Crisis Update: Symbolism And Civilization's Collapse
Writhing and gurning in the Colosseum as war stalks the nations
World was on the verge of a meeting of minds as the Cold War ended
People saw there were no enemies, Reds or any colour, but criminal politicians
Worse, leaders had lied and concocted a conflict to suppress their own citizens
Today they have failed to create a global one-ism; so they fall back on war
Globalists are replacing the ties of ethnicity and culture with a vacuum
Loss of 'traditional solidarities' opens society to a crisis of morality
Edgar Morin, French philosopher says it is too late to avoid catastrophe
Veteran of WWII Resistance writes that the time has come to do it again
Resist every lie asserted as truth, and build autonomous networks
Yet many still party as Rome burns and conflict stalks the nations
Writhing and gurning with the vices of the eyeless
Bombarded with adverts for war; deaf to the cries and the rumours
If the all the countries are 'in this together,' who is coordinating it?
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Footnotes do not 'prove' a point but show that it has some validity
See also Illusion And Pharmakeia - Or how bankers and robber barons plan to skin you alive (Jan 14, 2022)
(3,200 words or a quarter hour of your company).
Feb 15, 2024
In 410, Rome fell for the first time in 800 years. The Annals of Rome are said to record that officials were warned that the Goths were closing in: 50 miles away, 10 miles away... 5 miles away and the Romans continued to party and lay horse racing bets in the Hippodrome.
Suborned officials, or some other unknown party, quietly opened the gates of Rome to admit the Visigoths.
“There was a young man who had come in and said to the vice president, ‘The plane is 50 miles out. The plane is 30 miles out.’ And when it got down to, ‘The plane is 10 miles out,’ the young man also said to the vice president, ‘Do the orders still stand?’ And the vice president turned and whipped his neck around and said, ‘Of course the orders still stand. Have you heard anything to the contrary?’” [1]
Sitting in the Pentagon on Sep 11, 2001, did defense secretary Donald Rumsfeld revive the symbolism of the sack of Rome, even if unwittingly?
Once again suborned officials at the very least kept secret their advance knowledge of the 911 attacks. [2]
This week the populace partied at the Super Bowl as other wars threatened to escalate out of hand; partied like it was 1999, or 409, having have been indulged for so long that most could not believe they might be about to lose everything.
How did we get here?
Edgar Morin, aged 102, a French sociologist and philosopher, last month wrote in Le Monde that the qualities of our civilization have deteriorated with the spread of selfishness, and “the disappearance of traditional solidarities.”
Nature abhors a vacuum and into it has stepped technology, in particular computational mathematics and genetics.
Democracy is dying, he says, because “computerized control of populations and individuals, tend to form societies of submission that could be called neo-totalitarian.”
Science has hitched a ride from the astonishing increase in computing power and memory (even if it no longer doubles as fast as Moore’s law) and computer modelling now drives science and corresponding government policy. To model space, genes or viruses can be incredibly profitable even if we never get to the Moon or cure the common cold.
Technology makes possible the cybernetic control of humanity, but at root “the polycrisis we are experiencing across the planet is an anthropological crisis: it is the crisis of humanity failing to become Humanity.” [3]
Morin subscribes to the idea of polycrisis — ecological, economic, political, social, civilizational — though this is a manufactured concept: a phrase Klaus Schwab emits with flecks of spittle as he gesticulates wildly, or the cascading crises of which president Joe Biden spoke at his inauguration.
It deflects attention from the perpetrators; though Morin’s analysis still stands.
The qualities of our civilization have deteriorated, and traditional solidarities have disappeared. The reason is not purely organic or grass roots, although it is true that monetary systems have had a lifespan throughout history, empires rise and fall, and humans have expropriated and slaughtered each other for all of recorded time.
Cybernetics and the financialisation of personal data is driving technology which, like any, can be used for good or bad; it has no logic except, perhaps efficiency.
Profit drives ecological plunder, hidden behind the cover story of Climate Change. The plutocrats’ solution is a carbon scam — or further plunder.
If globalism is creating a cultural and moral vacuum, this diminution of civilization is not accidental.
Unlike the leaders of Rome, today’s oligarchs have consulted the Oracle, fear that they know their fate, and are trying to eliminate the rest of us, or take us down with them.
Great sucking sound
Globalism is whittling away the ties of ethnicity and culture, but has replaced them with a vacuum. In this void a process of entropy increases randomness and disorder.
This the opposite of what social engineers had hoped: that homogenisation would produce consistent behaviour across institutions, placing education in particular, into a tight lock with the state. They are still trying.
Globalists (who pursue globalism as “one world government” in contrast to the organic process of globalisation) have a schizophrenic relationship with nation states. They need national authorities to corral the people — to vaccinate them, for example, or lock them down (a prison term).
Yet the power of the owner/investors has long eclipsed states. The “college of corporations... one vast and ecumenical holding company” (Ned Beatty as Arthur Jensen, Network, 1976) has “trillions at its disposal far beyond global GDP, and with the greatest respect, beyond even the governments of the world’s leaders” (King Charles, 2021). [4]
Academics may argue over the homogenizing of global culture, or half-way houses like heterogenization, and the extent to which there are uniform themes (literally, in the case of denim jeans). Politicians may think by jetting from the World Economic Forum to the next Climate Change conference that they have founded a globalist culture but they are neither cultured nor elite.
