Horrorshow, Nice Horror, Friendly Ghosts, Tech-Possession and New Ireland

To prepare for global governance technocratic leaders need a heterogeneous society nudged by horror run by a transnational corporate community without local affiliation to make ghosts of us.

The Banality of Horror in Sneering Postnational Shadowplay

We live on tenterhooks, our nervous systems straining as the networks entrain and train us to it. I.T. This is AI-Govnerveance. It was a horror franchise with a dancing clown. We are indeed pennywise and pound-foolish with fear as we dance like puppets. Horror as a genre is about something else in many contexts. That the zombies walk the earth when hell is full is a theme in recent cinema.

The phenomenon of horror is well-studied and leads to various theories. Thus horror is a mirror of wider changes and had a political dimension (Picariello, ed. The Politics of Horror). Horror is manifestation of repressed guilt or religious conscience for some writers. Horror is a distortion from undue claims of reason (see the work of Marquis de Sade). Politics can become horror (Stephen King in some of his books). Horror can explain social governance (John Carpenter, They Live). We have Nazis using horror for hatred as core of propaganda. But we miss the present ubiquity of persuasive iniquity as leverage in pervasive public policy. Nudging is government and corporate method in a propaganda system from producers, directors, artists and most of all us. Horror as internal reaction is externalised and projected to manipulate on a constant level in the age of AI-Governance. Covid was a codification of nudging terror.

The art and theatricality of violence and terror has been perfected mostly by the actual and mental engineers, scientific and sorcerous, that made states, royal lineages and commercial networks. Horror governs, hypnotises, nudges. Systems horror-wash their societies to hold them. If the psychology of violence does not cause you to yield, the real stuff must be wielded. Now, what I term tech-endo-symbiosis means horror in your mind can be orchestrated, genuine stuff downplayed while the cymbals and symbols of falsehoods are bashed for manipulative effect.

Apart from ideas of evil and enchantment, maybe we should think of the banality of horror and uses of disenchantment. Many writers realised the worst horror might lurk under an unexpected, insipid, ordinary, mediocre demeanour. We see this in Misery, American Psycho and It Follows. It informs The Shining and One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest. We see it in Whatever Happened to Baby Jane? Politicians seem more like such characters. Dystopia is horrific. William Gibson projected the Gothic into his cyberpunk, tech-dystopia. A doppelgänger society produces a changeling Frankenstein group of people. Dystopia is prophetic horror. Instead of over-concentration on Orwell or Huxley, I would point to We (from a century ago) by Zamyatin and That Hideous Strength: A Modern Fairy-Tale for Grown-Ups by C.S. Lewis as supported by J.D. Bernal’s non-fiction. Orwell did not see the occult scientific aspects. Lewis knew what was going on outside the left-right focus. He had a locus of horror in a scientific organisation called NICE (National Institute for Co-ordinated Experiments). Now the UK has the National Institute for Health Care and Excellence (NICE). During Covid, SAGE (Scientific Advisory Group for Emergencies) came to fore. Curiously that was Bernal’s nickname. Bernal foresaw we would be transformed into silicon or live in a human zoo in The World, the Flesh and the Devil: An Enquiry into the Future of the Three Enemies of the Rational Soul, nearly a century ago. Both Lewis and Bernal come from Ireland. Recently one whose family famously emigrated from Ireland, Robert Kennedy Jr, wants all Americans to have health-wearables. Another whose family were also in Ireland, Geoffrey Hinton, wants global governance because we are not special, are not made by God and need intelligent people to run us as AI that he created innocently takes over. The modern use of the word ‘dystopia’ was first in relation to Ireland. Dystopia as prophetic horror is merely realisation and revelation of the strategic plan which is mostly medical, transhuman and posthuman - facilitated by penumbral socio-political tactics. Horror in the end becomes horror on the way and it seems very, very…. nice. Niceness is the mask of horror levered by guilt. But the siren calls and swansongs must be heard. Those nice and sage names were just an accident, no in-joke I’m sure. Horror characters like to have a laugh at our expense don’t they?

The terrorists are the ones with the little bomb as the Dublin writer Brendan Behan noted. Terror is a tactic. Tyranny instantiates terror as a primary mode of governance. No petty terrorist, criminal or serial murderer can match the cold horror of our governance systems historically and presently. Warfare in a global context is ultimately against citizens of the countries that pay dearly for it, pending adventurist plundering. They keep all. But technocracy will be nice horror of a genuine existential eternal type. The nice people will save you from the other nasties they often pay for in the play. They will dispose of the corpse of history in the copse behind their mansions with no trouble from the cops. I Can’t Believe It’s Not God involves stories titled I Can’t Believe It’s Not History.

