Secessio plebis: on the third anniversary of the fluoro lay-down in Western Australia.
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Dear Readers,
I wanted to do something for the three-year anniversary of the fluoro lay-down.
The years have been very cruel, and much of what we predicted has come to pass. When I started this Substack two years ago I could not have anticipated the depth of coordinated evil we would have uncovered, and how much my understanding has radically changed. Many people cannot come to terms with the current condition of our nation, and they remained ‘baffled’ as to why their view of the world does not match reality. The level of evil is too much for some.
I don’t know about everyone else, but when I look in the mirror, I appear to have aged ten years since the fluoro lay-down.
I think about that day a lot.
Our day.
I think about all the shirts on the stairs in the hot sun, and every day since I have prayed for everyone who was there. I know from speaking to some of you that life has been extremely difficult. This past year was the most brutal of my life, and I will be talking about this in my upcoming annual Christmas message. For that reason, I am currently exhausted, so I asked for some help writing this article.
Friend of ExcessDeathsAU
writes the Substack and is a historian of early modern and modern European civilisation. You can read his full bio and about his work here. I first stumbled across Stephan’s work because I was looking for translated European perspectives on covid madness, and Stephan’s takes on the depravity of EU covid experts™ and media™ are not just extremely funny but provide a valuable and unique perspective we here in the Anglopshere are lacking.I then became hooked on the story of Stephan’s late grandfather Erich Sonntag at
, who left an enormous postcard collection to Stephan after his death. Mr Sonntag was also conscripted to the Wehrmacht. My late grandfather wore a uniform for the ‘other side’ in the WWII European theatre, and there is a sort of sad poetry that Stephan and I are here in 2024 writing together as friends during yet another brutal European war.So when thinking about this article my mind wandered down well-beaten paths, again, in Europe, but this time to a ‘village’ on the Tiber.
I had heard of ‘secessio plebis’ regarding a general strike in the Roman Republic but did not know much beyond the concept. This is what we did three years ago during the fluoro lay-down, and of course the best person to ask about strikes in ancient Rome is a European historian who himself resisted the EU covid madness (and they went absolutely crazy).
Reading Stephan’s essay, I was struck by the similarities between secessio plebis and our current situation- from the first general strike to the insidious ‘freedom movement’ industry. It is quite something to read about an event that occurred 2,500 years ago and see it repeated today.
While the topic is complicated, the plebians of thousands of years ago appeared to have had rather more political success than we did. Although Stephan did not specifically discuss this in his essay, I would opine that the success of the plebians was due to their dual role as Rome’s standing army.
To put it mildly, during covid Emergency powers, Australians did not have the backing of the police and the military (I intend to write more about this in an upcoming article).
In any case, as always, readers are encouraged to form their own opinions.
Thank you for being here and may God Bless all of you on this third anniversary of the fluoro lay-down.
Yours Faithfully,
ExcessDeathsAU
8All things are wearisome of labor;
Man cannot express it.
The eye is not satisfied with seeing,
Nor the ear filled with hearing.
9 That which has been is what will be,
That which is done is what will be done,
And there is nothing new under the sun.
10 Is there anything of which it may be said,
“See, this is new”?
It has already been in ancient times before us.
Ecclesiastes 1:8-10 NKJV Full chapter
Introduction
For those who are unfamiliar with the ‘fluoro lay-down’ in Western Australia, please read this article:
On December 1, 2021, the people who carry the state of Western Australia on their backs told the people who pull the levers of the machine that they were done.
Thousands of us mainly in mining, construction, law enforcement, fire-fighting, medicine and transportation placed our uniforms on the steps of state parliament, knowing that there would be no second chances to make this decision.
For many of us who gathered in Perth that day, we were the only people in our workplaces who walked off the job. Our unions pushed the jab in lockstep with the state and hung us out to dry. It wasn’t until we arrived at Parliament did we see how many of us there really were.
We did not have a leader – it was not a ‘movement’ as such. We simply had to resolve to stick together, which is actually a powerful position.
In response to the West Australian government’s vaccine mandates, we plebians (the citizen workers), who actually hold the power through sheer numbers, competence, and access to complex civilisational infrastructure and knowledge thereof, told the patricians (the politicians, the bosses and the bankers), that they could carry on without us.
On December 1, 2021, we withdrew our consent and went home.
This event was banned, shadow banned, and has been rarely discussed.
The reason why I am using these terms (plebian, patrician) is, as above, there are deep parallels in history to what we did – the history that the power structure does not want us to know about.
I write about united non-compliance a lot because, knowing history, I know it works, particularly in complex civilisations. In September I wrote about how the Australian Department of Defence commissioned Engineers Australia to write a report (2019) about what would happen if there was a catastrophic breakdown in governance.
The report lists many of the national infrastructure vulnerabilities and estimates how long it would take for them to fail and for the nation to collapse.
