When the Soviet Union collapsed, it did not descend into chaos or have a long period where no one was in charge. It was a process that began with the power struggle between Mikhail Gorbachev and Boris Yeltsin. This power struggle undermined the power of the party and eventually the government. Into the void flowed a new source of power and authority, the oligarchs. These were men with control of key assets who backed Yeltsin’s privatization plans for the economy.
Those oligarchs did not spring from nothing. Some were key party figures who had controlled aspects of the Soviet economy, but most were privateers who operated in the shadow economy of the Soviet system. They held posts in the Soviet system but had extensive contacts in the criminal underground. As the power of the state declined, the power of the underwound economy grew. When the system collapsed, they became the power centers providing control of the country.
This was not unique to the Soviet system. Whenever power begins to wane, alternative centers of power begin to flourish. There is a period in which the real power exists in these distributed power centers, but the façade of the old system remains. Collapse is merely the formal recognition of reality. Germany in the interwar years is another example of what happens when there is a power vacuum. The fascists did not spring from nothing. They had roots in German history and culture.
The Western Roman Empire is probably the best example of the process of collapse and what follows. For a long time, the empire was mostly a fiction. The daily life of the people was controlled by the local powers, the large landowners. These local authorities had power through ownership of land and authority through the administration of the law and regulation of local economics. They even supplied local security in addition to providing men to fight in the legions.
The latifundia was what we would think of today as a plantation. It was the closest thing to agribusiness in the ancient world. It was a large parcel of land worked by slaves for the purpose of export. By the late stages of the empire, these enterprises were common throughout the empire. After the empire, they became the basis of what we understand to be feudalism. The slaves became peasants, and the landowners became the feudal lords controlling the administration of Western Europe.
There was a lot more going on at the end of the Western Roman Empire, but a critical and necessary element was the rise of distributed power centers. Like the ethnic gangsters in the Soviet Union, these agricultural enterprises initially filled in the gaps of the system to keep it functioning. In time they began to rival the power of the empire and when the empire collapsed, they filled the void left behind. The resulting system was built around those local centers of power.
Just as there is a point at which a number of grains of sand becomes a pile of sand, there is a point where the decentralized power centers go from subservient to the central authority to rivaling the central authority. There is a paradox at work in that we can know this point exists but can never identify it with certainty. How many grains of sand constitutes a pile? At what point do people look first to the oligarch for leadership rather than the central authority?
It is a useful question to consider, because there was a point of no return in the Soviet Union just as there was in the Western Roman Empire. Many of those oligarchs in Russia were just the guys who noticed it first. Mikhail Fridman was active in the underground economy in the later years of the Soviet Union and quickly moved to the newly privatized economy as soon as it was possible. Like most of the oligarchs, he was an early adopter who saw the writing on the wall.
In other words, the men who would eventually become the oligarchs after the fall of communism were the first to see that the old system was doomed and something else was coming to replace it. They did not know or care what was coming. They just wanted to profit from the chaos. In fact, when the opportunity arose, they promoted the chaos, backing Yeltsin over Gorbachev because it was good for business. They profited from the collapse before anyone saw the collapse coming.
In current year America, this is relevant because it suggests that the American empire has been in collapse for a long time know. The rise of the financial oligarchs in the late-1980’s and 1990’s was one sign. The rise of Silicon Valley oligarchs as a rival power center to Washington is another. The assault on small business and the middle class by the combined power of the oligarchs and the political class is analogous to the late years of the Soviet system.
In other words, the American empire may already be in collapse. The geezers in Washington are allowed to pretend they are in charge as it benefits the oligarchs, but they have no real power. Legislation is written by the army of scribes known as lobbyists and think tanks, underwritten by the oligarchs. Elections are determined by the money and media supplied by those same oligarchs. The real power lies in boardrooms and villas, while the political system is just a show.
The Soviet and Roman examples suggest such arrangements never last as reality eventually forces its way to the front. In Russia, the oligarchs were brought to heel by the one universal source of power. Vladimir Putin, with the support of the intelligence community and the military was able to reassert civil control of Russia. The oligarchs still exist, but enough have been killed, exiled, or jailed to make sure the rest know who wields the real power in the country.
This is the other shoe to drop in the American empire. The intelligence services have real power, as we saw with the FBI efforts to overturn the 2016 election. The military has real power but lacks real leadership. Their willingness and ability to thwart Trump’s efforts to get out of Syria and Afghanistan should be of concern. Somewhere in the officer ranks there is a man with the skill and desire to change the relationship between the military and the decaying civil control.
Historical analogies are never perfect and are useful only in comparing the broad outlines of times and places. A smooth landing for the empire is not guaranteed any more than Caesarism is a certainty. The military could blunder the empire into a war it cannot win and destroy its credibility in the process. A financial collapse could lead to a popular revolt against the oligarchs. Of course, there is the looming demographic crisis that will bring unimaginable social upheaval.
Even so, what history is telling us is that the American empire is well past the point where reform is possible. It is past the point where the decaying system of imperial control can expect to outlive its current operators. The system is on life support and powerful interests are evolving in response to this reality. The collapse is now certain, but the timing is what is unknown. Another lesson of history here is that no one saw the Soviet collapse coming. The end is always a surprise.