Banshees Over The Field of Shame

In a progressive, posthuman world the past must be construed as horrific, the present progressing through tactically promoted horror and the future full of promise and indeed heavenly. If that horror supports something which justifies tradition, nation-states, religion or family it must be attenuated in favour of selected emphasis for the present to attain the futurist dream. The Italian futurists lauded machines, speed, war and death. They were honest. But people somehow presume the clean, hygienic future promised will be anodyne, reasonable, reassuring and nice and that they have no role to play in creating it save doing what they are told.

I come from Ireland but live in Sweden. Ireland is small and personal. I just heard some Swedes saying how the Irish did dying well. We’ve always been good at that, constantly displaced from land and life. Joyce redirected the saying that an Englishman’s home is his castle to an ‘Irishmans’s house is his coffin.’ He described Ireland as the old sow that eats her farrow. The writer needed ‘silence, exile and cunning.’ Finnegans Wake involves a nightmare. History was one from which the writer was trying to wake. Beckett instantiated existential horror. Lord Dunsany explicitly explored the genre and influenced others like Lovecraft. Existential horror absent coherent spiritual foundation induces a pathological desire for conceptual certainty even if wrong.

I wrote about the film The Field (1990) years ago and was gratified that the author John B. Keane in a letter described the article as the best he had read about it. I emphasised the indigenous aspect of the original play. In the film The Bull links perceived shame induced by the returning American’s desire to purchase the field to his lost son. The son’s tragic fate was linked to the land too. In the play, it was not an Irish-American but a returning Irishman. The theme of defence against outsiders ended in a failure for former victims of colonial dispossession, unlike in the play. Celebrating local or national success against outsiders was becoming old-fashioned and taboo. It is a grim film.

In Sweden I noticed intelligent people claimed homogeneity here was maintained by shame. A better explanation is found in former mechanisms of the Protestant state church, how it formed and enforced consensus, directly in the home. It was not shame that led to standardisation but pragmatic succumbing to compelled conformity. But shame can be easily invoked or leveraged, especially by people who have none, in other people that have no cause to be.

My grandfather used work the field in the film. I used put up a tent there and the goats would feign disinterest before they curiously sought to gnaw your lines when you turned your back. In times of struggle my family were involved in everything from surviving the famine, land rights, secret societies, ambushes, imprisonment, torture, escape, more imprisonment, rebellion and all that stuff. Actually horrific. But that horror has been attenuated, underemphasised, forgotten, swept under the carpet. We must trade that and move on focusing on some other concerns, someone else whose present is worse now. This is even if their unfortunate situation is produced by producers of the propaganda system that also appropriates property of new victims and old alike. Now memory is replaced with memery and victimhood can be presented as part of a consistent and endemic pattern of vicious oppression. The supposedly proletarian and peasant past must be put in the stocks for its share of shame and pelted progressively. The stocks and shares of the timeless phoenix oppressors pay peacocks to obscure old colonialism to re-apply it for the future.

My father’s family were devoutly Catholic and deeply in love with the land. There was no great incongruity between respecting the pre-Christian spirits of the land and folk-mystical Catholicism. I hear people laughing at others who pray the rosary and suggest it is useless for determined responses. My father’s uncle and other captured prisoners said the rosary in the cattle-hold on the ship that transported them to Wales and England in 1916. Prison came again when they resisted the Treaty. The Church was split on such struggles. Individuals believed they had a moral and legal right to defend themselves. Many would have believed they were risking their eternal souls but persisted, suffered and died. The head of the dorm where one relation was imprisoned in Wales was Terence MacSwiney, Lord Mayor of Cork. His 74 day hunger-strike and death got world attention.

Luke Kelly’s recitation of For What Died the Sons of Roisin says

“Will German, French or Dutch inscribe the epitaph of Emmet? When we have sold enough of Ireland to be but strangers in it.”

Ironically, leading folk figures like Kelly and Brendan’s brother Brian Behan were or had been communist with international allegiances in opposition to capitalist forces. Communism does not support indigeneity though it co-opts such contexts.

Now fields of shame are ones being examined in relation to nuns. Reporting involves massive speculation and obfuscation contributing to cessation of Catholic Church hegemony. There is great selectivity in leverage of shame especially in the hands of people who profess few objective standards to judge beyond opportunity and suitability for their objective. The nationalist movement was taken over by Marxist and pseudo-Marxist elements suspiciously comfortable with globalist and transnational narratives.

Old Ireland’s destiny seems sealed. Doomed. The Banshees of Inisherin (2022) played with old stereotypes. In 2024, Bambie Thug sang for Ireland in the Eurovision. She was described as ‘witch’ or ‘ouija popstar,’ sounding a bit like a banshee to some. Perhaps the two were a death knell of old Ireland. The new Ireland is much less Catholic, rural, agricultural, low-tech, poor and indigenous. It is more multicultural, more Marxist, liberal, hi-tech, more run by Europe, pro-transnational corporate, wide open economically and in-debt.

