Category Archives: Foreign Affairs

The Death of Islam

Posted on by

If you lived in 11th century London around the time when Harold Godwinson was making the mistake of leaving too many troops in the north, your life was rather shabby compared to the life of a man living in Damascus or Samarra. This was the Golden Age of Islam. The Muslims were on the cutting edge of commerce, math, science and economics. If you were looking down from above, Islam looked like a winner.

Granted, the Muslim advance into Europe had been halted, but they still controlled large parts of Europe and controlled the Mediterranean. As a practical matter, just in terms of peace and prosperity, Islam looked like a superior model to what existed in Christendom and Asia. It was not just at the top either. Literacy rates, and life expectancy were much higher in the caliphate than anywhere else.

Fast forward 200 years and life in London would not have changed much. The typical peasant would have had a life similar to his ancestors under someone like William the Conqueror. To the East, however, little guys on ponies had defeated the armies of Europe and were poised to drive all the way to the Atlantic. The armies of the Batu Khan had smashed the Rus and were ready to ride to Paris.

To the south, those same guys from Asia were sacking Baghdad, burning its libraries and murdering most of the male citizens, while impregnating the females.  Historians estimate that a million citizens of Baghdad were killed in one week. The destruction was so massive, the population of the region did not recover until the 19th century. The Mongol Invasion ended the Golden Age of Islam.

By the 14th century, Islam was still dominant in what we call the Arab world, but it was not producing or even augmenting an ascendant culture and people. In fact, as the culture of the Near and Middle East collapsed, it took Islam with it, turning it into a tool for jostling between clans and tribes. The Muslims held on militarily through the 20th century, but that was largely due to the Turks and their long involvement in Europe going back to antiquity.

Even so, by the late Middle Ages, life in the typical European village was not that much better than life in the typical Muslim village. If you just looked at the top, the Ottoman Turks looked strongest, but the seeds of decline were apparent. While the West was on the cusp of great technological, cultural and financial revolutions, the Ottomans were still running a system Diocletian would have understood.

As the West moved from the Middle Ages into the Early Modern Period, it was about to rocket ahead of the rest of the world technologically, culturally and military. The typical villager in Europe was living a vastly more prosperous life than his contemporary in Baghdad or Tripoli. The religion, the culture, the demographics and even the climate all came together to produce what we know to be the modern world – in Europe.

Islam never made it out of the Middle Ages until Western prosperity overflowed its cups and brought material wealth to the Arab world. Even so, Iraq is still a Medieval society equipped with satellite dishes and mobile phones. Their culture, economics and politics remain locked in the amber of a bygone age. Even their revolutionaries sound like extras from a B-movie about the Crusades.

That’s not just a reality we in the West accept. It is a reality that every Muslim from the Arab world faces and grapples with every day. The culture that produced him lost to the culture that confronts him. No one stands in line for the latest Muslim mobile phone. There is no Muslim Silicon Valley. The armies of Allah throw rocks at the space ships and lasers of the infidel. To be a Muslim is to be a loser.

That daily reality is in his pocket when he looks at his cell phone. It is on TV where all the actors wear Western clothes. It is in his house where his sister demands to wear makeup and live on her own, dating men outside the family. Even at mosque he is reminded that he is on the losing side of the fight. He rides a Western made bus or drives a Western made car. He texts his coreligionists on an Apple iPhone, not a Mohammad Phone.

There is an argument that Islam is on the rise. As we see Muslims pouring into Europe and even America, the argument goes, Islam is like rising flood waters, about to wash away the West. That misses what’s happening at the roots of Muslim culture. Every one of those Muslims is on a journey that will end as it did for John the Savage in Brave New World.

The Muslim defines himself by his family relations. He is everyone who came before him. His culture is their culture and their culture defines him. Those Muslims on the road to Berlin can either abandon themselves and their identity in order to join their new world, or, they can embrace death. The self-detonation phenomenon is just a dramatic way of choosing the latter.

The thing is, both choices have the same implication, the death of Islam as an organizing philosophy. Just as the Muslim is faced with the reality of assimilation, Islam is faced with the same choice. Islam can cut itself lose from its past and embrace the material world of Western culture or it can blow itself up in a last final act of vengeance against the victor. Either way, Islam is dying.

The Sunni-Shia war that is centered in Syria is perhaps the way forward so Islam can evolve and become a workable mode of thought in a modern technological world. Like the Thirty years War, maybe old Islam is burning itself out and what comes next is a lighter, personal version of Islam. The Thirty Years War left large chunks of central Europe depopulated and others reduced to cannibalism so these transformations carry a heavy price.

Islam is collapsing and it could very well take the rest of us with it. The central challenge to leaders of the West is how to manage this civilizational collapse, which primarily means containing it. The past year has been about piety contests over who can invite the most Muslims in for settlement. The coming decade will be about who can keep the most Muslims out of the West.

 

What Comes Next

Posted on by

Read a lot of history and you’ll notice that wars are more often than not blamed on a few factors. One is aggression by one state, lusting after territory or resources held by another state. The other factor leading to war is the lack of foresight, the failure to look beyond the moment. The Austrian Ultimatum to Serbia is an example and one to keep in mind when watching what is happening in the Near East.

It’s impossible to know, of course, but by 1916 I would bet the Austrians deeply regretted sending that ultimatum to the Serbs. By that point in the war, the Austrians were exhausted by the cost of war and ready to throw in the towel. Even though it should have been obvious, no one imagined what industrial age war was going to do to Europe. They learned the hard way.

