Bridging Delusions of Progress & War

Escaping the pattern of atrocity

Dec 27, 2024

∙ Paid

Post-modern narratives failed to confront centuries-old conflict
Despite brutality, old empires needed ethnic and religious co-existence
Today's tribal, ID politics tends towards resentment, real or imagined
Fortunes arise from the chaos of war, like opportunist politicians' careers
Tech bro optimists profit from disruption, as much as the warmongers
A licence to kill as the progressive segues into transgressive
On the cusp of a debt crisis, another monetary system approaches its lifespan
Rivals seek control of resources and energy - who fights for wind farms?
In a different world we might be chatting on a train from Beirut to Cape Town

(2,900 words or 14 minutes of your company.)

Maffeis Engineering designed pairs of swinging railway bridges over the Suez canals. Sadly the train to Cape Town is still waiting after 100 years.

Dec 27, 2024

There is a strange disconnect between the narrative Western societies are telling themselves, and the boots on the ground.

We are on the brink of a new era: technology that can tailor individual solutions; replace farms and food; and limit private travel and liberties. In exchange, non-governments or NGOs will replace core functions of the nation state (thus disempowering ethno-nationalism) and redress social and environmental justice.

Yet we witness wars that match those of the 20th century, aided by new technology that can tailor those individual solutions for destruction: artificial intelligence grades the population for elimination; drones deliver explosives.

Old for new

Consider the newspaper headlines about wind and solar: no-one is fighting wars to seize new land for solar parks or coastal windmills. Wars are being fought for oil and gas, and the pipelines that carry them, as in Syria, or to exclude rival gas suppliers from the market, like Russia.

See Syria's Surprise Fall Not So Strange - Assad's exit puts oil & gas routes back on the map (Dec 10, 2024)

In spite of King Charles' announcement in June 2020 of the Great Reset — and the end of a society defined by mass production and consumption — warships still patrol the world's trade routes as Yemen exchanges missiles with Britain and the U.S over the Red Sea.

Railways and logistics are as important today as when Britain obstructed Germany's plans, begun in 1903, for the Berlin-Baghdad railway. Today commercial forces compete to control trade "corridors" with the likes of China's Belt and Road Initiative which is partly obstructed by the war in Ukraine.

For all the excitement of robots and artificial intelligence, and the promised Fourth Industrial Revolution, the borders of Western countries are laid open to a new wave of demographics — not only for youth and fertility, but for lower expectations of pay and living standards.

The demographics of migration also determines the degree of dependence upon government. This is a key to the Great Reset, which sees the state bearing much of the cost of the workforce (think universal basic income) and acting as provider of labour (think gangmaster) to corporations.

Privatise profits, socialise costs

This is proposed in Eric Weinstein's work for the International Labour Organisation's Migrant Division and United Nations document, "Replacement Migration" (2000).

See Great Reset Exposed As Replacement - Globalists have nowhere to hide (Oct 22, 2024)

Driving the above, is the looming monetary crisis. We are on the cusp of a debt-driven collapse as another currency system approaches its lifespan (For more on replacement migration and the debt collapse see below).

Can you see the dark humour?

At this very moment drones are, for reasons not explained, hovering menacingly above Western cities.

The same technology that is sold to you as a convenience is killing people in Gaza, Ukraine and Russia, and until recently in Afghanistan. The absence of delivery is weaponising famine in Sudan.

Technology has no morality, you may say. A car can be used to terrorise and kill; to the individual it is a double-edged sword.

It comes into service when killing is justified for the greater good, or because voices in my head, or my reading of ancient scriptures, tell me to do so.

Progressive transgression

In political terms, licence to kill is provided when the progressive segues into the transgressive. I doubt activists can spot the dangerous implications of their own language.

Apply this to any modern technology: the "safe and effective;" Green energy policy and deindustrialisation; industrial food and the closing of farms; quarantines and 15-minute cities.

See Drone Psyop Continues For Your Own Good - 'Take me to your leader' (Dec 16, 2024)

Perhaps the propaganda of progress must precede transgression, as we witnessed in the totalitarian social experiments of the 20th century.

Activists have largely replaced journalists in the legacy media, and promote agendas as if they are a vanguard of change agents.

Many youth perceive a righteous trade off but they fail to notice that some old families and their foundations have worked over generations to bring them to this point.

One that is comfortable with selective war: arming this country, waging proxy war on that, while enthusiastically remilitarizing our own.

Ruben Andersson and David Keen write that governments and bureaucracies get addicted to wars from which the military-industrial complex profits, when the costs are laid on weaker parties.

“The sense of righteousness that has so often infused right-wing war fever has been increasingly evident on the left.”

Narratives like Russiagate, which proposed that president Donald Trump conspired with his Russian counterpart Vladimir Putin to undermine democracy, may have been a hoax but lives on in progressive minds.

“Right-wing microeconomics has tended to drum up existential threats against the nation, such as migration, terrorism and drugs. A different kind of existential angst — focused on rising authoritarianism, global emergencies and vulnerable groups — has typically animated liberal righteousness.” [1]

At the same time, shutting down debate obscures the costs of war. Britain's prime minister Keir Starmer said in in 2022 (while leader of the opposition) that he would expel from the Labour Party anyone who blamed NATO for provoking a war with Russia.

This leaves populist politicians like Trump (with a selective view on war), popular fronts like Alternative for Deutschland, Sahra Wagenknecht Alliance, and the UK's Workers Party and Reform questioning escalation, while self-described "centrists" beat the drum.

The answer might lie in Arnold Toynbee's pessimism that post-modernity would be characterised by anxiety and despair. No "end of history" for him (he died in 1975). Those who wrote in the 1990s, just after the fall of the Berlin Wall forgave Toynbee "for thinking that the post-modern age, like those which had preceded it, would be dominated by war." [2]

Toynbee's pessimism was a reaction to contemporaries like Norman Angell who had written before WWI that industrial integration had made militarism obsolete; that there was no need to control land in order to profit from it:

“If credit and commercial contract are tampered with in an attempt at confiscation, the credit-dependent wealth is undermined, and its collapse involves that of the conqueror.”

That is precisely what the European Union and U.S. did in 2022, by seizing Russia's $300 billion in foreign exchange reserves, undermining trust in the Western banking system.

Angell's analysis written in 1913 was prescient even though his conclusion was wrong.

Perhaps he misidentified the beneficiaries of war, or more pertinent, that war creates its own beneficiaries whose fortunes arise from the chaos, just like the careers of opportunist politicians.

Buying a moral compass is not the answer, nor the attempt to stand on the right side of history (watered down pseudo-Marxism, as a friend says) — silly phrases, both.

"I don't believe in the idea of being on the right side of history. The histories of the future are none of our concern. Our concern is the present. And our country is, in at least this one important sense, on the right side of it."
— Mark O'Connell in The Irish Times. "The mystery is why so many countries are silent on Gaza."

Nature's vacuum

Governments don't care about moral anything and they write the history that covers their bloody deeds.

But let us warm to the theme of this article: if this is the dawning of a new era, why are we knee deep in the atrocities of the past?

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