One of the interesting things about what is happening in Syria is that it is not just the fall of the government but a collapse of Syrian society. When Assad fled, everyone in his government went into hiding. The people running various parts of the system abandoned their posts, leaving no government at all. The money is worthless, so the economy has ceased to function.
Then you have the gangs of lunatics running around, supported by your tax dollars, making sure nothing is working. Now we are getting word that remnants of the military are forming up into war bands. Soon the various ethnic and religious groups will do the same and the result will be a war zone where lightly armed war bands fight with one another for control of increasingly worthless land.
In other words, Syria collapsed and went from a poorly functioning country to something like a fallen Bronze Age society. This is not just the fall of a government but the collapse of everything, which is not something we often see. The last example is Libya, which was not much a society before we killed Gaddafi. The most recent example is the collapse of the Soviet Union three decades ago.
That is the show this week. Societal collapse is a rare thing, but Syria is a good reminder that it can still happen. The conditions are pretty similar in all the big examples of collapse. Of course, once you start thinking about those conditions, the West begins to look a bit fragile. Syria is also a reminder that collapse always catches people by surprise, even those causing it.
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This Week’s Show
Contents
- Intro
- Syrian Collapse
- French Collapse
- Tsarist Collapse
- Soviet Collapse
- Collapse & Revolution
- The American Collapse
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Full Show On Odysee
Somebody had to expect the collapse. I firmly believe that the Syrian Army officers were paid off and / or blackmailed into abandoning their units. Once they were gone, most of the rest of the army just walked away.
Clearly…it’s not like the head choppers are much of a military force…As one expert observed, a battalion or two of Russian troops would have halted this invasion quite rapidly….
The Syrian officers were making a pittance, so there was no need to pay them off. What happened to them is the value in supporting the regime dropped to zero, so they quit supporting the regime.
I wonder how long it is going to be before we start seeing slave markets in Homs.
The fact that the US supported this rebellion then immediately started bombing the rebels after they succeeded says it all. A book came out in 2005 named “Incoherent Empire”. I never read it but the name always stuck with me. Of course this incoherence comes because the US government feels obligated to support a rogue state in the region that works directly against American interests, but we can’t talk about that.
The US may be “fragile”, but not all seems the same. For one, we have a division of civic duties among the States and the Fed’s. What did Syria have outside of a Federal government to assert order? But perhaps most importantly, Syria is populated by low IQ Arabs enmeshed in a religion of “death”. Healthy societies are not founded that way, especially after a successful revolution where factions were only held together by a common enemy. Now that Assad is gone, the factions immediately turn upon each other. Of course, this seems all planned by the CIA. The end… Read more »
The US is protected by oceans and weak neighbors, so the much more likely result of our internal squabbles is breakup into cultural/ethnic based regional groups…which frankly should have happened a long time ago…
It is happening now. Let’s hope it is more successful than the suburbs proved out.
Syria never had an Islam problem. The crazies are imports, sponsored by Turkey and the United States. The human capital is a bit less than in North America, but it had substantial smart fraction. The Alawites look very European for a reason. Like Lebanon, a Syria left alone probably settles into something like Jordan, but with more tourism.
‘Fate of Empires’ by Sir John Glubb p.12-13 In the fourteenth century, the weakening empire of Byzantium was threatened, and indeed dominated, by the Ottoman Turks. The situation was so serious that one would have expected every subject of Byzantium to abandon his personal interests and to stand with his compatriots in a last desperate attempt to save the country. The reverse occurred. The Byzantines spent the last fifty years of their history in fighting one another in repeated civil wars, until the Ottomans moved in and administered the coup de grâce. p. 15 In the first half of the… Read more »
Syria was a reasonably well functioning country 15 years ago, with Assad protecting Christians and minorities…Then the US and its minions decided to create a color revolution, accompanied by strangling sanctions and US military occupation of a major. oil producing area…That failed due to Russian military intervention, as did a later attempt in 2015…This time, the Syrian Arab Army refused to fight, probably due to bribery, and the Russians gave up…Now it’s Lord of the Flies territory…
The lesson is that no smaller country can indefinitely withstand destruction by the concerted action of powerful countries….
it’s crazy how every action the USA takes in the Middle East leads to slaughter of Christians, dismantling of Christian communities, and mass migration of non-Christians into the USA and Europe where the ties of Christianity are further weakened. But no, that’s surely just a coincidence.
6 Syrian Druze villages are asking to be annexed to Israel’s Golan Heights and become a part of Israeli Druze population.
Giving Israel some new targets when they need to drum up a casus belli against their neighbors.
Alex Krainer is one of the sharpest geo-political minds on the internet. He is also very aware of historical precedence, something which seems to elude Americans. In this interview, his informed opinion is quite different from all the journalist jibber-jabber we’ve been hearing. He believes the Russians and Iranians decided some time ago to simply invite chaos into Syria as a way of finally defeating the West. In other words, they’ve sprung a trap. His argument is compelling. Listen carefully and listen to all of it…
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Q0FQeGjPSc0
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