Because the Great War was a long time ago, no one remembers it or cares much about it these days, but the lessons of that war are instructive today. At the dawn of the last century, the newly industrialized Europe was still trying to make pre-industrial political systems work, despite the obvious problems. Just as important, the great powers were trying hard to maintain an international system that worked fine in the age of sail but was inadequate for the industrial age.

That’s what comes to my mind when thinking about the friction between Russia and Turkey over the conflict in Syria. The Turks and Russians have had reason to make war on one another for over 500 years. In 1556, the Astrakhan Khanate was conquered by Ivan the Terrible, who had a new fortress built on a steep hill overlooking the Volga. In 1568 the Ottomans sent a force of Turks and Tatars to lay siege to Astrakhan, with the idea of taking it from the Russians.

The military governor of Astrakhan drove back the besiegers using local militia and then a Russian army counter attacked and drove off the Turks and Tatars. On their way home, up to 70% of the Ottoman soldiers froze to death in the steppes. In The Great War something similar happened to the Turks at Battle of Sarikamish. The retreat left 90,000 Turks dead, most of them freezing to death in the mountains. This crushing defeat was blamed on the Armenians, which lead to the Armenian Genocide.

Stories like this one should give everyone one pause, as these are two people with a long, long memory of reasons to hate one another. It’s not going to take much to whip up support in either country for going to war with the other. There’s also the fact that both Putin and Erdogan have strong domestic constituencies in favor of bellicose and aggressive foreign policies. That alone is enough to precipitate hostilities.

There’s also the fact that like the Great War, the West is laboring under a treaty system that no longer fits the current age. The Pax Americana made perfect sense when the Soviets were aiming a bunch of tanks and missiles at Europe. NATO was a logical and practical response to the Soviet threat.

Today it makes no sense for a country of 300 million to defend a continent of 500 million, when that continent is no longer facing a real military threat. The modern Russian army would stall before it made it to Oder–Neisse Line, due to the lack of supplies. There’s simply no reason for America to have troops in Europe and there no reason for NATO to exist.

Another comparison to the Great War is the overall stupidity of key leaders in the West. President Obama makes Kaiser Wilhelm look like Bismarck. Look around Europe and it is hard to find anyone that you would trust in a crisis. This invites the sort of mischief we have seen from Russia in Ukraine, the Baltics and now the Near East. Of course, like Tsar Nicholas, Putin could very well be standing on a rotting pedestal of authority.

Comparisons to the Great War are worthwhile, but now is not then and we have new challenges today for which even the savviest leader is unprepared. As we saw in the Ukraine, asymmetrical war is a new breed of cat. Those “little green men” who turned up in Crimea have no obvious analog in the past. That’s why the West was caught totally unprepared for it.

Then there is the use of unconventional warriors, like Muslim terrorists. Russia may not be able to invade Poland, but they can facilitate the movement of ISIS suicide bombers into your kid’s grammar school. The commodity war that the Saudis have been waging against Iran and Russia is yet another facet of the new brand of total war. You can be sure the Saudis will have qualms about funding Chechen terrorist either.

The wild card, the thing that makes easy comparisons to Europe’s past difficult, is the collapse of Islam. We don’t think of what’s going on in the Muslim world as a collapse since it serves our ruler’s interests to pretend it is something more malign. The endless propaganda painting Islam as Nazism is so the public will sign onto forever war. Drive around the Imperial Capital and you find thousands of firms getting rich off dropping bombs on the muzzies.

Islam is not ascendant, no matter what the rulers claim. Islam is in collapse, a collapse similar to what happened to Christendom in The Thirty Years War. The various sects within Islam are at war with one another over a dwindling amount of influence over their culture. Western materialism is shrinking the pie, as it were, and the tribes of Islam are at war over who will get the lion’s share of what comes next.

And no one comes next.

Ruminations on the Great Game

Posted on by

If you are floating around on your yacht in the Black Sea and decide to visit your home on an island in the wine dark Aegean, you will have to first pass through the Bosporus into the Sea of Marmara and then through the Dardanelles into the Aegean. If you keep going, you end up in the Mediterranean. It’s reasonable to say that a lot of the important stuff in Western history happened in and around what we call the Turkish Straights.

It’s also reasonable to say that a lot of what is going to happen in Western Civ will be happening in and around this area. Those Muslim hordes pouring into Europe are mostly crossing Asia Minor into Greece and the Balkans and then making their way to your town. The Turks have found a clever new weapon to lever concessions out of the Germans. They now control the flow of terrorists into the heart of Europe.

The downing of the Russian plane by the Turks is a reminder that the place where civilization started could very well be when it ends too. The Turks and the Russians have fought wars going back to the 16th century. It may go even further back as there are a lot of blond haired, green-eyed Turks. There are a lot of swarthy looking Russians who can grow a beard in hours. In other words, the two sides have been swapping wives the old fashioned way for a long time.

The most recent was 100 years ago when the Turks decided to try to recover some lost lands from the Russians during The Great War. With the Russians fighting the Germans and struggling to keep their army supplied, the Turks figured it was a good time to strike so they launched an attack into the Caucuses. It did not end well for the Turks, but it really did not end well for the Armenians. Anyone who has ever known an Armenian knows they will never forgive the Turks.