The role of women has been critical in transformation. But on what deeper currents flow these new lovecrafts? Yeats and his dream lover Maud Gonne and others sought to conjure a new Ireland over a century ago amongst other things. Aleister Crowley (who Yeats had fought with in the Golden Dawn) did a magic ceremony in New York in 1915 to conjure up an independent Ireland. John Dee conjured the British Empire. A conjuring is ongoing. Some peculiar spirits have been invoked like classic antisemitism that existed pre-Israel but hardly in Ireland. Elite magic drew from the folk otherworld in an anthropological way prior to modernist penetration.

Old Irish festivals like Halloween indirectly contributed to a horror franchise - Halloween. You heard many ghost stories growing up in Ireland. My grandfather saw a banshee when he was coming home late as she sat on a gatepost combing her hair. The neighbour died. He also saw his old friend home from England in the haggard at a rambling night. But it was only a fetch. His friend in England died too. Maybe Old Ireland is a fecked (acceptable Irish word) fetch now merely fetched for the fun, commerce or shaming. We ourselves will be kind of nice, friendly, going off in the stilly night, more Casper the Friendly Ghost. Nice. Wicked as younger people say. Inversion is the norm. That means good now and that’s not an accident. Casper is a bit like those Greys but with a smile and more whitewashed. The Ghostly Trio are a modern trinity. Commerce and culture make Ireland’s transition to something else, bland and banal.

Taibhseoireacht and Lynchian Epitaphs

Chilling is good sometimes. I don’t want you to be petrified. But petrification is the proposed policy of some of the greatest imperial thinkers in the last century. Turn nasty flesh into silicon. Hard to believe but documented. Crystals. Genes. You, into machines.

There’s good news and bad news. The bad, we are all to be ghosted. Especially by AI. The good is people don’t seem to be bothered. It is not mere passing on but becoming dead and lost in an undead kind of eternal way. But when you give up, bit by bit, bit by bot, bite by byte, all control even down till your cellular level, what do you expect? You are being possessed technically and spiritually. That’s not a problem for most in an era when spirit has been replaced by sport, soul reduced to music, dancing to drug-induced automatism and heaven and hell merely old superstitions. The fairies were frightened by motor cars as we grew bolder in the night with our streetlights. But dark beings and zombies are entertaining. You can trust nice politicians who are just like Annie Wilkes, Nurse Ratched and Norman Bates. Nice. AI, the ultimate ghost-writer at a time of ghost-riders in the sky, depends on code and crypsis, cryptic and inevitably the crypt. New spectres are haunting the world, as well as communism. Think The Exorcist.

The Irish word taibhseoireacht can relate to telling ghost stories or playing and acting ghosts and may indicate a particular tradition with special ghost-story-tellers. The concept is fading away like us, vanishing like a vapour, superseded, de-communalised. I’ll not alter my mind if you tell me it is in plays. The Weir. Weird. Orson Welles doesn’t count either. Return to Glennascaul.

“One by one they were all becoming shades.” Joyce wrote in The Dead. But death is not the problem. The danger is much more sinister. Can we die while we live by being possessed or dying spiritually? Think of An Inhabitant of Carcosa by Ambrose Bierce. He disappeared in the end himself.

“For there be divers sorts of death - some wherein the body remaineth; and in some it vanisheth quite away with the spirit…”

We seem unable to distinguish black magic from blancmange. Tik-Tok was from the Wizard of Oz. A robot. Remember dancing officials when people were dying. Distraction. Robotic. Jerusalema. New religion. No religion. Imagine. No borders. Imagine there’s no countries. Lalala. Lol. LOL used be only the Loyal Orange Lodge in Ireland. We got The Shankill Butchers as well as Republican ghouls and British Government pulling strings on both sides.

The horror story genre has become mode of our cybernetic control. To steer it means. We are in steerage, below decks on a fine ship. What could go wrong with this Titan? Robert Emmet asked his epitaph be not written till Ireland had taken its place among the nations of the earth. It may never be, but old Ireland’s will. That’s horror for some, a happy ending for others, they think.

I remember staying with friends when two older boys told us a story at night as a tree tapped on the dark pane and I was terrified. It is easy to implant determinative states, especially when you now have psychologists trained and paid to be able to do so. You can be nudged into an abyss. Sit down by the fireside mo chara and make yourself comfortable. I have no desire to frighten you for fun. A bad dream may be vivid and violent leaving you violated but vanish when daylight comes. But someone else’s dream unfolding in your daylight may be an altogether more sinister affair. Maybe Robert Louis Stevenson’s The Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde was a premonition about participants in the emergent technocratic state.

