Caitlin Johnstone Also Quotes Shelley, We Must ‘Rise, Like Lions’

July 10, 2022 (EIRNS)—While Craig Murray posts Percy Shelley’s Ozymandias to characterize the collapse of the British Empire, Caitlin Johnstone begins her July 9 posting with a quote from Shelley’s Masque of Anarchy:

Rise, like lions after slumber
In unvanquishable number!
Shake your chains to earth like dew
Which in sleep had fallen on you:
Ye are many—they are few!

Johnstone then points to the masses occupying the Sri Lankan President’s home, his office and the Ministry of Finance on July 9, leading to the resignation of the President and the Prime Minister: “Just look at that. Look at all those people flooding in there. That is some truly awe-inspiring power. Imagine how terrifying it would be to find yourself on the receiving end of it.” She goes on

“every ruler throughout history has spent time envisioning what would happen if a crowd that size decided to storm their base of operation. If their numbers became too great to suppress, or if your forces who would be doing the suppressing joined the ranks of the people instead, the best-case scenario for you is that you’d have already fled the building by that point, as Rajapaksa had the good sense to do shortly before the building was stormed.”

She continues:

“If you’ve ever wondered why our rulers work so hard to keep us divided against each other, this is why. If you’ve ever wondered why we’re always being instructed to take our grievances to the voting booth even though we learn in election after election that it never changes the things that most desperately need to change, this is why....

“The managers of the oligarchic empire which rules over us are terrified that we will one day notice that there are a whole lot more of us than there are of them, and that there’s really nothing they could do to stop us if we decided to replace them with a system which benefits ordinary people instead of an elite few....

“This is why our political and media institutions act the way they act and why our systems are set up in the way that they are: to keep us from realizing how easy it would be to shrug off the old mechanisms of oppression like a heavy coat on a warm day and build something new that works for all of us.

“Things will keep getting worse until we find a way to cut through the propaganda brain fog and rise like lions.”