The following articles were published by Orlov about 6 months ago. Read them, get hooked, then go to his site and subscribe to his work for on-going access to his work. Some of his work is freely available here. For full access: Become a patron.
Groundhog Day in Syria. Dmitry Orlov, ClubOrlov. Apr. 11, 2017.
When listening to people you shouldn’t necessarily trust (because, for instance, they are known to be liars) it is very important to try to assess whether or not they are lying. And so it is with the representatives of the US government and their counterparts in the EU: they have lied about a great many things in the past; are they lying about Syria now? They lied about the Gulf of Tonkin and used these lies to start the Vietnam war. They lied about Iraqi weapons of mass destruction, and used that to justify the invasion of Iraq. They lied about humanitarian disasters in Kosovo and in Libya, and used these to dismember Serbia and to destroy Libya. And so a good, conservative starting point is to assume that the Americans are lying, then search for evidence that would indicate that this time they might be telling the truth. Let’s take a close look.
At a meta level, lying is often a question of demeanor. Those who are telling the truth tend to weigh the evidence, attempting to reconcile contradictory facts, because there always are a few such facts. The truth about any incident is almost always a bit messy, especially in the early days, before all the facts are in. On the other hand, those who are lying generally make a big effort to keep their stories straight.
Then there is the question of timing: if the story becomes “known” almost immediately after an event, and never changes no matter how much contradictory evidence comes to light, there is a very good chance that it is a lie. If, on the other hand, it emerges gradually, in the course of a painstaking investigation and careful sifting and weighing of the evidence, there is a good chance that it’s the truth. It is particularly awkward if the story leaks out prior to the event itself, or so soon after that the various mouthpieces, who start telling the exact same story using the exact same words and phrases, had no time to consult each other. In this latest supposed chemical weapons attack in Syria, EU’s foreign policy figurehead Federica Mogherini went public with her condemnation of it rather soon after it transpired—perhaps too soon to give her time to verify the facts. Did she simply get a memo from the US State Department containing her talking points? How many decades will we have to wait before this information is declassified? Let’s hope that a nice Russian hacker will oblige and liberate it beforehand, and that Wikileaks will publish it.
It is also a bit awkward if the supposedly spontaneous response to an event required preparations that had to have started prior to the event itself. For instance, preparations for the US invasion of Afghanistan started before 9/11. Another example: after the Malaysian flight MH17 was shot down over Eastern Ukraine, a group of hackers called CyberBerkut published information that showed several henchmen of the Ukrainian oligarch Igor Kolomoisky conspiring to fix media coverage of the event before it transpired. In this latest incident, several military experts have chimed in to say that the operation involving firing Tomahawk missiles at a Syrian airbase had to have been planned beforehand; there was simply no way to make it happen on a moment’s notice. There was another strange coincidence: ISIS went on attack immediately after the incident in Idlib, and massed attacks are never impromptu. Who gave ISIS advance warning?
Lastly, it is rather awkward when a new lie bears an uncanny resemblance to an old lie. This supposed chemical weapons event did have a certain Groundhog Day quality to it: it was almost an exact replica of the supposed chemical weapons attack that had led Syria to voluntarily give up its chemical weapons stockpile. Exactly how many times is it possible to make a country give up its chemical weapons and certify it as free of them? Twice? Three times? At what point does the entire process turn into a farce?
But back to the story: the current story being told and retold about Syria is that the Syrian air force used chemical weapons against women and children in the Idlib province. It was first told immediately after the event, based on no investigation whatsoever. No evidence was collected, no lab tests, nothing. There are, however, certain facts that do not fit this story. First, Syria had surrendered all of its chemical weapons to international inspectors, and the US paid to have them destroyed. The people in charge of that operation were even awarded a Nobel peace prize for their efforts; will this prize now be recalled, seeing as they appear to have failed? Second, it is known that the so-called “Syrian rebels” (or “moderate terrorists,” if you like) do have chemical weapons and the ability to make them. Although Western media was careful not to report on this, they have used chemical weapons in both Syria and Iraq. It is interesting to ask where they got them; according to Seymour Hersh, they got them from Libya, along with other weapons, with Hillary Clinton’s help.
Third, there is no evidence that chemical weapons were indeed used. What has been shown so far, as far as “evidence” goes, was White Helmets (an organization known for staging fake atrocities) rushing to the scene and fussing over some dead children who, we are expected to believe, died from Sarin gas poisoning. The actors wearing the white helmets were not wearing proper masks or gloves while handling supposed chemical attack victims. We are therefore within our rights to inquire as to these actors’ time of death, and when and where burial services will take place, in case we wish to pay our respects, because by now they would all be dead of Sarin poisoning.
Finally, if we look carefully at the photographs of the children who were the supposed victims of a Sarin gas attack, in several of them we can observe evidence of blunt trauma to head or neck. We are therefore within our rights to inquire as to the time and manner in which that trauma occurred. Did the White Helmets knock them off with blows from a rifle butt, then posed them as chemical attack victims for a photo op? Sarin gas does not cause contusions.
Since there is no actual evidence that a chemical attack took place, or that the Syrian government is complicit in it if it did take place, we need to fall back on the standard technique used to assess circumstantial evidence of a crime: establishing means, motive and opportunity. We must certainly grant that opportunity did exist: Syrian jets did bomb the area at the time, specifically targeting a munitions dump, which could have contained chemical weapons, and the Syrian government did not deny any of this. But we can’t say that the Syrians had the means without contradicting a great many people who stated unequivocally and on the record that Syria no longer possesses any chemical weapons.