David Foster Wallace wrote in 1996 about David Lynch and his ‘Lynchian’ perception about ironic macabre in the mundane in an uncanny valley of eerie duality that seems to confuse intellectuals about moral worth and values. I think of Lynchian in that stylised violent sense cooled down by his transcendental meditative method to survive an explosion of emotions as lynch-pin in our controlled hypnotic disorientation. A pale lynching continues today in pursuit of political dissent. Foster Wallace said movies were authoritarian in form or as a medium. From Davis to Davos the machine unfolds. Ireland came to be informed by California, Geneva, Brussels and other places more than from its own supposed sovereignty. When Ireland joined the EEC, coincidentally Jack Lynch signed the deal in 1972. DeValera was against it. But he was made a monster all along we’re told. The people have spoken. The b…… as one English politician said on another occasion.

Most did not understand. Ireland in split form had a sovereignty haemorrhage and later a gigantic financial mortgage. A Tiger was never a good idea. Nobody noticed the Asian ones. Though transnational capital levered globalisation, the left loved it after genuine opposition was re-directed. Churchill had foreseen the United States of Europe but so had Trotsky and Lenin.

Let me redefine ‘Lynchian’ in context of leverage. Lynchian Leverage could refer to the calm and cool leverage of cultural authoritarian modes within entertainment and culture to gain consensus in combination with stylised threats of violence and exposure of fears to gain necessary conditions for transfer of political power from a lower to a higher level. Huntington wrote about the men at Davos with no souls in Dead Souls: The Denationalization of the American Elite (2004). Starmer prefers Davos to Westminster. This was where the sanatorium was in The Magic Mountain (1924) by Thomas Mann. We have not listened sufficiently to spirits from the trenches pressing against the pane of contemporary affairs wondering what their pain was about and where countries they were supposedly fighting for went and why we want our children to do it again. But be clear we are fading away in a crimson mist. Humans. All nations.

Cybernetic Sorcery and the Monster

There is curious bamboozlement on both political left and right which fails to appreciate the extent of cybernetic sorcery for potential globalist governance systems. If we face a new totalitarianism in a global techno-scientocracy where bio-tech is primary focus, we should not be surprised our worldview is already highly affected. We are coming to the end of our times because of techno-posthumanism. That aim creates a panorama with a range of short-term tactics, long-term strategies and constant pressure-points against any potential opposition. Instead of facing genuine horror, we are manipulated by tall-tales of end-times cobbled together by empires for future empires. A story can lever the public, capturing imagination, entrapping in a suggestive repetitive vortex snaking into our subconscious and distracting us from dull reality of constant actual horror. Cultural commentators divided into supposedly opposite materialist camps. The new norm anticipates the penultimate stage of human containment pending our disappearance.

In that Greatest Game for control of spiritual consciousness the penultimate stage involves comprehensive conditioning. There is vast amplification of useful messages and attenuation of resistance. In the assault of mass media and our incorporation into the network, we miss subtle nudges that alter remaining resistance. In that antechamber, shadowplay by puppeteers present a narrative calculated to dislodge existing affiliations to lodge a new receptive one. To transform the subjects of the new system, the past must be channelled into a narrative in a process of inversion.

One ancient type of story is of overcoming the monster. The transnational, cybernetic, AI, networked society is now a monster. In an inversion, the new monster is the class of people that are its potential victims. As the networked society is part of global reorganisation of previous affiliations, potential sources of resistance are demonised pending dispossession. Odd monsters appear in the form of shapeshifting old ladies protesting about communities and economic inundation. The monster will appear nice and the genuinely nice will be presented as monstrous. Yes, it’s a hungry wolf dressed up as your granny.

Flying Into The Heart of Local Darkness: ‘The Horror. The Horror.’

There are many obvious phenomena before us that we somehow ignore. Yet if my model of a future technocratic totalitarian and posthuman society run by AI (predominantly from an Atlanticist or even Sino-Atlanticist base) is true, it becomes easier to comprehend the propaganda and praxis of the neo-colonial, neo-imperial scientocracy. The distorted graffiti mirror of the propaganda we encounter and tropes in mass media and entertainment are nevertheless revealing and comprehensible.

Notice many famous writers on horror do not believe in a spiritual world. They often locate horror in other humans, machines, politics, hygienism and strange bio-medical aberrations. You can have accidental stumbling into horror but less of your own making, unless you encounter a rural or local community. Horror in religious terms is associated with the consequences of allying with dark and demonic forces. It is related not to accident but your behaviour, honour and actions. It was more Dante’s Inferno. You were in the lowest realms of hell because you were a traitor. Traitors no longer believe in that it seems. Perhaps that is why there are so many. As the entertainment industry moved against perceived hegemonic power or religion, horror mutated. A simulacrum of religious horror was created. When the transcendent is removed, horror becomes a tool to play out mundane ideas.