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Probably no point in checking the early life section of ‘Mikhail Fridman’
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Many of the oligarchs were from the Tribe. They had ties to the Jewish gangsters that controlled the underground economy in the Soviet system. Other ethnic groups were represented, but the Jews have always had the most talent for such things. From the late 1960’s until the end, the shadow economy was what kept the system going. Even state industry relied upon contraband to meet their quotas.
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Strangly it was the underground economy that actually kept the system running a little longer, the black market actually supplied goods that people wanted
2
I’m sure that the tribal connection was useful as well when Wall Street came to loot the place.
3
Quite a few also had ties to Israel. That was always a western tentacle into the old Soviet Union. In the end, the oligarchs sided with Putin against Wall Street, which is why our politicians hate Russia.
2
Because American Jews are so wealthy and educated, a lot of Americans don’t understand that Israelis and Russian Jews were (and probably still are) big-time gangsters in Europe – and the USSR when it was still around.
In Germany in the 1990s, Russian Jews and the Israeli Jews ran a lot of the prostitution and drug business. They were also behind the sale of a bunch of black market goods like cigarettes and alcohol and God knows what else.
But you’re right that the Jewish oligarchs in Russia got behind Putin to kick out Wall Street. It would interesting to know their motivations.
I’m sure part of it was fear of Putin and desire to stay in power, but I’d suspect that there wasn’t a ton of love between the Russian Jews and their American Wall Street cousins. I know that American Jews generally aren’t huge fans of Israeli Jews, whom the American Jews consider to basically Jewish Guidos. Of course, the feeling is mutual with Israeli Jews considering American Jews to be pussies.
But, in the end, they are still family.
2
Even today, Odessa is pretty much run by Jewish gangsters. Ukraine is run by Jewish gangsters. What Hollywood portrays as the Russian mafia in the United States is really the Jewish mafia that settled here after the cold war. The role of Jews in that part of the world is much more complex than our anti-Semites need to believe. It is not a one-way relationship. That is probably why they ended up backing Putin. He is the devil they know and trust.
2
Most of the oligarchs were of a similar age, and they were members of the youth wing of the communist party, so they had the contacts needed to profit from the collapse, being Jewish also helped because it was a little easier for them to get outside laons, a few million dollars to pay bribes and buy hard assets while the ruble becomes worthless
The stories from Russia in the 90s are crazy, most of the population had no idea what was happening
5
This is correct. The youngsters knew that under the old system, the best they could do is to manage a state enterprise or rise the ranks of the party, have the ability to travel (unlike the plebs) and own a dacha in Sochi. So they actively undermined the old system and quickly embraced the new one.
The outright gangsters were mostly killed within the first 10-15 years after the fall of Soviet Union. The smart gangsters joined forces with the well connected party youths and ex-KGB agents.
1
Right now, I think the US is in free-fall mode. We are at the point where the elites intentionally broke global trade and can’t put it back together again. Empires cannot survive broken trade routes for very long. The Bronze Age Collapse is the best example of this, where some unknown threat (“The Sea Peoples”) put pressure on some kingdoms and it set off a chain reaction that led to a near-complete wipeout of civilization for hundreds of years. The Roman Empire was done and dusted for good when they lost control of the Mediterranean and couldn’t feed their people with grains from North Africa.
People can deal with the slow deterioration of day-to-day life over a long period. Roman citizens dealt with it, and Americans have been dealing with it for several decades at this point. A sudden shock that can’t be fixed though, it makes the regime lose legitimacy very quickly. Remember that Senile Joe was “elected” on the basis that he had the answers to moving past COVID and getting the country back on track. Within a few weeks of his installation, it was obvious to even the most ardent blue checkmark he couldn’t do either, and the Empire has had to resort to ‘threats and fear to keep going. At some point people turn their backs on them and never look back.
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Globocapital hubris may have busted up trade and logistics but these are just systems. The hubris of globocapital, like that of its political corollary, is that of extreme detachment from the “human capital” as they have come to call it. Which is to say: “us”. Labor, “votes” etc. we don’t really exist in their minds as complete human beings.
Davos/WEF oligarchs love to huff the pages of brave new world but their lives in the cloud obscure them from the reality that humans are a lot more than economic units to be traded, hypothecated, and arbitraged.
All the JIT logistics and algo-driven efficiency is just a system of interconnected tools to order actual human labor. Skynet can’t yet build itself. What they really broke was the human spirit of labor and the stores of goodwill within it. That part of the social contract was broken. Straw on a camels back perhaps. For good perhaps.
Its far more romantic to paint those SWA pilots as veterans and patriots doing the right thing for our cause. Some are likely just that. But what is (arguably) more damaging to globocap – and also indicative of the deeper affliction of our spiritual war, is not a collective movement against the State by organized labor, but rather a cascade of individuals who have had their goodwill and propensity to produce surplus productivity evaporated. The warm water in the pot of frogs got turned up too quickly.
As you say the slow decay can be managed; our ability to extract meaning and purpose – and rationalize the diminishing returns, from our labor is a feature. Until that hubris, ignorance, greed – whatever, of the oligarchs and their precious systems harvest one bail too many from our winter stores. And then people simply alter the value of the various exchanges put upon them and their time.