While many people read the media articles about this in 2020 and saw ‘fear,’ like the ancient Romans, I saw a blueprint of how to force the hand of a tyrannical regime using united non-compliance. A key aspect of this report was about ‘whole-of-nation mobilisation’ or ‘national mobilisation’ which “involves purposefully using a society’s resources to support achieving national objectives in time of war, crisis or disaster.”
There were three key points from this I particularly wanted people to see, absorb, and understand:
During a mobilisation, the nation to the extent necessary comes under the direction and control of the central government.
All the possessions of all the people are henceforth at the Government’s disposal.
Historically, the critical shortage in Australian mobilisations is people.
Please go back and read these three points again. They come directly from the Australian Department of Defence who will be in charge during national mobilisation.
In sum: during national mobilisation, you own nothing and the critical shortage is people.
No people, no mobilisation.
Remember this.
However, these actions require a level of discernment and spiritual and moral bravery that, as we saw during the covid years, most people do not have, and in order for these actions to be effective, they either require large numbers of people or a few people in key positions. Preferably both.
Secessio plebis - history
As I wrote above, a committed group of people in a complex civilisation just deciding one day to say ‘F this – we’re done’ is not a new concept. Now I will hand the article over to European historian
who will explain to us what happened in ancient Rome.[Ed. – History enjoyers, please see full essay from Stephan - including references - in attachment below. What follows is an abridged version of his full essay for us].
Secessio plebis was an informal exercise of power by Rome’s plebeian citizens between the 5th and 3rd century B.C. and was similar in concept to the general strike. Rome’s ‘plebeian’ citizens (i.e., those paying taxes but not permitted full voting rights) would “abandon the city en masse in a protest emigration and leave the patrician order to themselves…a secessio plebis signified that all shops and workshops would shut down and commercial transactions would largely cease”.
“Patrician” is the term typically used to describe the Roman nobility; membership originally was hereditary, and only the scions of patrician families were full citizens of the Roman respublica (i.e., the ‘Roman Republic’ – occurred between the ‘Regal’ and ‘Empire’ stages of ancient Rome). Patricians were eligible for public offices or the republican assembly; the Senate. Of course, the patricians were a minority within Roman society.
While scholarship is by and large unsure how many of these events took place—classicists consider up to five such withdrawals—this essay is concerned with the legendary first secessio plebis that is said to have taken place in 494 B.C.
The main qualities of the new respublica around 500 B.C. at the time of the first secessio plebis were poverty and social strife.
The new ruling elite, the city’s patricians, were the region’s commercial and business elites, and supposedly both running the government and staffing public offices. Unlike their (previous) royal counterparts during the regal time period of Roman history, the patricians were part and parcel of the social fabric and everyday dealings among the populace. Many of them owned real estate, rented out property to their fellow countrymen, or were lending money to the plebeians.
Very soon, the patricians, the self-styled betters, found themselves envied, denigrated, and very much despised by the majority of the people whose ‘less-than-learned’ opinions about the patrician ruling elites were less than amicable.
Essentially what happened in Rome around 500 B.C. was a change in the relative distribution of political authority, and whenever that happens, not all positions are subsequently filled with able and honest men. The patricians wanted to supplant the former king with a kind of aristocratic-oligarchic régime whose leaders would be recruited from among themselves, while the plebeians sought to codify rules and craft laws around debt bondage.
These—dare we call them eminently reasonable—demands were at the heart of what the plebeians desired.
Remember that the plebeians were neither proto-proletarians nor oppressed and exploited workers; they were, first and foremost, citizens of Rome. There also existed a small group of plebeians who had become very wealthy, if not wealthier than many of Rome’s patricians.
The one thing the former lacked, however, were participatory possibilities in high politics.
Since around 500 B.C., Rome no longer had a king but two co-presidents, so-called ‘consuls,’ which were elected annually by the senate from among the ranks of the senators. This office was the highest in the republic and politicians typically had to climb the institutional ladder (cursus honorum) before being deemed eligible by their peers. All these positions were unpaid, which meant that only those among the patriciate who were very wealthy could actually afford to enter high politics. This is the club the few, very wealthy plebeians desired to join, and the secessio plebis ‘protagonists’ thus (ab)used the understandable, reasonable original demands of plebians with regards to debt slavery, which is why they walked out of the city in the first place.
One wealthy man achieving consul was decidedly not what the plebeians intended for, and the connection between increased protection from debt peonage and debt slavery had very little, if anything, to do with the requirements of high political office.
What transpired during the various secessions of the plebeians, therefore, is an early example of the perversion of legitimate demands by a sizeable chunk of society by a few politicians with ambitions and very few, if any, scruples. To get their will, these wealthy plebeians—who, let’s not mince words, wished to become the equals of their aristocratic betters—played up envy and resentment among their fellow citizens.
The rest, as the saying goes, is history: in 366 B.C., the law was changed and enabled plebeians to become consuls via payment. The first to do so was one Sextius Lateranus. However, the circle of ‘lesser plebeians’ who could afford such a career was correspondingly limited.