One of the many reasons America has no business mucking around in that part of the world is we know pretty much nothing about that part of the world. On the other hand, the people in that part of the world know everything about that part of the world. History for them is a nightmare from which they can never awake. All sides have old scores they would like to settle for no reason other than that’s who they are and that is what they do.

It’s why the Russians getting into Syria should be our sign to get the bleep out of the region and leave the locals to settle their disputes. The Turks should be told that NATO will not get involved in any war they start with the Russians. Maybe deliver it with a copy of Churchill’s The World Crisis, Volume II where he describes the thinking behind his plan to seize the Dardanelles. American leaders are too stupid to appreciate their own stupidity so we will blunder along regardless.

Of course, it is not just the Turks and Russians. The collapse of Syria is the latest chapter of the intra-Islamic war that is playing out in fits and starts between Saudi Arabia (Sunni) and Persia (Shi’a). The former is willing to destroy OPEC in an effort to throttle Russia and Iran. The latter is willing to risk war with Israel (a war they would lose) in order to get a nuke, which would make them the regional hegemon.

The Russians, of course, have long range goals that have little to do with the war within Islam. They are just seeking advantage where they can find it. The Turks are Sunni, so it is convenient for the Russians to play the game in order to provoke the Turks. It will not be long before the Russians figure out how to “help” the Kurds and maybe encourage them to demand a separate homeland. The odds of a full blown war between the Turks and Russians are small, but an unconventional war with the local variety of “little green men” popping up in Asia Minor is not out of the question.

Putin may have dreams of sacking Constantinople, driving off the Muslims and repopulating the place with Cossacks, but that seems unlikely. Instead, he probably sees an opening to regain influence over the Balkans. That fits with Putin’s pattern of casting himself as the protector of the Slavs. Plus, control of the Balkans means another pressure point on Europe. When your best customer is also paying you to keep the frontier under control, you become the indispensable man.

More important, increased influence in the Balkans means it is another entry point for Iranian oil and gas. Look at the map and you can see that Russia controls a third of the Black Sea coast. Building strong relations with the Balkan states and that control grows to more than fifty percent. If the Turks are pinned down with the Syrians to the South and restless Kurds in the east, they will not be much of a problem in the Balkans.

The Russians have been at this a long time. It is in their nature. Americans, on the other hand, can’t stop thinking about Hitler. It’s tempting to think the West is simply allergic to nationalism, but it may not be that sophisticated. Fear of Hitler keeps the defense dollars from Washington flowing. Millions of people make a tidy living watching out for Hitler. Reality simply does not pay as well.

Even so, 100 years ago conventional wisdom said war was a thing of the past. A 1910 best-selling book, The Great Illusion, used economic arguments to demonstrate that large scale wart had become unprofitable. Global commerce had eliminated war. You hear the same arguments today. If a country has a McDonald’s, it is no longer interested in war. Not long after The Great Illusion was published, war became inevitable and it started in the Balkans.

The Rise of Russia

Posted on by

One of the stranger things about living in America is the lack of a news media. With a few exceptions, what we call a news media is mostly just the propaganda arm of the far-left and the ruling class. The proselytizing is endless. Even sports is larded up with “messages” that have nothing to do with sports. President Obama has been on ESPN more than the coach of the New England Patriots.

Another consequence of this is that big important stuff gets ignored. For instance, the great re-arrangement of the chess board in the Near and Middle East has gone largely ignored mostly because it would be embarrassing to Obama. The Russians are about to rub out ISIS and setup Iran as the regional hegemon.

Syria’s armed forces advanced south of the second city of Aleppo on Friday in a fresh ground offensive backed by Russian warplanes, a monitoring group said.

Since Moscow began its air war in support of Damascus on September 30, the Syrian army has launched assaults against rebels in at least four provinces with Russian aerial support, the Syrian Observatory for Human Rights said.

Russian air cover is backing offensives by Syria’s army and allied militias in the central provinces of Homs and Hama, as well as Aleppo in the north and Latakia along the coast.

On Friday, the Syrian army pushed south from the provincial capital Aleppo city, where control is divided between regime and rebels forces, as Russian air strikes pounded the villages of Al-Hader and Khan Tuman and nearby localities.

“The Syrian army started a new front on Friday and advanced to take control of the villages of Abteen and Kaddar” about 15 kilometres (12 miles) south of Aleppo city, said Observatory head Rami Abdel Rahman.

He said “dozens” of Russian aerial attacks in the past 24 hours had struck the area, which is controlled by a patchwork of groups including rebels, Islamist fighters and Al-Qaeda’s Syria affiliate, Al-Nusra Front.

For a generation, the US ruled over the Middle East through the Saudis and Israelis. It was hardly perfect, but that was the arrangement. The main point of it was to keep the oil flowing and the crazies bottled up in their own lands. Suddenly, the regional hegemon is going to be Iran, backed by Russia, with some support from Syria’s Alawite tribe.

Once the Syrians regain control of the Western cities, the push east to wipe out ISIS comes next. It’s easy to forget that ISIS is a Saudi creation, for the most part, and the US has had some hand in funding them. Once ISIS is gone, the Saudis are out of cards to play and they will find their authority in the region greatly reduced. In the Arab world, might makes right.

That’s not a small thing. The Russians will now control a vital piece of Europe’s energy supplies. By setting up Iran as a Russian client and the bully on the block, the Russians will effectively control Middle East policy and be wired into the complex relationships that transcend the region. A while back, I pointed out that those millions of Arab men marching into Europe will have a lot of Russian friends too.