Writers in the US have criticised films like Deliverance (1972) for stereotypes of rural Appalachia. This was a consistent theme from early 1900’s in US film. It led to people therefrom being characterised as backward, stupid and dangerous. This could be partly explained by the pro-urban bias inherent not just in capitalism but profoundly in Marxism. The urban elite look down their noses at rural communities. There are historic dimensions going back to the ideas of the ‘mudsill’ in the US in the mid-19^th century. But there is also a deeper issue. Communities with strong local identities are inconsistent with globalising governance models of concentrated urban tech-surveilled societies. Strong local communities can also provide sites of resistance to technocracy through their homogeneity and disdain for containment. Franz Fanon and others note, many communities may be as they are precisely because they were caught up in the trauma from earlier imperial games. J.D. Vance has been criticised for his book Hillbilly Elegy. The line between romance and realism is hard to draw at times. But he seems more comfortable with posthumans now.

In colonial experiments, the native people were usually ignored, treated as less than human, eradicated and displaced. Part of that process involved a genuine lack of comprehension and a necessary vilification of the perceived possessor of that which was to be taken. But this process is an interior or internal one as well. The empire or colonial power usually had to do that within its base. Internal colonialism preceded its external phase. Ask the Irish, Scots and Welsh about that or the Anglo-Saxons or early Britons. Robin Hood. The Celtic Church. The empire itself was based on an erasure of existing opposition.

To execute the expansion of empire, some of the forces hitherto hostile must be co-opted. New identities are constructed and some formerly hostile agents can direct their hostility elsewhere under a new construction and ultimate illusion. Tendencies of old empires and colonial powers have been transmuted into the struggle for a global empire constructed through corporate form and transnational institutions. Through the US version of emerging empire a fake national solidarity is marshalled to suit strategic aims unrelated to welfare of the people it purports to represent.

The former national identity created within the empire’s homeland becomes irrelevant and even a burden. Thus Britishness becomes brutishness of the people who mistakenly believed they were important when they gave lives for it. The forces profiting from imperial transmogrification can today cast off the masks of identity and reveal the continuous hatred based on class, commodity acquisition and control. Former homogeneity can be dispensed with. A heterogeneous society is easier to control. Guerrilla wars cannot happen in such societies. Inevitable opposition can be demonised before they realise what is happening as a pre-emptive conditioning anticipates and thwarts organic resistance. You must be nice. That’s the main thing. Even if hypocritical. That meant acting. Your persona must be nice. Fit into a nice approved compartment made for you. It’s easier for AI then to manage. Persona of course meant mask. Those clown-masks always have a smile. The expensive smiles people buy can look very much like a snarl, a cat stripping its teeth in threat. You probably have one that you won’t acknowledge or maybe even do not realise. The dissonance is dispiriting as you find yourself wandering in the uncanny valley of the shadow of death. One psychiatrist says that Psalm 23 is not liked by demons that oppress people. But we have rejected all that nonsense so we won’t say that we fear no evils. In fact, there is a direct correlation between our modern world view and the commerce of horror, from the Penny Dreadfuls onwards. Jack the Ripper meant you were not thinking of Fenians. Later the Fenians could be the horror players. Engels found the Irish ghettos were hell on earth. Hell became an earthly domain around which avenging angels congregated. The ones, as secret as the secret societies that made this world, in the shadows, caused sleepless nights for the class that ruled, or were they real?

Horrorshow is good. That was what it meant for Alex in A Clockwork Orange. Nadsat was the lingo. Russian-influenced. Horrorshows are good for governance. Guy Fawkes. V for Vendetta. But rulers manage real horrorshows from executions, to excuses for war, to war, to internal repression and so on. But now governments are getting on your nerves literally. The leverage of horror is part of that revolution of the constantly-revolving machine of governance calculated to achieve death by a thousand cuts.

The national and local community then becomes loathsome and horrible. Problems, created by colonialism can be accentuated unsympathetically and projected onto victims paradoxically perpetuating myths that preceded them. Such art and social critique comes from the propaganda system of old empires transmuted into a neo-colonial mycelium of a technocratic nature. Immigration then may appear to be some sort of cost, boomerang, retribution or just solution to the exploitation or supposed benefit from indigenous, national and local communities who often have been subject to a continuous pattern of similar conduct, especially in Ireland as history underlines. When selling a location corporatists amplify differences. However to extract therefrom, differences will be denied and often destroyed in the long-term. The local community may benefit but often not. Hospitality is replaced with a commercial simulacrum. Localness succumbs to globalism. Inversion. Neo-colonialism manages horror and projects horrific images externally on the appearance of ordinary as it masks its own.