Still, the ‘perversion of legitimate popular demands’ did not alter the trend towards legal equality of opportunity; by the early third century A.D., plebeians had become eligible for the whole range of public offices and equality under the law had become widely established. At that point the plebeian-only consul could have been abolished altogether (or, had the patricians claimed that “it is simply not fair that this is available only for you”, made equal, too), but this never happened.
And thus, the course of history changed. However factually accurate the details of these events and developments may or may not be, the proverbial lesson of history appears this: legitimate popular demands have very often, if not always, been subverted by ambitious, if avaricious, men (and sometimes also women) to further their own, less-than-honourable aims.
O tempora, o mores.
Implications and final thoughts from EDAU
I would like to emphasise that secessio plebis is not about ‘being average’ or ‘common.’ Secessio plebis is a unique state of personal virtue, moral courage, and excellence. As we saw in Western Australia at the fluoro lay-down and elsewhere, only a tiny fraction of the population was prepared to embody these values when it counted.
Secondly, as Stephan has described, defined leadership figureheads in the instance of the fluoro lay-down would have infiltrated and corrupted the power of the united action. As we are currently seeing with this ‘freedom movement,’ it could be argued that select people are co-opting legitimate dissent for their own personal power gains, themselves becoming the ‘new patricians’ and, disturbingly, leading people back to the old guard wrapped in a shiny new package as if the past (nearly) five years never happened.
We are also seeing a fracturing of the dissidents. Where once we were united against tyranny, people are now encamped firmly on different ideological hills attacking each other over wedge issues because it feels like we have gained so little actual ground. In our perceived powerlessness in the prevailing regime, we are devouring each other.
As Stephan pointed out:
To get their will, these wealthy plebeians—who, let’s not mince words, wished to become the equals of their aristocratic betters—played up envy and resentment among their fellow citizens.
And, of course:
Is there anything of which it may be said,
“See, this is new”?
It has already been in ancient times before us.Ecclesiastes
The parasitic class does not want us to know how much power we have as individuals, and that we do not need their brand of ‘leadership’ or even much leadership at all when choosing the path of virtue. That is ultimately the reason why I write this Substack, and why my work is so censored and will never have broad appeal.
Power vacuums are quickly filled because most people cannot bear to live without someone directing their thoughts and actions. People want their thoughts led, which is why we now have ‘thought leaders.’ It is my hope that as more people understand the power of decentralised action, next time more courageous individuals will make the decision of their own volition to join us.
For those of us in Western Australia, during Emergency powers it is legal for the state to ‘vaccinate’ citizens by force and order others to do so, and WA was in a declared state of Emergency for 964 consecutive days (16 March 2020-November 4, 2022). (Archive).
Emergencies are distinct forms of government where your human rights are gone, even when they say you have them, and it does not matter how many international agreements™ Australia has signed. Those who do not understand this will still be confused, meekly asking the government for help as they are being hauled at gunpoint to the back of the truck.
Those who do understand reality know that when they come for you with force holding a needle, that is the point at which there is nothing left to lose.
The government understands this as well, which is why they ultimately did not go all the way. We few who held the line experienced some of the most dangerous 964 days in West Australian history, and it was a situation that none of us wanted.
Finally, even though they gaslight us and say ‘Australia has religious freedom’ this is untrue. This statement is a thought-terminating cliché designed to pacify the lukewarm.
During the Emergency powers, there were no religious exemptions for the covid vaccine in Australia. If, during an ‘Emergency’, one cannot exercise one’s sincerely held religious beliefs, then one does not have religious freedom. In Australia, the real emergency was tyranny, not a ‘deadly pandemic.’ Yet, even if there was a ‘deadly pandemic,’ for believers, doing the will of God is more important. That is the point of being a believer.
We only wanted peace and to worship and live as we believed, but this situation was thrust upon us by cowards hell bent on having access to our bodies and souls.
Yet, we prevailed.
Every single one of us independently decided that we would resist.
We few who held the line.
Lest we forget.
Epilogue - this is the unity the Australian power structure really fears.
“Indigenous Australian Man supports WA Nurses.”
Freedom Media WA
Click here to see video (Rumble; 1m 16s).
Here in the US, we just had our "secessio plebis" with the election of Trump. Why the patricians allowed the popular vote to prevail, I don't understand. But there is a clear shift in the Overton window. This is encouraging, but we'll see if there's any real change.
One thought I can't suppress is that the patricians would rather destroy the world than give up power. We're in our hallowed "peaceful transition of power" right now. It's business-as-usual, the sun rises, we go to work, go buy groceries. I smell Muhammad Ali's rope-a-dope. We'll be asleep while the patricians are working overtime. So much evil abounds.
I hope the Port Hedland debate today has some impact. It is encouraging that it's happening and is visible to all who would want to watch.
Oh, and you're welcome on the ko-fi. (I haven't signed up there. I avoid signing up anywhere I don't have to.) I kept my job and know Divine Providence requires that I help fight this war.