Another piece on the board is the fact that the Russians have transformed their military under Putin in response to what they have learned from US military involvement in the Arab world. Those little green men who turned up in Crimea should have been an eye-opener to the West. Now it looks like the Russian military success in Syria is getting the attention of Western strategists.

The strikes have involved aircraft never before tested in combat, including the Sukhoi Su-34 strike fighter, which NATO calls the Fullback, and a ship-based cruise missile fired more than 900 miles from the Caspian Sea, which, according to some analysts, surpasses the American equivalent in technological capability.

Russia’s jets have struck in support of Syrian ground troops advancing from areas under the control of the Syrian government, and might soon back an Iranian-led offensive that appeared to be forming in the northern province of Aleppo on Wednesday. That coordination reflects what American officials described as months of meticulous planning behind Russia’s first military campaign outside former Soviet borders since the dissolution of the Soviet Union.

From an American perspective, handing the Middle East over to the Russians is not a terrible thing. Americans are far too moralistic to run a proper empire. The Russians are too incompetent to remain a big player in the region in the long run, but in the short run they will be the whip hand that is needed to keep the peace. The Russians will kill everything that moves in eastern Syria, for example, in order to subdue ISIS.

The bigger issue is that the Russians can effectively coordinate a multi-pronged attack on Europe, without triggering a nuclear war. In the east, they can put economic pressure on the Baltics, Ukraine and Poland. They can also put pressure on the Germans through their near monopoly of natural gas flowing into Europe. Then there is the wave of migrants flowing north that Russia can turn on and off as necessary.

The center of gravity in Eurasia is moving east and Americans hardly notice. How much of this is due to Obama’s incompetence and how much is Putin’s skill is hard to know. There’s also the fact that the American foreign policy establishment is exhausted spiritually and intellectually. Even so, the great under reported story of this decade is the rise of Russia as a world player.

Ruminations on the Russians

Posted on by

I’ve been reading a little bit about The Great War, when time permits. The 100th anniversary has unleashed a lot of good books, articles and even a podcast on the subject. Dan Carlin’s series on the war is excellent if you’re into podcasts. I have a dozen books on my list, that have come out in the last few years, unread on my shelf, but I’m hoping to knock them out in the fall.

The Great War is on that list of things you have to know about in order to be an educated man. The 100 Years War, the Thirty Years War, The English Civil War, the American Civil War and the Great War are events you simply have to know in order to know the modern age. You don’t have to be an expert, but you need the basics. In the case of the Great War, I don’t know if you can be an expert. The Battle of the Marne is enough to keep a first rate mind busy for a lifetime.

What has always intrigued me about this war is two things. One is everyone went into it, even the German military, with out of date notions on warfare. Some of their attitudes were pre-Napoleonic, in regards to the rules of war. The biggest error was in not understanding how the changing technology would change war fighting. They could not imagine it. Instead, they learned it in a massive bloodbath.

This is not a post about that war, but about our next one. At the start of the last century, lots of smart people thought war was no longer a possibility. Globalization, trade, “smart” managers and technocrats had made territorial expansion unprofitable and counter productive. Norman Angell wrote a very influential pamphlet arguing that the integration of the economies of European countries had grown to such a degree that war between them would be entirely futile, making war obsolete.

We hear the same arguments today. The addition now is that American military hegemony, along with the nuclear stockpiles of China, Russia and the US, makes war an impossibility. No one would risk it. What everyone hangs their hats on is the global capital markets. War at any scale would make the global elite poor and that means there will never be another war of any scale.

Just because these claims echo those of 100 years ago does not make them invalid. They may be right, as it seems unlikely that we will see tanks racing across Germany again, but that’s not the way to bet. Great economic upheavals have always ended in great wars so this great economic upheaval is probably going to end in a great war. The question is what will it be like?

I think the place to start is with the Russians. Again, hailing back to the Great War, Russia, like the Germans 100 years ago, is the country trying to get a place at the table, but is instead being ignored. France and Britain controlled 70% of the globe a century ago. Today, the West controls 100% of the world economy. Finland gets more respect from Western powers than Russia. They have a lot of reasons to cause trouble.

The way the Russians handled Crimea and Ukraine should be one of those things that keeps western planners up at night. It was asymmetric warfare at a level no one thought the Russians possessed. It’s not just that they have evolved their military strategies; its that they have clearly learned a lot about how Western strategies have evolved. Those “little green men” who popped out of nowhere did not pop out of nowhere. That was well planned and well executed.

What the Russians clearly learned is that the old rule of war is still true. The side that gets there firstest with the mostest usually wins. In the case of Crimea, the Russian got their forces in control of the ground before the West knew what was happening. Instead of tanks and infantry units, the Russians used irregulars in anonymous uniforms, mixed in with local elements sympathetic to the Russians

Now we see the Russians, to everyone’s surprise, are putting boots on the ground in Syria. They have tanks guarding an airfield that they appear to be building up, presumably for the purpose of basing fighter planes. Coincidentally, there are a million Syrians heading to Europe as refugees. Those refugees will certainly maintain links back to the home country. Inevitably, Russian intelligence will be working with Syrians in the region, developing lots of contacts that could be used later.

This may sound far fetched, but consider another example from the Great War. The guy who assassinated Archduke Franz Ferdinand was a guy named Gavrilo Princip. He was part of a conspiracy run by a member of the Black Hand. Their leader was a man named Danilo Ilić, who was controlled by Serbian intelligence. The people who poisoned Alexander Litvinenko with polonium are not going to fret about running Syrian terrorists in the heart of Europe.