Local to Global

I don’t go to the cinema anymore. It seems to be social-engineering propaganda, exoticism, crash-bank-wallop, plastic historical re-construction or victim porn. It is hard to ignore the propaganda model of a society. What has surprised is how few people have noticed in entertainment consistent tropes and motifs that characterise a community being prepared for global rule. In preparation for de-homogenisation of potential sites of resistance to global governance by scientocracy or the Empire of Scientism, military-style re-organisation and re-plantation of countries has been occurring. I began to notice some features in the 1990’s and talked about dangers that lay ahead. I said unlimited growth in tourism would reach a saturation point. I argued the local community was left out of much international regulation and would be displaced. I argued that we would have a phenomenon where the local community becomes a ‘ghost host community.’ This meant those who live there would disappear or flit into the background like unwelcome poltergeists.

Neither left nor right were interested in such issues. People were convinced this was a normal consequence of growth of tourism and narrative of globalisation. This stuff just happened because of more flights, television and images of people from different cultures. Those forces aided by legal rights to free movement would change the world. From a left perspective, such new forces would undermine hegemonic forces contributing to a Gramscian cultural revolution. In the capitalist model, there were new ways to commodify, essentialise and extract. Both unite in the transnational corporate efforts.

To get benefits, an economy needed to harmonise and standardise its infrastructure. While preaching diversity, the world of difference began to be flattened out till it becomes difficult when travelling at times to remember where you are such is the deadly uniformity made by the market. This is how empires looked.

Growth of the airline industry and cheap travel was associated with the canonised commercial leaders as if they had magically concocted from their own brain a new system. This figurehead phenomenon put commercial actors in the frontline so the phenomenon would not be scrutinised. Where did the era of cheap air-travel begin? If you follow the phenomenon back, we come to the Berlin Airlift. Cheap travel, through the Freddie Laker model was essentially a phenomenon began with military planes in a military context which used commercial contexts to pursue its objectives.

After the initial phase of normalisation of air-travel on a mass-scale (inconsistent with the idea of a collapsing ecology) the infrastructure of cheap travel played an important role in the free movement of people. The legal right and the overstaying without legal right were enhanced.

Ghost Host Community

In the 1990’s I began to talk in the contexts I could of the ghost host community. Regional and global legal regulation would sever the connection between a local, national community and place they identified as home. That was the odd emphasis of legislation embedded in the EEC (and later EU) treaties and international instruments such as UNESCO treaties. Membership of the EU involves a loss of pooling sovereignty and a transfer of authority outside countries, associated with legal rights of free movement. People from outside have rights to come and live in ‘your’ country. I warned the danger inherent in this trend was the ‘host’ community would become a ‘ghost’ community. BBC and other channels including Channel 4 had a clear comedic theme I noticed at the time this was becoming evident to me at least. In The League of Gentlemen in Britain in 1999, the local community was satirised as horrific.

Academic study of Irish literature used to point to interesting tropes before it became inundated with currents more involved in promoting the propaganda model. There were three interesting points suggested among many. One was the unique contribution of horror and the Gothic to English literature. The second was unique hostility to returning emigrants. The persons feared more than others were the Irish person or descendant who returned. The third might be an anti-rural bias.

Horror came from Bram Stoker, Sheridan Le Fanu, Charles Maturin and others in Ireland. What they shared apart from horror was belonging to the Protestant Ascendancy. We see this theme worked out in a more internal, psychological and esoteric fashion in The Picture of Dorian Gray by Oscar Wilde. I suggest it also informs painting motifs of Francis Bacon, born in Dublin from that class. We have a recurrent explanation that the class associated with a violent and tragic control of the Irish people created the cultural compost for a nightmarish, ghostly artistic expression or even perhaps psychic exorcism. Colonial continuity of control from 1169 and costs to the class that benefited therefrom inform this dislocated genre. Ghosts of the indigenous and later Catholic Ireland haunted the imaginal world.

The second hostility was to the returning emigrants. This is evident in Irish literature. One primary explanation is based on ownership of the land, primogeniture and the fear that returning emigrants would make the thin pickings thinner. This was explored by writers John B. Keane and William Trevor among others. When people emigrated to the US, an American Wake was held. They weren’t considered to be coming back. They were dead in some ways. More ghosts.