This is something hitting the entire labor market. More jobs available than ever. Nobody is showing up. Essential infrastructure seems to be hit hardest. PD/FD, healthcare, municipal services all have staffing shortages. And nobody is picking up those overtime shifts unless forced. Everyone thought all these people were getting paid to stay home. Many were. But there is something else afoot. Something far more dangerous than a simple economic problem.
1
One can see the collapse of traditional authorities in a microcosm in many organizations. For example, the Southwest Airlines Pilots sick-out was not union sanctioned, and they are staying out in fear of liability. In the Covid fiasco they are essentially a shell that has no authority over its own members. One is going to start seeing many more de-facto unions with no discernable official organization flex their muscles in the middle class.
As schools start to garrison themselves from parents and show open contempt for the children they are supposed to teach, even hard left parents are starting to use online schools, charters, and “pods”. Even my teacher neighbor, nice lady but a lefty, is so sick of the school culture she quit to pursue tutoring.
Older institutions, like religious groups, are going to see larger de-facto splits from the larger organizations while still remaining a part of them in the books. I’m seeing this first-hand with Catholic parishes who have amassed enough power where the Bishops know they can no longer reign them in. The Pope’s recent mandates trying to stymie alternative power structures that were forming around the Tridentine Rite were a massive flop.
At the federal level, it will probably start with rural communities organically giving the middle finger to the state and federal government, and the governments being too ossified and dysfunctional to force order outside of trying to make an example of a few towns. As rural communities get away with things, state governments will start ‘getting away’ with things, and the federal government will continue to try and barricade itself to the outside world.
Their only trump card the feds hold right now is control of the financial institutions, but hard inflation and coming economic unrest is going to weaken that power considerably.
19
I live in a rural community and can confirm that getting away with things is in full swing. It’s rare to see state enforcement officers of any agency anywhere, and feds are basically an extinct species. The nature of the tax code and demographics means that rural folk don’t pay much in taxes either. Were it not for propaganda broadcasts, it would be easy to forget the federal government existed.
4
Can confirm. The only evidence of FedGov in my area is the teets, not the claws and certainly not the brains. The irony is that lots of the Fed gibs are “delivered” as block grants that pass through state agencies. Our governor is so displeased with our rural deplorability that we generally get our gibs last from the leftovers pushed away by the urban sinkholes. So, as a bonus, we tend not to attract the freeloading diversity. There is an entrenched cohort beneath the poverty line, but local private charity is so generous that our climate (snow is very rare) beckons the intransigent homeless. On the whole, I am fine with a sort of “Out of one, many” devolved federalism if the net effect is to be left alone as an irrelevant backwater.
Agreed in full. Also, once the federal government cannot meet transfer payments, it will not be able to hold basically any locality.
It has been brought up occasionally here, the development of parallel “societies”, such as the Amish and other groups. I see the benefit, but I have a question for the posters here.
Does one seek out fellow travelers, or let them come to you?
I’m thinking the later.
Which kind would be harder to vet?
Thoughts would be appreciated.
4
You act completely normal, happy, wholesome, and put together. You make it clear through your actions throwing people under the bus is beneath you. Then you let them come to you.
My family got redpilled a couple of years ago, and the families that we thought were nice but a little too hard core for our tastes became our closest friends. They didn’t have to advertise anything but drew us in by virtue of being right and 100% loyal to their allies.
17
This is a great answer, Chet. Very concise and very true. Far better than the essay I was going to write.
I’d just bolster the being normal/wholesome thing: when encountering others, simply don’t talk about the stuff the LMSM tells you to care about. Bin off the Covid, Climate Change &c. A good indicator is somebody who can actually converse about things of import to them – without the need for LMSM autocues.
6
I’ll never forget a while back when I felt completely alone in my political outlook, we visited a family we met at a social function and I saw Ian Smith’s “The Great Betrayal” in their library.
Instant ally.
4
Yeah like attracts like. Somehow I managed to find a super right hairdresser and esthetician(fyi for the men, that’s expensive skin care) which are both highly feminized leftist professions. Now I recommend them to my friends so I support people that would be on my side. Don’t give money to leftists
7
“If you build it, they will come.”
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=o3c_pJ_CLJQ
Probably there will need to be a small number of people who strike out on their own first and are then joined or emulated by others. A similar example can be found with the YouTuber EVS. He was a former comic book pro yeeted out of the industry because he supported Donald Trump. He went to YouTube and built his own comic book community around crowdfunding, which has been successfully copied by several unorthodox creators that’d never be hired due to their beliefs and demographics (heterosexual Caucasian male). Several guys now have large comic book crowdfunding campaigns where they can make their own material rather than having to bend the knee to the progressive line.
6
I’m sure a lot of people are breathlessly anticipating getting to bow before Lord Zuck the Cuck and Jack “Duke” Dorsey of Twatter.
The main difference I see is that these underground black market kingpins who became the oligarchs were there providing goods and services that people needed to survive in the collapsing USSR. Or at least that is my assumption. On the other hand, these financial oligarchs and big tech companies are just skimming off the top from the people that do the real production. The finance parasites are obvious. When the economy collapses and the government is powerless I doubt they will have much power to do anything. They only exist because the fed keeps printing money.
