The Versailles Hall of Mirrors as 21st Century Washington and Brussels

Martin SIEFF

During his 24 years as a senior foreign correspondent for The Washington Times and United Press International, Martin Sieff reported from more than 70 nations and covered 12 wars. He has specialized in US and global economic issues.

 Trapped in the empty luxury of Versailles, the French ruling class could only see their illusions of power reflected in mirrors.

The Legendary Hall of Mirrors in the Palace of Versailles was built to display the wealth, power and glory of France’s most proud and spectacular monarch, Louis Quatorze (XIV) the Sun King. But a century later it became the opposite: making a mockery of his arrogance and pride when the thousand-year-old monarchy, the grandest in the history of Europe, was toppled in the French Revolution of 1789-93 and the king’s descendant, well-meaning, hapless Louis XVI, was beheaded.

Then, the Hall of Mirrors, created by the great king’s favorite architect Jules Hardouin-Mansart and completed in 1684, became a metaphor for the centralized system focused on pomp, circumstance and the arrogant display of limitless wealth that Louis Quatorze had created.

Trapped in the empty luxury and petty court intrigues of Versailles, the French ruling class could only see their own imagined beauty and illusions of power reflected in mirrors. They were ignorant and blind to the despair and rage building up against them among the ordinary people of France.

Today, old Reagan Free Market, minimum government Republicans and tree-hugging, coal, oil and natural gas-hating and abortion-loving romantic Green Democrats who hold the politics of Washington and its media in an iron (and rusting) grip are the true heirs of those decadent French aristocrats. Their Mainstream Media has become a 21st century Cybernetic Hall of Mirrors 2.0. Across the Atlantic the dark and doomed Spirit of Versailles has migrated from the outskirts of Paris to Brussels where it now resides in the European Commission.

History has repeated itself on a colossally larger scale.

The more that Silicon Valley and the Mainstream Media have extended their control over the United States, the more they have lost control of the actual population of the country. Now we see the ruling international, free trade liberal elite hypnotized by their own dreams, by the very fantasies they have used to control their populations for so long, making them blind to the forces of rebellion and rage are rising up inexorably to destroy them.

Utterly blind to their own failures and their direct responsibility for them, US liberal and European leaders project their own guilt outwards on to their own victims — the despised “Deplorables” as Hillary Clinton contemptuously called them — the hard-working decent working classes of America in industry and agriculture, white, black and Hispanic alike. And they blame Russia and China, independent remote nations on the other side of the world, for the very conditions they themselves have labored so long and hard to bring about.

As Alistair Crooke wrote in these columns on February 8, “unable to deal directly with the evidence of systematic failings and economic ‘rigging’ (that being far too sensitive an issue), western leaders work instead to alter the definition of reality. When you are attempting to extend a make-believe economy by printing more and more debt, in spite of its failed history, it is no wonder you have to silence dissent.”

Aldous Huxley’s prophetic, dystopian masterpiece “Brave New World,” published back in 1932, perfectly envisioned 21st century America with its arrogant, self-satisfied Alpha elite depriving the despised Deltas and Epsilon workers at the bottom of the social pyramid of all intelligence, literacy, self awareness and any aspirations to real culture.

In the eyes of today’s Alpha elite, as Crooke clearly sees, “Those then, that do not embrace the propaganda that big Tech and the corporate media relentlessly push, need to be de-platformed, and pushed to the fringes of society.”

Crooke then chillingly pointed out how the “New York Times” for more than 140 years the revered authoritative voice of Liberal America, is now calling on the Biden administration to appoint a “Reality Czar” who will be given authority to deal with “misinformation” and “extremism.”

Crooke rightly sees this as a modern revival of the Medieval Inquisition, armed with chemical drugs and electronic tools of surveillance of which the Inquisition could not even dream. This is of course correct. But the comprehensiveness of the machinery of dissent that the “New York Times” demands in fact contains its own self-destruction.

For the Western Elite has unwittingly trapped itself in a closed system, a self-reflecting illusion — the modern updated high tech version not just of Huxley’s Brave New World but also of Louis Quatorze’s corrupt and sordid Old World.

As Matthew Ehret, another brilliant contributor to this platform, has documented, closed systems, in society as well as in physics and ecology, are doomed to deterioration, decay and collapse. This follows the remorseless processes of Entropy defined in the Second Law of Thermodynamics. Only continual inputs of energy, ideas and organizing principles from outside the closed system can reverse the Entropy process and entity, whether it is biological, social, economic or political.

However, the liberal elitists of Washington and Brussels refuse to acknowledge the validity of any other ideas or systems outside their own control. Their own arrogance dooms them — and those trapped under their control.

The global elites have now trapped themselves in another Hall of Mirrors. And they hate to the marrow of their bones the very conception that they could possibly wake up from their dream and break out of their own self-constructed trap. Instead of conditioning the despised Deltas and Epsilons to rejoice in their servitude, Huxley’s perfect closed system has trapped his own Alpha elite instead.

In his message to the Davos World Economic Forum this year, Russian President Vladimir Putin, as Crooke noted, warned the Western elite how their irrationality and failure to recognize the failure of their catastrophic economic policies is propelling the world towards universal crisis and global war.

And we are all caught up in the madness with them.

https://www.strategic-culture.org/news/2021/02/27/the-versailles-hall-of-mirrors-as-21st-century-washington-and-brussels/