Wind of Change
Actually there was a moment, 35 years ago, when a global meeting of the minds of the populace did seem imminent.
It began in solidarity with the protestors in Tiananmen Square in April 1989, and horror at their brutal suppression in June; and the fall five months later of the Berlin Wall.
This change was visceral — not something happening on the television screen, mediated by BBC News, with vague verbiage about “a sense of” something impending while editors waited for the authorized text from the Foreign Office.
This was the Cold War vapourising; the enemy we had been told to fear had vanished.
We watched, live in February 1990, as Nelson Mandela walked out of the gates of his prison.
Russians embraced the Wind of Change, a song written by a German band, Scorpions, after a concert in Moscow convinced them the Cold War was coming to an end. (Songwriter and front man Klaus Meine has since rebutted claims that the CIA wrote the lyrics.)
The enemy, it turned out, was not the people, Reds, Blacks or any colour: it was the leaders who had failed us.
You may subscribe to the Anatoliy Golitsyn theory that the communists faked their demise but the point stands: citizens on both sides of the iron curtain saw that the enemy was different to what they’d been told.
I was working at the BBC for Robin Lustig when we would contact by telephone a dissident priest in a barn somewhere in Romania to report first hand the planning of revolution, and suddenly there was an uprising in Timișoara and within weeks, the leader Nikolae Ceaușescu had been executed.
This presented a problem for the leaders of the West because it showed that even the most repressive dictators, with their secret police, the Securitate or Stasi, could be overthrown. Western citizens might also demand their republics back.
This was a huge problem. If the people got to keep their republic they would discover the rulers had looted the treasury. The Western political model, the social market, the welfare state, cradle to grave, was in crisis, unsustainable and soon to be insolvent.
Perhaps insolvent through negligence; maybe imploded deliberately as Golitsyn said of the USSR.
The journalist and author John Lanchester suggests the Western post-war economic miracle of lifetime employment, pensions and social security had been a temporary strategy to counterpose two camps in the Cold War. See, Whoops!: Why Everyone Owes Everyone And No One Can Pay (2010).
With no longer a “workers’ paradise” with which to compete, 1991 heralded the end of the social compact between Western governments and citizens.
Corporate pensions were already being phased out in the 1980s in favour of inadequate personal schemes. The golden age by that stage had lasted only 40 years.
The social market wouldn’t end immediately — the leaders feared their blood on the streets. Society would be militarized under cover of the War on Terror: the PATRIOT Act of 2001 would require every citizen prove their innocence, the people would be surveilled, government budgets would be devoted to the security state.
The Western oligarchs — the money at the top where the power resides — saw that the monetary and social system dating back through Bretton Woods to the founding of the privately-owned Federal Reserve central bank in 1913, was tottering.
There is no reason to accept the argument that polycrisis is inevitable; there are stronger arguments that it is being orchestrated and choreographed.
Of the cascading crises - ecological, economic, political, social, civilizational - we can make several observations:
Ecological plunder and its solution, the climate crisis, is profit driven;
Economic systems had been tried and failed: national socialism and communism;
Computerised control of populations enable a new economic model of austerity for the masses;
Political systems, like legislatures, are being subverted by corporate owners;
Representative government is undermined to accelerate social engineering;
Civilizational collapse is the replacement of moral order by arbitrary rules.
One world or multipolar?
An argument we hear often is that Russia and China are part of the globalist scheme for a one world government.
The supposed proof, that they use the same technologies — central bank digital currencies, biometric identity and social credit — is to misread technology.
In reality, governments take advantage of technological innovation because the same technology is available to all; it has no inherent logic or loyalty.
Silicon valley billionaires advance the same misconception — but in their case they would, wouldn’t they, since they profit from doing so — that technology reshapes the globe into a one-world system of government.
Former CIA officer and analyst Clare Lopez advances the Golitsyn view that the USSR faked its demise and that Russia is at the heart of a communist plan to control the world. [5]
The problem with this view is that if Russia did not exist, the West would still be in the same hot mess.
It is the West that has failed to live up to what it promised Western citizens: the social compact, the welfare state, cradle to grave, and such like. Even privately earned pensions are now in crisis. In the U.S. Social Security and Medicare are on course to go bankrupt within a decade.
The reality the Western audience must acknowledge is the log in its own eye.
Russia is still reinventing itself after more than 70 years of Bolshevism, which was a combination of its own problems (land mass, logistics, industrialisation on such a scale, a northern latitude and a short growing season) plus imported problems dispatched by Western bankers (the Bolsheviks).
President Vladimir Putin is no savant, and, yes, Tucker Carlson missed the opportunity to ask certain perceptive questions, like spelling out what Russian sovereignty means.
See Eurasia note #85: The Vladimir Putin-Tucker Carlson Interview - Probing, insightful but key questions missed (Feb 9, 2024)
War on the people
As the USSR collapsed in the late 1980s-early 1990s, Western populations learned they'd been sold a lie about the Red menace. No Western intelligence agency or leading Kremlinologist forecast the USSR’s collapse. The CIA vastly overestimated the Soviet Union’s economic advancement, power and stability.
The populace discovered their governments had misled them in other, even more brutal ways.
There was the dawning of realisation, in Europe at least, that the terrorist bombings that plagued the continent, from Red Army Faction of Baader–Meinhof, the Red Brigades, to the IRA, might not be all they seemed.
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