The big tech corporations work by selling our data to anyone who wants it. That and ad revenue, which is of dubious real value given the prevalence of ad blocking tools. They are the more dangerous ones I think, as they thrive on us all being addicted to our smart phones and social media. But if the networking infrastructure fails and cell towers stop working they are powerless.
9
“But if the networking infrastructure fails and cell towers stop working…’
IMO this is already past the “if” phase, at least where I live near a giant, blue shitlibopolous. The roads, that cross two state lines, are terrible. Granted, the dropped cell calls are mostly because rich people and their NIMBY fetish means gaps between towers.
But bad roads, communications dead zones are coupled with illegals living in the woods and more coming. Men standing by the roadside, just one no work day away from not being able to afford to wander around the streets with their Corona, then looking for food.
We are already at a tipping point, and the non elected woman governor of our state is in the process of dismantling the health safety net by throwing thousands of nurses out of work. Add to this the others that are also being hurled into the streets, no collecting Unemployment … to ‘protect’ us all and we’ll see what happens.
My point is the anarcho-tyranny we are bathed in daily can shift to anarchism on a dime and when that happens, effeminate Zuckerdorsies will be like the Pacino character in the final scene of Scarface … minus his personal “little friend”.
10
I’ve never understood the people who say that cell and radio towers are ugly. They are functional and to be honest I think most people just pass them by without even noticing. I know I used to before I started working in that field. The worst thing about cell towers from my perspective was that they were more of a bitch to climb since most of them were monopole towers rather than open truss type.
These are the same people who live in tacky McMansions and hang garbage modern art on their walls. And they have the nerve to call a cell tower ugly. The hell with them I think they’re beautiful. Far more useful to society than the people who complain about them.
4
4
Your remarks remind of when I had to do some work in a graphite operation, hands the down the dirtiest* place I’d ever had to work. Thing is, that “dirt” paid for my room and board so while I never saw it as “beautiful” I did learn to not see it.
*(Graphite in a manufacturing operation is ugly just due to it’s color. A cardboard recycling plant I had to go to on occasion was worse in just about every way, but since it wasn’t like going into a dark coal cavern it was a little bit easier to deal with).
2
There is no getting around the fact that our oligarchs are much faker and gayer than what the Soviets sported. Even mainline tech companies like Salesforce and Google are completely dependent on the grifting economic arrangements provided by GloboHomo while Amazon, Uber, Airbnb, etc also depend on being able to play fast and loose with employment, regulatory, and tax laws. If any amount of grift was to be removed from the system these places would cease to exist while a Soviet oligarch’s oil fields that he bought for $50 aren’t going anywhere.
2
Most of the oligarchs made money by stealing from their country. They had the right connections – to government officials who were in charge of managing public property and privatization. The story about the oligarch’s humble beginnings providing services to the people is mostly just that – a story – made up to make them look better. In reality, they privatized for peanuts (almost literally) or were managing state enterprises and funneled money out of them. If they had provided any services before that, it was usually in drug trade, people smuggling or racketeering. Most of those are dead now, though and the majority never provided anything, they were just well connected.
The story is the same in all ex-Communist countries.
2
So how is the transition from state ownership of almost everything to private property to be managed? The “oligarchs” are supposed to write a check to whom? The Russian farmlands and forests are returned to the boyars or auctioned off to Soviet apparatchiks for sacks of rubles?
Excellent stuff Z. Given the competitive nature of our global polities, the lack a true vacuum in power amongst the competing states probably means, as you outline, collapse will be limited and variegated. Whatever form post-collapse governance assumes, the collapse to a sustainable, stable level seems sure. Dynamic equilibrium…true in chemistry, true in economics and political economy.
4
“Like the ethnic gangsters in the Soviet Union . . .”
I wonder what what “ethnic group” these gangsters were from.
15
You must be pretty ignorant if you haven’t figured out the answer.
1
5
You must be pretty ignorant if you can’t figure out a joke.
5
Probably those pesky Seventh Day Adventists.
3
This may be a joke but in reality it was politically-connected, zealous vegan SDAs who gave us breakfast cereal and the inverted “food pyramid” that contributed greatly to the obesity crisis. Don’t discount their organization and influence.
2
Factionalism is the wildcard, no? You allude to the aspect with the biggest prospect for violence, demographics. But the factions that we see at play behind the scenes from time to time are financial and there are deep and hostile divisions among them.
While politicians and bureaucrats are paid and ultimately expendable whores, the two groups that seem most at each other’s throats are what I’ll dub for simplicity’s sake are the Clinton and Obama factions. The Tribe is aligned mostly with the former and seems to have the upper hand now. Biden was supposed to solidify power in the Obama faction and that has mostly failed. The Afghan debacle, for example, indicates the Obama crew is fearful the military is more aligned with the Clintonistas and therefore has to be destroyed. It’s probably right about that. The Regime’s sudden hostility to China is puzzling but may indicate the Tribe knows its glory days are about to be stamped out by the PRC.
When you see a violent Blue on Blue race riot, possibly in the Imperial Capitol itself, that will be the signal the Obama faction feels it needs to make a move. Don’t discount it prevailing in the short term if it creates sufficient chaos and is able to draw in and subsequently humiliate the military and intelligence communities. China and notably Europe will remain neutral and exploit the divisions.