This partnering with locals the Russians are doing has another benefit. It lets them cheaply extend their influence to weak spots of the West. Setting up camp in Syria means they can create mischief through the Middle East and North Africa. They are, in effect, extending the front lines north to the Baltics and south into the Mediterranean. Instead of being surrounded by the West, Russia and its partners is now surrounding the West.

The Industrial Revolution ended with two massive wars that nearly obliterated civilization. If not for the Anglosphere, civilization would have ended. maybe the technological revolution ends with something less dramatic. Maybe the next great war is a low grade affair between irregulars. I don’t know, but it seems like the folks to watch are the Russians.

The Greek Struggle Session

Posted on by

I have found the Greek financial crisis endlessly fascinating over the last five years. The main reason I can’t get enough of it is that unlike American political scandals, all of the important parts of the Greek drama are hidden. What we see from the performers is their reaction to those important actions and we are left to guess what is going on behind the screen.

After all, the Greeks have no money and they owe a massive amount of money relative to what they can possibly raise over the next ten years. Even if they stated auctioning off islands and national treasures, they are never paying off their debts. We finally learned that they will never be able to pay the interest on those debts. There’s some other reason Europe is spending countless hours pretending to disentangle an “impossible” knot.

Reading this post on ZH this morning, I think I may now know the answer. The European Project is all about reducing cultural and national identity administrative distinctions. Being an Italian simply means living in a place that used to be a country called Italy. If you are a Bantu who floated over last week, granted EU citizenship and now reside in Milan, you are an Italian!

Here we have the Greek stubbornly acting like Greeks by voting out politicians who go along with the European program. They voted out one main party for another and when that failed they voted out the main parties altogether. Syriza, despite its Marxist trappings, won on an explicit appeal to Greek patriotism. The Greeks even went so far as to vote in huge numbers against the EU proposal in last week’s plebiscite.

The result, as that Zero Hedge piece points out, is the Greek parliament voting in favor of the same deal that was rejected last week by the people. Talk about the ultimate in humiliation. If you are a Greek who voted for Syriza and against this plan, you have to feel like a fool. The people in charge are laughing at you. All you did with your silly voting is waste the ruler’s time and for that you will suffer.

And that has been the point all along. It’s not the money. It’s the humiliation. The Greeks have been cast in a German snuff film for the titillation of German technocrats and as a warning to everyone now living under the German yoke. You either goose step to the tune being played in Brussels or end up like Greece.

In the last century, Marxism relied on personal humiliation to break the will of people. The rulers would require the people to say ridiculous things in public about the wonderfulness of the regime and it’s animating theodicies. Children would be made to sing party songs and officials would be required to participate in official charades. It was all intended to humiliate the people. It is hard to rise up in revolt after you have been made to toady to the state in front of your peers.

There was also the forced confession and the struggle sessions. Forced confessions were how individual heresies were made into collective ones. They turned a natural virtue – empathy – into a vice. How could one feel sorry for a suffering human who had gone against the revolution? It was intended to atomize the citizen, cutting off his loyalties to his fellows and replacing it with loyalty to the state.

The struggle session worked similarly. The heretic would be forced to confront their own apostasies in such a way that altered them emotionally. Everything about them, right down to their core, was challenged and questioned. Once they could no longer trust themselves, they could only trust their masters in the party.

Ultimately, that is what has happened in Greece. It is one long struggle session. Like the forced confessions and show trials the Soviets were so fond of, this was intended not just for the Greeks, but the rest of Europe. The Greek Finance Minister said it was to warn the French, about being French. It was certainly a warning to the Brits and others who have patriotic parties making noises about Europe.

If you are a Greek citizen, how can you have any faith in your Greek democracy? Why would you bother with it? You now see that voting is just a charade. The people making the decisions are in Berlin and Brussels and they speak German. Those are the people in charge, not those guys lobbying for your vote. Comrade, why are you struggling against the tide of history?

As an aside, if you ever thought about what Europe would have been like if the Nazis had won, take a look at today’s Europe. Eventually Hitler would have died, probably assassinated, and been replaced by technocrats like Albert Speer. The Germans love technocrats more than they love scat films. By now, rule by street thug would have given way to rule by lemon-pussed technocrats.

Free Trade Fantasies

Posted on by

Yesterday the guy who wrote this piece tried picking a fight with me on twitter over my observation that some trade deals are good and some are bad.  Libertarians hear the phrase “free trade” and they fall into a trance-like state. I think if you labeled dog poop “free trade” they would gobble it up like candy. That would be after they name-dropped David Ricardo and Adam Smith.

I’ve never had a twitter fight and I would certainly be willing to give it a shot. The trouble is started by using uptalk which makes me think of punching people in the face. There’s nothing that screams smug pussy more than slapping a question mark onto a statement. I’ve made it a rule to ignore people who do it. Reading his twitter feed, I get the sense he wears his ignorance like a shield and there is no point in debating such people.

But, I don’t know him or his work so I could be all wrong. Still, life is too short to waste time on finding out. My sense is his site is mostly libertarian spank material and I have no interest in it. I know all the arguments and much of what libertarians say is reasonable, but a lot of it is nonsense too. Humans are not moist robots and our relationships are not transactional. Economic man has never existed and that’s why libertarianism has never been tried.

