The Edge of the World

The Edge of the World
Type	book
Publication date	2014
Author(s)	Michael Pye
Subjects	black death,  “pandemic”,  centralization,  COVID-19/Purposes?
2015 book that presciently predicted (and supported) the use of pandemics to create centralization. "We've seen how plague became the reason, just like terrorism today, for social regulation, for saying how children must behave, for taking a worker's right to choose what work he wanted, for deciding which of the poor are worthy of help and which are just wastrels. Plague enforced frontiers that were otherwise wonderfully insecure, and made our movements and travels conditional. It helped to make the state a physical reality, and gave it ambitions."

The Edge of the World: A Cultural History of the North Sea and the Transformation of Europe is a 2014 history book written by Michael Pye and published by Pegasus Books. It covers the period from the fall of the Roman Empire to just before Europe's emergence from the medieval era. The story focuses on the impact of the medieval North Sea cultures.

Michael Pye wrote:

Plague justified the rules that kept a person in her place. . . . We've seen how plague became the reason, just like terrorism today, for social regulation, for saying how children must behave, for taking a worker's right to choose what work he wanted, for deciding which of the poor are worthy of help and which are just wastrels. Plague enforced frontiers that were otherwise wonderfully insecure, and made our movements and travels conditional. It helped to make the state a physical reality, and gave it ambitions.

Famine is not at all democratic since you can buy yourself out. Plague, on the other hand, takes anyone and everyone, a true shock to elites who fancied themselves protected by law, by strong walls, by money and other people's obligations.

Reviews

Catherine Austin Fitts reviewed it in December 2020:

“The book was published in 2015 to accolades from establishment sources, including being declared one of the year's 100 notable books by the New York Times. The Wall Street Journal described The Edge of the World as "beautifully written and thoroughly researched."

Having thoroughly enjoyed Pye's early insights on the Frisian culture and the development of the Hanseatic League, the book's abrupt ending and Pye's conclusions in favor of centralization left me in a state of shock. When the Covid-19 pandemic began, Jon Rappoport referred to it as the latest development in a 10,000-year-old war. Reading The Edge of the World: A Cultural History of the North Sea and the Transformation of Europe underscores how true this is.

One wonders if the folks at the Harvard Corporation and Rockefeller and Gates Foundations and the leadership gathering annually at the Bohemian Grove - or the hordes of academics they fund through the Council on Foreign Relations and intelligence agencies - read Pye's book. One also wonders whether the accolades the book received depended on the author's support for forced labor, tyranny, and the concentration of capital. Whatever the truth of the matter, we are dealing with a very old playbook. We can thank Pye for his astounding demonstration of that fact. What is the old saying? "The proof is in the pudding."”
Catherine Austin Fitts (December 2020) 

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