Ultimately the Dirt People have the upper hand, which is counterintuitive and not an opinion widely shared here, because the only dog they have in the fight is their long-term survival. This is why it is so critical to withdraw as much as possible from the toxicity of the cultural and political battles and wait for the moment to pounce once the system implodes and withdraws to its urban strongholds. No one knows when it will happen but I’ve moved from sooner rather than later. There is too much internecine tension to keep on a long time.
17
The “looters” and the “true believers”, or as Z put it once, the slow and fast revolutionaries.
2
I’ve been reading about Camp Anacostia, when the “Bonus Army” of vets from World War I went to D.C. to try to get retroactive backpay for their time fighting over in Europe. The documentary has a very PBS vibe, so of course they sneer at the idea that communist subversion may have been part of the deal, but who knows? The point is, though, that a young Douglas MacArthur was as comfortable firing on American civilians as that retarded black cop in D.C. was. MacArthur, of course, wasn’t a retard who forgot his firearm in a bathroom, but his actions (ignoring Hoover’s order and crossing into the camp to engage) is something to keep in mind for those nurturing fantasies of a military coup against Biden. I’d trust some LTs and Majors and some Light Colonels, but no one gets that bird or that star without playing ball with the rulers or “going native” in Buchanan’s words. Going native wasn’t a crime when the ruling class wasn’t this feckless and evil, but you don’t want to hang out around any generals in the American military now (remember that weirdo Wesley Clarke?). Almost anything would be better than what we have now, but there’s no guarantee that in the scramble for power after a fall, the same problematic people wouldn’t find a way to once again ensconce themselves in power (they’re pretty good at that). There’s only one way to make definitely sure they never threaten us again, but I’ll stop short of spelling it out here.
22
1
Spoken with plenty of 20+ year retired vets who’ll tell you that the Obama senior brass purges were very real, surgical, and precise. Any normal non-woke general officer has been retired from the senior ranks; the ones there now are all in on “woke”.
You saw what they did to Lt. Col. Scheller, USMC. He was only an O-5; you can be sure the purges will now extend to the lower officer corps ranks.
So, yeah. Whether it was fear from the civilian government of a coup, or a desire to promote woke officers for eventual deployment domestically against the US civilian population, (more likely both), don’t look to the US Military to step in and assume a leadership role that in any way benefits the native stock here.
The military is not your friend, never has been, never will be. It’s the ultimate tool of total state power, and like the Eye of Sauron, it’s best to avoid it’s gaze entirely.
21
1
I’m increasingly of the mind that our military is a paper tiger. They have the finest weapons and technology and a pretty good fighting base, but the officer core is completely rotten. Maybe at the lower levels you have good men, but a system that produces General Milley has very deep problems.
The Putin-like player I see in our drama is the intelligence community. They can use the façade of democracy to operate wield real power in the shadows. They don’t have to assassinate Jeff Bezos. They can knock off one of his key aides to get the message across to Bezos and the other bosses. The willingness and ability to kill is real power. The oligarch will gladly pay to avoid facing it.
That said, the oligarch are quietly building their own private armies now. Lots of combat veterans are getting hired for private security firms underwritten by oligarchs. Warlordism is one possible outcome, at least in the short term.
15
1
Exactly. The military still has plenty of people who know how and are willing to kill, but it doesn’t have the leadership nor is the “tip of the spear” trained for the kind of killing and intimidation needed grabbing and maintaining power in its own country.
But the intelligence agencies have all of those abilities. I’ve said many times that our rulers are wimps compared to the Bolsheviks or fascists. They can give an electronic punch but they definitely can’t take a real one.
Look how they panicked when some middle-age Trump supporters got a little unruly. Imagine AOC if she found her pussy boyfriend dead in his car. Do you really think Milley would push back if he found a warning note on his bathroom mirror?
Even if our oligarchs do hire a bunch of ex-military guys, I don’t think that they have the balls to use them against someone who could fight back.
6
You know the old joke about the one-eyed man being king of the blind, well something similar happens in the land of the estrogen. The few with even a little testosterone can easily become king. Think about it. The people rolled over and accepted the Covid stuff. Would they rally to the rescue of the civilian leaders if the military staged a coup? If the intel services installed a president of their choosing?
The trouble for all of these guys is it would not take much for a group of serious men to organize and throw their weight around. If the local cops suddenly see that they and their families can be targeted, they stop looking for enemies of the state. Then those oligarchs and intel officers have a whole new set of problems. America could easily look like Mexico.
9
Yeah even one man sawing a chunk out of a railroad track, then dropping bent nails on the highway while driving home could cause havoc.
Imagine a group, more devoted and perhaps more willing, as you describe.
Lessons about the fragility of the supply chain…
3
Back in the Bush years I pointed out that we were lucky that the Muslims are so dumb. Bombing planes is hard and offers little return. A truck bomb in a tunnel is cheap and had a massive return. If the next round of terrorists are a SD brighter, the result will not be the same.
4
I can’t remember if I saw it here, but I recently finished a book titled “Unintended Consequences” that speculated on a similar situation, though the story was totally 2nd amendment specific. Still, a group of hard, focused men…
1
At a certain distance, you have to chuckle at how they are busting up that which makes them possible. Those rules that make the orderly business of governance possible feel like an obstacle, but they are what separates these rather soft people from the harsh reality of the human condition.