Anyway, after all the red Team-Blue Team stuff, he laments that many Republicans and Tea Partiers think trade has hurt the country. To libertarians, this is like learning that half the country believes in witchcraft. As I wrote earlier, the phrase “free trade” has a narcotic effect on these people.

Shockingly, the former Half Sigma has a post up that gets at the problem with libertarianism in general and free trade in particular. I don’t think his idea for socialized banking is a great idea, but the point about pure markets existing only in the imagination is important. Political systems work as long as they comport with reality. Libertarianism works only in a world with perfect economic men ruled by saints.

Similarly, free trade is a boon to both countries as long as both countries have the cultural ethics of Canada. That way, people in both parties can expect their claims to be upheld in both countries. When one party to a contract is not holding up his end, the state must step in and enforce the contract. When that party’s home government is just as corrupt or incompetent, you get something other than free trade.

Not all countries have Anglo-Saxon sensibilities. Canada is not going to invest much into competing with America because both countries are culturally similar so cooperation is natural and mutually beneficial. China, on the other hand, is vastly different from the US. They see American and Americans as competitors, even adversaries.

That’s not to say there should be no trade with China. Like progressives, libertarians tend to see things in black and white. You’re either in favor of unfettered trade with everyone or you’re a close minded protectionist. Only libertarians and lunatics think this way. Most people fall into the middle area that thinks prudent trade deals with friendly countries are good, while reckless trade deals with rogue nations are bad.

All of this is germane to the TPP deal Obama is pushing. This deal is mostly a give-away to globalopolies, rather than a trade deal. The reason it is a secret deal is to keep people from seeing what’s in it, obviously. You don’t do that if you think the details are going to win you praise from the public. But, a lot of it has been leaked through various channels and it is what one would expect from a deal drawn up by global corporations.

It’s a reminder that being for free trade is like being for leprechauns riding unicorns. All of these deals should be looked at skeptically. The debate is not between free trade and no trade. The debate is over over how much power we want to cede to global corporations and foreign governments. Sometimes it makes sense to do deals with less than sterling countries. Sometimes the interests of multinationals coincides with those of Americans.

It can only be decided on a case by case basis.

 

The Greek Complexity Problem

Posted on by

Watching the Greeks cast about for a way to make math go away has been fascinating to me. Everyone knows the Greeks can never repay their debts. Everyone knows they will never make the reforms required to keep receiving aid from the rest of Europe. Yet, everyone keeps pretending otherwise and not just for appearances. It seems they really believe that mathematics will yield to wishful thinking.

Anthropologists assume that in modern times, complex societies cannot collapse. They can weaken and go through a process of reform, but they cannot collapse. The reason is every society is adjacent to another complex society. Collapse would lead to being taken over by a neighbor. Even a screwed up society like Greece will suck it up and do what is necessary to fix their walls and rebuild their core rather than become a province of Turkey or Bulgaria.

But, we don’t know that. It is just assumed to be true because it has always been true.  Things are true until they are not. Not so long ago, it was inconceivable that a member state would face financial collapse and now the Greeks are now preparing for bankruptcy.

Greece is preparing to take the dramatic step of declaring a debt default unless it can reach a deal with its international creditors by the end of April, according to people briefed on the radical leftist government’s thinking.

The government, which is rapidly running out of funds to pay public sector salaries and state pensions, has decided to withhold €2.5bn of payments due to the International Monetary Fund in May and June if no agreement is struck, they said.

“We have come to the end of the road . . . If the Europeans won’t release bailout cash, there is no alternative [to a default],” one government official said.

A Greek default would represent an unprecedented shock to Europe’s 16-year-old monetary union only five years after Greece received the first of two EU-IMF bailouts that amounted to a combined €245bn.

The warning of an imminent default could be a negotiating tactic, reflecting the government’s aim of extracting the easiest possible conditions from Greece’s creditors, but it nevertheless underlined the reality of fast-emptying state coffers.

Default is a prospect for which other European governments, irritated at what they see as the unprofessional negotiating tactics and confrontational rhetoric of the Greek government, have also begun to make contingency plans.

In the short term, a default would almost certainly lead to the suspension of emergency European Central Bank liquidity assistance for the Greek financial sector, the closure of Greek banks, capital controls and wider economic instability.

Although it would not automatically force Greece to drop out of the eurozone, a default would make it much harder for Alexis Tsipras, prime minister, to keep his country in the 19-nation area, a goal that was part of the platform on which he and his leftist Syriza party won election in January.

No one really knows what will happen if the Greeks default. There will be lots of hooting and hollering. Capital will rush out of the country as Greeks try to stash their savings abroad, but that’s most happened anyway. The banks will fail and close down. The economy, for a short period will seize up. Civil unrest will be inevitable. A military coup is not out of the question, as in times of turmoil, the guys with the guns tend to have an edge.

To the average Greek, this could feel like the end to the world, but it does not qualify as a collapse by the standards of anthropology. Greece is in no risk of dissolving. A coup would just mean new leaders in charge of the same society. Similarly, Tsipras crowning himself king would simply be a modification of the organizational chart and small one at that. Reform would simply be handed to an authoritarian.

It’s tempting to pin the reason for all of this on democracy. Critics of democracy have always pointed to the quote allegedly from Alexander Fraser Tyler, “A democracy is always temporary in nature; it simply cannot exist as a permanent form of government. A democracy will continue to exist up until the time that voters discover that they can vote themselves generous gifts from the public treasury.” In short, democracy becomes organized looting that accelerates into chaos.