Emigration suited colonial power. A weak colony limited rebellion. They were happy with a vision of Ireland without any Irish. That may come true. Focus on domestic hostility ignores institutional desire to limit return. This would be especially the case if the newly rich emigrants could apply their skill to the colonial context. Engineers and entrepreneurs of Irish-origin were impressive. From Henry Ford to John Philip Holland we saw ingenuity that could operate in new institutional contexts. But Irish identity and indigeneity was largely sundered and distant innovation suited imperial imperatives. Others could cultivate political connections and commodify expatriate culture but ongoing affinity was contained. When Ireland grew commercially, corporate entities could cultivate green connections. American politicians could mobilise expatriate sentiment. But tensions were evident in controversy around support for the IRA between a popular sense and government policy. The returning emigrant trope continued in film. The Irish-Americans just did not fit in, like other potential returning emigrants. This led to the position that descendants of families based in Ireland for centuries were arguably less welcome that any other groups, unless it was to provide material support, industry or philanthropy. It is easy to see well-financed videos with the returning emigrant satirised today still. Philanthropy could paradoxically be used to reduce the sense of traditional Ireland for a modern industrial land. During the peace process, the nature of Republicanism shifted finally from pretensions to nationalism and US influence contributed.

Wicked dreams of ghosts that disturbed the curtained sleep of the Ascendancy were thickened with shades of emigrants whose memory of Ireland became in memes a mistaken take of twee twilights. The Irish-Americans are accused of fashioning a mythic place with emigrant sentimentality.

Irish society is less interested in traditional narratives. That desire to be modern was reflected in the minds of the urban literati. Urban Ireland and diaspora became open to a story that rural Ireland was an awful place with nothing much worth preserving. Standard ballads were tweaked to reflect sociological concerns about workers rather than religion. We can see that in the ballad Spancil Hill and how the most common version dropped a couple of verses about attending the church. I have heard a singer now use it in context of coming into Ireland as an emigrant. Irishness on a historic trajectory has been radically re-engineered. The traditional, farming, rural, Catholic, Irish-speaking, music, dancing communal place with pubs and churches is marginal. New Ireland is cosmopolitan, more to the left, corporate and more interested in a homeland for the Palestinians than Irish. No doubt, through economics, international finance and immigration, we could say Ireland is being re-possessed by neo-imperial forces. Transnational elite support the military-industrial complex that wants heterogeneity not homogeneity.

Ghost of Christ to Vampires

Christ gave up the ghost on the cross in a standard translation. In Ireland Catholicism has been giving up the ghost. The Father Ted series presaged the New Ireland. As Marx’s daughter made clear, ridicule works best on the working-class. As Gramsci made plain the Catholic Church was the enemy to communism. The opening credits of the show involved a helicopter landing or crashing on an island with priests. The local and traditional has a sharp encounter with modernity.

There is a curious parallel within the film The Catholics (1973) which had an arrival in a helicopter to an island of monks who celebrated the traditional mass. The demise of that Tridentine mass after Vatican II seemed to parallel the decline in Irish Catholicism as modernism become more evident. We would have to ignore writings of Jung who explained psychic power of the traditional liturgy to buy the benefit proposed. We see Christ is ghosted. Connection between Christ and Irish communities was eroded. The country that committed itself constitutionally to Christ in 1937 later sought to remove insignia of that era and hid indicators of the former providers of health care. Forget about that. International companies will look after the poor.

As I don’t watch many films longer nor attend plays you might challenge my commentary. Nevertheless between relevant clips and reliable reports, I see certain interesting themes. I notice another aspect of the distorted diaspora arguably refracted through a neo-colonial lens and presented as clever contemporary entertainment whilst playing to old cardboard figures for political forces. Let me remind you of another aspect of stereo-typing I remember in London in the 1980’s.

The left were appropriately highly critical of racist images of the Irish community presented by papers like the Evening Standard, especially in context of overspill of violence from Norther Ireland. They pointed to the consistent portrayal of the Irish as pathologically violent and simian. Ape-like identification is a reflection of scientific racism that enlightened empire led to in the late 19^th century. Presentation of pathological violence was beautifully ironic in the home of one of the most extensive imperial systems ever. Ghosts of empire can be future commodified, curated and abused. Later I recognised some of these figures in the work of Martin McDonagh who either subverts or reproduces them. Non-diverse essentialism appears humorous, but who is the joke on? The essentialism only works now negatively in retrospect it appears. We are to extrapolate from amplified contemporary contexts to a supposed latent feature of colonial victims in an inversion that justifies present policies that suit post-colonial corporate continuities.

Recently I noticed people wondering why vampires in the film Sinners were Irish. I have not seen it but have enough reports and interviews to get the idea. There is a political undercurrent related to the thesis about the Irish becoming white in America and assimilated into the system that had assaulted them. Inherent critique in a mainstream film is reproducing implicit identity of the vampire with explicit haunting. Instead of suggesting comprehension of parallel lines of suffering emphasis on complicity means difference is accentuated. Emphasis on oppression of the victim-class can then be utilised in discourse about contemporary contexts and especially immigration.