1
“Would they rally to the rescue of the civilian leaders if the military staged a coup? If the intel services installed a president of their choosing?”
Both of those things actually happened in 2020 and, yes, people rolled over. In fact, the coup and subsequent installation started in November 2016. We tend to discount the abject horror the purported insurrection caused among the Ruling Class, but the terror was quite real. These people are craven, weak pussies but so are most of the folks they oppress.
I think you are pretty close with the suggestion warlordism is a future stopgap possibility, and you are certainly correct that the United States military is a paper tiger. The only way the United States military actually could “win” a war even with Iran at this point would be full-throated use of nuclear weapons, and the Ruling Class doesn’t want skin in the game so that will not happen.
If China “takes” Taiwan, and my money is on a soft absorption after some serious military threats, the dollar likely will cease to be the reserve currency then and there. That’s when the factions I describe as “Obama” and “Clinton” go after one another and warlordism may become widespread in the border lands. It is also one reason I’m not so pessimistic about the future of our people although we are soon going to live through an absolute hell on Earth. The factions will withdraw to their urban enclaves, and it is very easy to imagine an East-West split.
Further, your description of the intelligence services as the Putin figure is spot on. The intelligence services are the “Obama” faction, and the military is the “Clinton” faction, and while they briefly united to depose Trump, they are in a state of cold civil war at best over Afghanistan and who gets what after the economy implodes.
Corrupt “health officials”, lawyers, judges, and politicians all have homes and families. too. So do people who employ illegal aliens, promote CRT on the school board, or work for (((open borders NGOs))).
One might find they are not very well guarded or equipped defensively, not very situationally aware, and are not formidable opponents in the street (without the weight of the state, tech, and legal protection behind them).
Totally random comment though with no relation to today of course.
4
This is why BLM is so disappointing. Cops live in the same community and their children go to school in the same community and their wives live in the same community. If BLM were actually serious, they would be the most dangerous group in America today. They are loaded up with cash and it would be very difficult for the lugenpresse to turn the tables and start calling them terrorists.
Make no mistake, the cops are the front line troops of globohomo.
1
@Tars Tarkas
BLM targeted police officers at their homes in a community near mine early on. That got squashed flat very quickly. Burn Loot Murder the inconvenient white proles to your heart’s content, but don’t frak with those who protect the property of the oligarchs.
2
@horace
Protesting is gay. That’s not what I meant. See Micah Xavier Johnson, multiplied a few thousand times with higher IQ.
Policing is based on voluntary compliance. Police are very easy to identify and helpfully walk/drive around in uniforms with their names on them.
I absolutely do not advocate anything Micah Xavier Johnson did, just noting that he in fact, did something. Right or wrong, he thought to the police were murdering African Americans for no reason whatsoever. Assuming BLM believes their own BS, that would make them VERY dangerous.
The only former military the oligarchs could hire would be PFC Dontrelle and a bunch of Chair Force office flackies. The real killers all live in “fly over” country and have a deep seething hatred for the oligarchs.
2
And stay away from “retired” FBI or CIA people. They’re still no damned good.
11
For some reason all us enemies of the state have silently agreed to go cuckservative on this and pretend it didn’t happen, but there was a military coup about a year ago, and this is the regime it installed. I guess the event was outside even our mental range of possible things, and the state and purpose of “our” military isn’t really true in our hearts yet, so it all refused to register.
Remember if you can: At the rhetorical height of a political purge of its ranks, tens of thousands of soldiers of a partisan army occupied the capital to insure the “transition.” Biden announced his reign as zombie fuhrer of globohomo West at a night rally of no one, filmed in corporate-evil-vision on horror-movie car showroom set. Etc.
It wasn’t a paranoid hallucination—yours or theirs. It was all what it looked like it was. They did it.
11
Yes, thank you, and widespread cuckery has indeed been the response. Some of that is a facade, though, because there is a very justified assumption the collapse is underway now and states and localities are about to become more and more independent.
I would argue the coup and installation actually started the day after the 2016 election and the lack of pushback emboldened the main actors.
Of course, the United States has natural alternative centers of powers. It’s in the name: States. Granted, they were supposed to be much more independent and have lost a lot of that over the years, but the infrastructure is still there.
Indeed, Lefty states and cities have been rejecting federal control for years by ignoring immigration laws via sanctuary cities. Now, you could argue that they were allowed to do that and other things because those actions agreed with the real powers and that would be true. But they set a precedent.
If things ever started to accelerate, I’d expect more and more independent states. Ironically, that would bring the country back to what was intended in the first place.
18
Agreed. My thought upon reading Z’s post was “Would this bring a new rebirth of Federalism?” I remember a section in Ken Burns (yeah, I know, I know) Documentary “The Civil War” where IIRC Shelby Foote states the biggest change to come out of the war was people went from saying the grammatically correct “The United States Are” to “The United States Is”. In other words the country was viewed as a whole, rather than independent states within a country. So all it took to reunite the country was a bigger, centralized government.
Could the constant screw-ups by the centralized monolith lead to more “Irish Democracy”?
FedGov: You MUST do X!”
StateGov: “We’ll take it under advisement.”