That’s pithy and useful, I suppose, but not accurate. It’s easy to pin the blame on the freeloaders and loafers. Democracy may increase their influence, but it also strengthens more responsible elements in society too. Modern elections are always over some problem that needs solving and the winner is almost always the one promising a solution.

Even in Greece, the main parties representing the ruling elite tried to force through changes in the face of their fiscal crisis. When all of your options on the ballot are calling for the same things, democracy has been suspended. It was only when the main parties failed to come up with a way to address the crisis that the lunatic parties moved to the fore, offering nothing of substance, just a catharsis.

It seems to me that what is happening in Greece is a part of a longer process that is happening in the West. The Greeks joined the Euro for a reason. The Euro, of course, was not created to give bureaucrats something to do during the day. The whole project, including the addition of Greece, was an attempt to solve a problem.

Publicly, the problem they claim to be addressing is the long history of conflict in Europe. Economic cooperation, then a single currency and eventually, political unity. That’s the part above the waves. The part below the waves is the diminishing returns of the organizational model developed over the last two centuries. They are grasping about for some way to make work the mathematics of social democracy.

The math of social democracy is all about diminishing marginal returns. The first big programs like public education and aid to the poor had big returns, far more than the costs. Subsequent investments in complex social management netted smaller returns, but still more than the costs. Over time, the inertia of progress forced greater investment in complexity, aimed at mitigated or ameliorating the human condition, well past the point of diminishing returns.

In this regard, the Greeks are an example of what lies ahead for all of Europe and the West. They joined the Euro because it looked like a solution to their problem, but it only delayed the inevitable. Now they desperately try to kick the can further down the road, but there’s not much road left. What comes next is anyone’s guess. Perhaps it will simply be a disorganized dismantling of decades of social complexity, a national version of a reorganization through bankruptcy.

Slimey Limes

Posted on by

I’ve been reading about the upcoming British elections. Unlike in America, British elections seem to go on forever. It seems that they have been talking about this election for years! I’m kidding, of course, but British election shows are following the same arc as American election shows. As soon as one ends, a new one starts up. I guess it keeps the political consultants off the streets.

For Americans, British elections are a good indication of where things are going in our own lands. Thatcher became the head of the Tories in ’75 and Reagan became the de facto leader of American conservatives in ’76. Thatcher became PM in ’79 and Reagan won the White House in ’80. It’s not a perfect bellwether, but it is useful. We elected the vulgarian Bill Clinton and the Brits followed that with the execrable Tony Blair.Sometimes America is the trend setter.

Even so, it’s worth noting what is going on in the mother country. The fraying of the political parties in Britain cannot have an analog in the US due to our system, but the general disgust with the political class is something we’re seeing on both sides of the Atlantic. That’s the point of this piece in the Guardian last week.

Public mistrust of government is high in Britain, and deference to the political elite has also collapsed as economic woes erode living standards. Amid all that, voters are deserting the Conservatives and Labour, Britain’s two main parties of the right and left since the 1920s, in droves.

In the 1951 election, Labour and the Conservatives – or Tories – shared 96% of the vote. By 2010 they could only manage 66% between them.

At the last election in 2010, Cameron – the first Tory leader since the 1960s to be educated at Eton college and Oxford University, an upper-class combination somewhat comparable to the Ivy League – successfully ousted Labour after 13 years of Blair and then Gordon Brown, but his 306 seats to Labour’s 258 left him 20 short of an outright majority.

The Conservative leader was forced into the first peacetime coalition since the Great Depression, his partners the middle-of-the-road Liberal Democrats who had staged a revival since near-extinction in the 50s and had won 57 seats. A coalition of some kind – or a minority government, rule by a party that does not have a majority of MPs – seems likely again this year.

From where I sit, the Tories look a lot like the GOP in that they have run out of reasons to exist. When you have caved on all of the important cultural arguments, what argument can you offer to voters other than you will wear a tighter fitting eye shade whilst managing the custodial state? How is Cameron different from Blair, other than being taller?

The other issue, of course, is the national question. That’s always the topic when discussing UKIP. It is the thrust of the party and the tool they are using to dig out the innards of the Tory party. I suppose you can add in a healthy bit of economic nationalism as well as economic populism. No national figure in the US has picked up this issue yet, but it is looking like Walker and Cruz are working on their conversion stories, in the hope of repeating what worked for Dave Brat.

It’s convenient to dismiss UKIP as the party of yahoos, just as it has been easy to dismiss Tea Party types in the US. The thing is, I wonder if the appeal of the Scottish Nation Party is really just a veiled and uniquely Scottish protest against immigration. There’s no economic reason for Scotland to break away. There’s not a language or cultural barrier that is big enough to warrant a split.

I looked up SNP’s position on immigration and it is nonsensical, therapeutic state gibberish.The national appeal is by definition exclusive and they make clear they intend to restrict immigration. On the other hand, they moan about being victims and having their feelings hurt by the mean men of Westminster. My hunch is the average Scot hears “Scotland for Scots” when he thinks of SNP.

Demographics certainly plays a role as we see in the US. Scotland is white, very white. The latest demographics say 96% white as a matter of fact. England, in contrast, is 85% white. In America, pasty regions up north love talking about diversity, while diverse parts of the country are more restrained. Diversity romanticism does not sell very well in the Southern states, for example, as everyone there has more than their fill of diversity.