Just like the argument Ireland should be morally obliged to accept immigrants because Irish people were forced to emigrate, we face an absurd old implication that Irish identity really was monstrously violent in a posture of enlightened comprehension. Complexity of present emigration facilitated by neo-con strategy for a new empire is made flat in a way that squashes nuance and historical continuity in the Irish context. The spectral Irish are allowed agency so long as it fits into a constant, contemporary narrative. Divide-and-conquer has long been an imperial tactic yet we seem oblivious to division today. Victim classes and oppressor are now mutable. Few see continuity. A consistent colonial force transmuted a century ago into the Western military-industrial Atlanticist complex which creates population-flows to suits globalist desires. In construction of technocracy, it manages narratives which involve fragmentation of constituencies of opposition. The behaviour of certain groups of emigrant Irish is leveraged to create a narrative of complicity. That is available to utilise to provide continuity in a process of contemporary domestic dispossession whilst invoking benefits of that experience as a debt that must be repaid by the descendants of those who did not. The new narrative avoids culpability of the privileged imperial class that created both tragedies as well as the apparatus of change, re-arranging the story to suits its persistence.

The Stake in the Heart

We need a stake to kill vampires. Thankfully there are many ‘stakeholders’ at the WEF and other nodes. Players have allegiance to the network. Massive, global orchestration of transnational transmogrification will soon make Irishness redundant. We will hear calls to sever institutional connections to old Irishness. It will manifest in deconstruction of the national tokens of identity. The name of the state will probably be up for grabs. It will be smeared. It will invite calls for a new fresh start. Deliberate reconstruction of Ireland through instigated demographic flows ensures it becomes something else. Calculated corporate reconstruction based on comprehensive institutional capture as part of transnational control and subjection to international rules will defeat neutral, national self-determination. The creator’s fox outsmarted the flattered crow. The Celtic Tiger enabled sovereignty be irrevocably transferred. Heritage was pawned and the hallowed Isle of Saints and Scholars was hollowed out for tainted dollars. Or as I put it in my novel, Ireland I Don’t Recognise Who She Is, the Isle of Saints and Scholars became the Isle of Slaves and Collars.

That does not mean the geographical entity of the island of Ireland will not give rise to interesting futures for its changing constituents. Under EU law, for example, a decision by the Islamic community to emigrate legally en masse to Ireland could make it an Islamic country quickly in the future. Not only is it not a country of old men, it is not a country for Irish men nor women of the old type. While identities are king, Irish identity is not.

Gramsci focused on the need to get rid of Catholic hegemony. Ireland became a lab. Now the horror of Irishness is located in stories about Catholic institutions, presented in reports as horrors stories. Irishness and previous cultural markers became horrific in a constant corrosion by corporate cap-communist campaigns. The Irish are to be haunted by this.

Many women especially see this progress as good, defeating the phantom of the patriarchy. There has been a large measure of acceptance and acquiescence. New Ireland is celebrated for progress. There will be a big price. But it will remain in permanent revolution. The medico-political hygienism that underpinned the pandemic response, approaches to abortion and other issues will engender great disorientation when consequences become apparent as the tide of sovereignty recedes. Nice pharma. For critics of transformation, developments in the last generation have been a horror-story of possession utterly at odds with the spirit that infused patriots. Both sides weaponised a horror trope about opponents. Both may encounter the bigger horror of the game encompassing the present game.

Being Ghosted and True Horror

We are being ghosted. Interpenetration of networks and human consciousness involves demise of our spiritual consciousness and humanity. We face been dragged into the underworld, continuing to exist as some disembodied, disincarnated entities. Perhaps we thought the point of no-return would be well sign-posted. Maybe we did not understand some artefacts we prize were black-magic, black-mirror scrying summoning entities. When we heard stories of Faustian pacts we maybe thought that would be more of a gentlemanly ritual. For materialists there is no hell save the past and present they have not secured control of and a promise of a future heaven on earth. The danger is the slow and easy road to hell C.S. Lewis suggested in The Screwtape Letters. The dominant strategy determining our future is the consistent effort to secure control of global governance through military and technoscientific means in a new Promethean posthuman society. We can visualise catastrophe and horror as reality and it is foisted upon us daily to lubricate new policies. We believe less in any sort of hell. It is not only that we will have ghosts walk the planet with other mutations we make and entities we summon, but we will be dragged into that realm we are convinced does not exist. We are being haunted by a spiritual sense of ourselves being lost, translated into dispirited society.

But let me suggest that we are in a horror-film and governed as if it was. Fortunately as of yet we are in an early stage of the final act of history. Remember those films are often ordinary at the start and people are often happy. Just hints of oddities. Reassurance. Alternative explanations. Gaslight. Be nice certainly and kind. Just remember not to be fooled by undue niceness and getting along. I know they say their car broke down and just want to come in for a minute at midnight, need a little hand, friendly… normal… nice…