So what do you do? Does FedGov decide it’s 1861 all over again? Do they really want to tumble those dice and see what comes up? With the diaspora of the world coming here, who joins the Righteous Call to Put Down the Rebels?
9
“Ironically, that would bring the country back to what was intended in the first place.”
Interesting point, and maybe a saving grace. Americans are an independent and self-organizing people. The problem, of course, is that we’ve been swamped with slavish sorts.
How that plays out is hard to figure.
6
The emerging independent states could take the form of two or more parts of states joining together. For example, the Greater Idaho Project. Since the Seattle area and the Portland area are increasingly diverging from the eastern and central parts of Washington and Oregon, joining Idaho makes sense.
I could see the same happening in other states.
8
Florida and Texas (sort of) are showing the way in actively pushing back against the Feds. However, as Z has opined, Abbott is a fair wimp. If he really wanted to send a message, he’d put their entire national guard on the damn border. None-the-less, it’s good to see a few states standing up for themselves. Here’s hoping it’s the beginning of a trend.
3
The problem is that the states are rotted as well. The state courts are loaded up with left wings freaks. The universities and K-12 in the states are all corrupt and rotten. The same finks and grifters sucking the federal blood have been feasting on state blood as well. All of the states are run by the two corrupt parties.
Whatever happens, it is going to be unbelievable painful. Everyone with their lips on the nipples of the state/feds is in for a nasty surprise. There are a lot of people whose only source of nourishment is the state nipple and they don’t even realize it.
1
Btw, does anyone have a few suggestions for books about Europe in the aftermath of the Roman collapse. There are endless books on the collapse itself but not that many about the hundred or so years afterward when the various invading tribes integrated with the existing power structures around Europe.
I read a few books about that time a couple of years ago but would like to see if there were others.
Try St. Augustine’s “City of God”, written shortly after Alaric sacked Rome.
Whether you are religious or not, it contains many an interesting observation on a collapsing civilization.
2
“The Church in the Dark Ages” by H. Daniel-Rops . It covers far more than the Church.
“The Venerable Bede,” aka “A History of the Church in England”.
This is where the rise of crypto currency is inevitable. You have a highly skilled class of the some of the world’s smartest people with loads of disposable cash who are ideologically opposed to the current corrupt system. At the same time they are facing highly ambitious, but inept and horribly compromised people. The politicians that crypto cannot buy, it will outclass in intellect and competence to such an extent that those left to oppose it would be incapable of concrete action. Perhaps 10-25 Congress critters can even accurately describe something as simple as blockchain. Imagine them trying to write laws to ban it as they are beset upon by the VCs and Sam Bank Friedman’s ($20bn net worth) with hundreds of millions of dollars.
Whole nothing is certain, this may prove to be one escape valve for anyone who wants to sit outside of the system. Educate yourself, learn how to be anonymous in interacting with these systems. Learn how to hold your crypto outside of the centralized systems.
5
7
Crypto people have to be among the most delusional out there. Banning crypto is extremely easy, or at least the converting of it to cash. The tech still hasn’t scaled and until it does it won’t be able to handle real mass adoption. The space is absolutely brimming with scammers and huxters making promises they have yet to keep. One example is Vitelek Buterin himself saying ETH should be priced hire than BTC even though even at it’s current price Ethereum is totally unusable.
Bitcoin is probably a good bet as a store of value and the space in general is serving as an inflation sponge. Smart contracts are cool as a concept as is the EVM but so far the tech is little more than a toy and a vehicle for dream salesmen.
I don’t get why some nationalist types think a fantasy economic system is a magic bullet. Actually I do. It’s just fantasy.
If something like Ethereum or Cardano or Chainlink starts to get real world use it will simply be regulated and absorbed into the system. It will get Juiced.
4
I think the crypto ecosystem started out with a few bright, optimistic thinkers (and a bunch of clueless lolbertarians), but was very quickly hijacked by clever people who knew just enough technical jargon to allow them to fleece gullible boomers of their money merely by shouting “blockchain!” and “smart contract!” repeatedly.
2
There are hundreds of thousands of the brightest people in computer science and cryptography devoting their lives to building out the space right now. Ask any graduate from a top tier comp sci/engineering/AI program where they want to be when they graduate. Work for some mindless tech borg improving an algo? Crunch numbers for an i-bank? Or own equity and work in a space at the cutting edge of computer science, economics and information technology? The answer is simple for many.
How is banning crypto extremely easy? Why has China not been able to do it? Why hasn’t Turkey? Or Venezuela?
Crypto is very new and scaling is occurring at breakneck speed. The amount of block space is growing exponentially and it’s only going to continue apace.
Current ethereum is very usable and useful. But it’s expensive to use for anyone using it for less than $10k in transactions. But it’s scaling. Massively. With a year or two it’s capacity will be 100x what it does today on the main chain alone. That doesn’t even account for side chains or roll ups. Not to mention, there are dozens of other competing chains with arguably better tech, scaling solutions ans upgrade capacity.
You probably would have had the same arguments in 2012. And you’ve been proven wrong.
You have an opportunity to be a part of a potential ecosystem that is outside of the banking system. Instead, you say it’s not possible and it’s stupid. Meanwhile many of the smartest people in the world continue to build and many people in space grow enormously wealthy. Many large institutions are buying in and many Senators are becoming large proponents.
