More Proof the World Is Going to Hell

INTERVIEW BY ANDY CAPPER

Photo courtesy Michael C. Ruppert

After we returned

from the riots

we took Henry to hospital to have his head glued up. We then went to his flat in King’s Cross and ended up watching the film

Collapse

on YouTube.

Released in the UK in October last year, Collapse was directed by Chris Smith (

American Movie

) and is based on an interview with Michael C. Ruppert, an investigative reporter, ex-LAPD officer and, some claim, conspiracy theorist.

In the film, Ruppert claims that the world’s oil resources are running out a lot quicker than the mainstream media will have you believe and that we are entering the final stages of modern industrial society. We aren’t conspiracy theorists here by any means, but we recommend you all watch this film as soon as possible.

We called Ruppert the day after we’d fled the most apocalyptic scenes we have ever witnessed in Britain and asked his opinion on the student riots. He had some interesting things to say.

Vice: What advice would you give to the people who were out protesting today? I don’t mean the ones who are aiming to be doctors or biologists, more those who are out to get degrees in marketing or media studies.

Michael C. Ruppert:

The only education worth taking a loan out for now is a practical trade. Do something that will help you stay alive. Industrial society is collapsing and there will be no recovery. We are past peak oil and nobody can deny that. There is a 96 percent correlation between GDP growth and greenhouse gas emissions, which means there can be no [economic] recovery without burning oil and coal. China is scrambling all over the world for coal because their factories are closing down because they rely on coal for energy. So any kind of a career that looks to go into this old model [is not recommended because] there can be no more recovery, period.

To be glib, you can’t be a TV presenter if there is no oil to make the TV work.

And there is nothing to replace it.

Expect to see a lot more of these very soon.

When do you see all this happening?

Right now—it is happening. We have just begun a whole new phase of collapse. You can see it now, a whole new phase of European dominoes with all these bailouts. All they are doing is printing money, and no one believes that is going to do anything anymore, because money is only a symbol for what energy can do.

What are the students in the UK who want to have jobs going to have to do then?

They need to learn a skill or a trade, something that is useful: carpentry, farming, be an electrician. There are not going to be any careers left. A lot of the jobs people are going to go into debt for? Those kinds of jobs aren’t going to be around anyway.

What would you say to a student who got back from the riots last night and went straight on his new iPad, Twittering about how unfair it is that it’s now going to cost twice as much to complete his three-year course in Japanese toy robot design?

I think they’d be better off finding land on which to grow food. People don’t understand that before the industrial revolution, and the use of oil, the earth’s population was at one billion. Now there are seven billion people and we can’t feed and support them all. I don’t mean to be insulting here but your generation has a huge sense of entitlement and maybe a belief that there is a big pile of resources somewhere out there that someone is going to find to make everything OK. Well, there is no secret store house to find. There is not.

There are reports that the British police are starting to militarise. More weapons and armoured vehicles (like the Jankel Guardian pictured below) are being acquired, and officers are receiving SAS training tactics. The mainstream press says this is to protect people from a Mumbai-style terror attack, but the concern at ground level is that when the UK’s economy really hits the skids there is going to be a new form of extreme rioting that the country has never seen before.

That is going to happen all over Europe. There is a catch-22 in progress for police departments who are being cut back globally due to budget issues, in places by as much as 50 percent, yet still have the mandate to keep order.