I suspect something similar is at work in Britain. The SNP can wax romantic about immigration and pretend they are treated like foreigners by the English. They can afford such loose talk. Their brothers to the south have to navigate through Londonstan and have a very different view of the rainbow coalition. A couple of muzzies saw off the head of a Scottish soldier in Glasgow and I suspect we get a different tune from SNP.

The old divisions in the Anglosphere were mostly about economics. The Left embraced Fabian socialism and the Right embraced free market capitalism. Today, everyone agrees on economics. Global capitalism is the economic foundation of the ruling elite. Where they differ is on biological reality. The cultural globalism espoused by a Jeb Bush assumes nurture is everything and nature is nothing. At the heart of the nationalist appeal is the implicit assumption that nature, not nurture, is what defines us.

The nurture crowd still controls the high ground in the West. They press on with their program, despite the rumblings of discontent. The fact that these issues are part of the public debate is progress of sorts. I suspect American pols are watching what is happening in the UK with great interest. Gains by UKIP and SNP could change a few minds on this side of the Atlantic.

Iran, The Savage and The Borg

Posted on by

The other day I saw this commercial on one of the news channels. It was on a talker show of some sort, I don’t remember which one, but the chattering skulls were taking turns being outraged by it. I was not quite sure why they were outraged and not all that interested. I think Taco Bell is on the unapproved list so they are not allowed to employ mockery. Alternatively, maybe they are not permitted to mock central planning.

Regardless, the thing that got my attention was the use of the Ramones song Blitzkrieg Bop. Eventually, anything and everything that is subversive or banned in western culture is absorbed into the Borg and turned into a tool of the Borg. Pop songs from the 60’s that celebrated the rejection of bourgeois society are used today to sell products made by global mega-corporations. Punk from the 70’s and 80’s is seeing the same thing.

The same is true of people. Conservative Inc gets their panties in a bunch when kids wear Che t-shirts or sport other symbols of communism, but they are mistaken. What it shows is that in the path of The Borg, there is no resistance. Everything will be absorbed and put to use in furtherance of The Borg. We are the Borg. You will be assimilated.

If you are reading this, odds are you are from the Anglosphere and you have some familiarity with the fictional Borg, as well as the real one, but the latter is taken for granted so you don’t think about it much. There’s no reason to think about it. Fish don’t think about the sea and birds don’t think about the air. English speaking humans don’t think much about the media in which we are suspended.

The rest of the world, however, thinks a lot about The Borg. They see it from the perspective of both outsiders and potential insiders – unwilling insiders. If you listen to the Islamic fundamentalist, they will tell you why they are so obsessed with killing the West, particularly America. That reason is they fear that their culture will become like that Ramones song in the commercial. It will be just another tool to move product.

The central planners of The Borg are already working on how to make Iran chic so they can move product. Once Obama gets his deal done with Iran, you can be sure Apple will have a Persian iPhone cover and the all-women’s auxiliary of the Cult of Modern Liberalism will be sporting swank hijabs.

In the novel Brave New World, the World State has come to terms with the fact there are parts of the world not conducive to easy living. These are set aside as reservations for the savages. They are not really left to their own devices as they are maintained as amusement parks for the World State citizens. You go there to watch the savages. It is not entirely different from how western tourists run around looking at ruins in third world countries.

The story of John the Savage in Brave New World is relevant here as it shows the torment of being in but not being of two worlds. In the novel, the Savage was never accepted by his fellow savages. Similarly, he was never accepted as anything other than a curiosity by the citizens of the World State. His “otherness” was incorporated as a novelty, like an animal in a zoo.

Muslims who have spent time in the West or been exposed to the West often have the same reaction. They can grow up in and immerse themselves in the West, but they are never truly Western. Islam is simply alien to Western culture. Unlike blacks, they cannot blame slavery. Instead, many come to blame the Borg and decide to make war on it as self-defense.

On the other hand, those in the Middle East often feel shame over their backwardness and inability to compete with the West. Without the West, the Arabs would be living in tents and riding camels. They would live and die as they did in the ninth century. At the same time, they adopt the material goods of the West and feel their culture being absorbed into the Borg, losing its vitality and utility.

In other words, to tie the two themes together, the Muslim Arabs stand facing two options, assimilate of die. It’s why Islamic fundamentalism has ticked up as exposure to the West has ticked up. The communications revolution along with the end of the Cold War brought The Borg to the Middle East and Islamic fanaticism has been the response. In the novel, John the Savage resolves this by hanging himself.

It’s why I think the Iranians will have no choice but to scuttle the deal, hang themselves, so to speak. Normalizing economic relations means a Starbucks across from the mosque, Western music on the radio, Western shows in the TV. It means The Borg is on every corner and in every home. Iran already struggles with the consequences of encroaching Western culture. Assimilation cannot possibly be an answer they accept.

Roman expansion was based on land. They seized the lands of others, held them by force and extracted what they could to profit themselves and maintain their grip on empire. Eventually, the math stopped working. Long before Alaric, the Western Roman Empire ceased to be an ongoing concern. But, the Romans did manage to export a great deal of their culture to the rest of the world.

America has never been a land based empire. Ours is a culture based empire. Instead of seizing the lands, we seize the culture and assimilate it into our own. Even our friends chafe at the stifling cultural hegemony. It is therefore no surprise that the fringes of human civilization would recoil in horror at our materialistic, homogenizing culture. It’s why, in the end, Iran can never make a deal with us. There’s no negotiating with The Borg.