Sam Bank Friedman was the largest private donor to Biden in 2020. And that was before the bull run we’ve had where the value of crypto has gone up 8x since then. Think of all the politicians and regulators $2.5 trn can buy.
It’ll be interesting to see how it all shakes out. At least Russia was a largely homogenous nation, where we are anything but. Maybe that’s why their collapse could a deflating type. Ours, when things go really south, may not be that fortunate – diversity will not be our strength.
9
“At least Russia was a largely homogenous nation, where we are anything but.”
True, RUSSIA is. The USSR had lotsa “stans” that said “Screw this, we’re outta here!” when the edifice crumbled. They were held there by the heavy hand of the state until they realized the heavy hand was old and liver spotted. Could such a thing happen in the US of A?
4
The demographics are the curveball.
I can see it being anything from Somalia to Haiti to a crappy version of Brazil.
We don’t really know what the mass asian immigration will do either. They did ok in Singapore – but Asians have a very low birth rate, and they’re also not in charge in the USA. Tons of indians continue to pour in and while they initially are extremely selected towards having a high IQ, we see in Canada that as more pour into the country they are actually quite dumb, corrupt, rapey, and criminal on average.
I’d say the worst case scenario for whites is that the asian / brahmin IQ is used to create a crappier Singapore / Brazil hybrid controlled by Joos.
However there aren’t millions of Haitians or Mexicans pouring into SG either. So it could be worse.
7
Demographics are not necessarily a death sentence, if (and it is a big if) the minority determines to rule through more, physical methods and control lessers.
There’s a reason that our overlords are terrified of history, because there’s quite a bit of it where a small number of Europeans dominated numerically superior others by force, and the will to rule. Take any example you want. The Spanish in the New World, the entire history of colonialism, the South before 1865 (and arguably from 1876 to 1954), and apartheid South Africa.
I might be speaking heresy to many here, but demographics is NOT destiny.
3
If that small demographic that rules us now would change course and have a come to Jesus moment, maybe they could rule and control to our benefit.
You know like make the ADL more like an early Father Coughlin system.
Mikhail Fridman
Didn’t even have to look.
7
They have destroyed European rule of law, therefore no respect for either property rights or citizenship rights of enemies of the European tribes and nations.
1
In the background, Rome as it dissolved had the papacy, with such strong figures as Gregory the Great; St. Augustine’s theology; and the rise of St. Benedict’s monasticism, with its emphasis on work and stability, which spread to the local laity throughout Europe. In the background of Russia in the 1990s, it had a restoration of Russian Orthodoxy and a strong identification, for the core people, of Russianness. Solzhenitsyn and his writings on how to restore Russia with federalism combined with a fairly strong central state. And the memory of Stolypin’s reforms before WWI. What equivalent to either does America have?
5
Jim and Tammy Faye Bakker
1
If the oligarchic analogues are Wall Street, Silicon Valley, the Intels and the military, with the Fed running backup, there could be a smooth transition through collapse, bankruptcy and much reduced national balance sheet in line with the goal of the Great Reset being population reduction to relieve the burden on an overuse of limited material resources. Why else would the nominal President be insisting that everyone line up for the potentially lethal spike protein?
Inter-power-center rivalry is to be expected, and, as you say, an American Putin may be waiting in the wings. So post-collapse may give rise to an American Habsburg Empire composed of ethnicities at one another’s throats to the benefit of the latifundistas. And then? Deja WW I all over again?
1
History, of course, affords many more examples of empires collapsing, or in gentler cases, waning peacefully. Several European empires from “modern” times (past few centuries) would be in approximate terms of global influence: Spain, England, France with honorable mentions to Portugal and Netherlands. The mother country profited for a while, usually. But in many cases the cost of occupation exceeded the benefits. This made it easier to grant independence peacefully. This was certainly the UK modus operand, 19th-20th century. In the remainder of cases, the locals were not averse to revolution to gain their independence. They correctly (in most cases?) knew it was time for self-governance.
There doesn’t seem to be any reason why America should be exempt for the patterns of history. We rarely consider ourselves so, but we have been a de-facto world empire for over a century. This cannot last. At best, the end will come gradually, a a denouement rather than a calamitous crash.
People are right to wonder what the future holds. For those who intend to take practical steps, I agree with the general advice: think and organize locally. Plan for local or at best regional economies. Trade will probably be in barter or old precious metal coinage. I highly doubt that Bitcoin and “Central bank digital currency” will figure prominently. Especially in a hard crash, the lesson of history is that the former central authority’s power greatly attenuated, if it didn’t vanish completely. Any government will be at the local level.
First, we need to change the connotation of the coming reality. Yes, collapse (in whatever form it takes) will bring with it great hardship and death, and wishing won’t change that. We are now dying in slow motion and the longer it takes, the lower the bottom. The collapse is actually the cure and the weeds must be killed before the garden can be restarted.
Second, it the old days, warlords could be effectively shielded by a personal guard force and food-tasters. But we now live in a modern technological era in which neither of those ancient methods has any efficacy. So what will come next is anybody’s guess, and arrogance in assuming a Praetorian Guard will suffice is culling feature of evolution.
Let the games begin.