Most convincing of all is the absolute, complete lack of motive. To the contrary, the Syrians were very much motivated to not do anything to disrupt the process of settling their civil war through diplomacy just as it was showing signs of starting to work. The Syrian government had largely won the war and had no reason to resort to such desperate measures. On the other hand, the “moderate terrorists,” who are at this point very close to being wiped out, had every reason to try such a desperate stunt, hoping that it would somehow turn the tide in their favor, or at least delay the inevitable.
Based on all of the above, I believe that we are justified in accepting as a working hypothesis the following: the supposed Syrian chemical weapons attack in Idlib is a false flag, quite possibly a fake false flag. Perhaps chemical agents were released into the air; perhaps not. Only lab test results on soil samples can tell us that. Perhaps children died of poisoning, or perhaps they died from being bludgeoned so that they could be posed as victims of a chemical attack; only an autopsy can tell.
Now, whereas the truth can be helpful or damaging, and can be put to various purposes, it is rarely purposeful in and of itself, a lie is often concocted to achieve a specific result. As I mentioned, this particular lie was clearly not designed to help the Syrian government. On the other hand, it could be said to have helped the “moderate terrorists,” who are currently in dire straits. But they are bit players in this drama. It seems strange to assume that a few foreign mercenaries can dictate the direction of US foreign policy or military strategy; it takes a bigger tail than that to wag such a big dog.
But is this a matter of US foreign policy or military strategy, we need to ask, or is it something else entirely? So far, the military action was as follows. The US fired 59 Tomahawk cruise missiles from two ships in the Mediterranean off Syria’s coast. These cruise missiles cost $1.8 million apiece, for a total price tag just over $100 million. But that’s just the cost of the ordnance; the operation as a whole, including the planning, probably cost closer to $300 million, and if you include the cost of the planning and all of the other associated activities, it is likely to have exceeded half a billion.
Only 23 of the 59 Tomahawks reached the target area, meaning that $60 million of ordnance was in effect simply tossed overboard. The fact that over 60% of these very expensive missiles are basically duds is not exactly celebratory for the mighty US military. We can be quite sure that none of them were shot down by either Syrian or Russian air defense systems. The Syrians currently lack the capability to shoot down these cruise missiles. The Russians do have the capability, but the air defense systems they currently have in place in Syria cover just the area around their airbase in Khmeimim and their naval base at Tartus. These two locations are hundreds of kilometers away from the target area and the curvature of the earth would have prevented them from tracking or targeting missiles flying at an altitude of 50 meters. Thus, it is safe to assume that more than half of the Tomahawks simply fell out of the sky.
The intent of the attack was to thwart the Syrian government in using their air force to bomb civilians using chemical weapons which, according to US officials, don’t exist. To this end, the target was a Syrian military airfield. Interestingly, the attack targeted the wrong end of a rather long airfield, which wasn’t being used. It appears that most of the missiles exploded quite harmlessly. A few of them hit things that could be considered targets: a mess hall, a radar installation, and six elderly Mig-23 jets. These jets are over 30 years old and were quite unlikely to have been in active use. Their value is barely $100,000 each, for a grand total of $600,000. The Syrian airbase was back in business less than 24 hours later, resuming flying sorties against ISIS.
Thus, in military terms, the US squandered half a billion to inflict perhaps a million dollars’ worth of damage on the Syrians. That is 0.2% efficiency—more of a self-inflicted defeat than a victory, and definitely not something to brag about. In tesponse the Russians have announced that the deconfliction protocol they agreed with the US, which allowed US planes to fly safely over Syrian territory, is no longer in effect. Now the Americans will either have to be cleared through Damascus ATC, or they are targets to be shot down. The Russians also said that they will beef up Syrian air defenses. They do have the technical ability to completely seal off Syrian airspace, fulfilling Hillary Clinton’s promise to impose a no-fly zone over Syria, except now it will be the Americans that won’t be flying there. It also bears noting that Russian military doctrine avoids exclusive reliance on air defense systems. In the normal course of events, if a US vessel started firing Tomahawks at a Russian target, that vessel would be taken out of commission some time between firing the first and the second Tomahawk by a Russian supercavitating torpedo. Thus, it is generally inadvisable to put Russian air defenses to the test.
Damaging as that is, the political damage is perhaps even more significant. There was resounding international condemnation of the US attack, which the self-important Americans are likely to regard as just noise, but there was also ridicule: Bolivia’s UN ambassador, speaking at the UN Security Council, held up a picture of Colin Powell holding up a vial of white powder as a poignant reminder that the Americans have a rich history of setting their pants on fire. Having demonstrated that they can no longer bully countries into submission, the Americans have no cards left to play either militarily or diplomatically. Since the attack on Syria took place without the appropriate UN Security Council resolution, the US is now a rogue state—and an impotent one at that. Who in the world would want to negotiate with such an unreliable, untrustworthy partner?
And so we have to conclude that this lie was not fashioned to help the US internationally. Was it useful to the US domestically, then? Politically, the attack on Syria took place without the authorization from Congress required by the US constitution, but that’s not particularly interesting, since the US constitution is by now about as effective as an old copy of Pravda in an abandoned Siberian outhouse. Militarily, demonstrating that 60% of Tomahawk missiles are duds is not exactly on strategy for the military-industrial complex. Trying to shut down an airbase by targeting the wrong end of a runway and blowing up some old junk is not exactly on strategy for the US “intelligence community” either.
In fact, it appears that there is exactly one person this lie was designed to benefit, and that person is Donald Trump. There are five distinct ways in which he has benefited from this entire fiasco—the dead children, the relentless lying in public, the Tomahawk duds and the international fallout.
First, he has shaken off the allegation that he has colluded with the Russians by demonstrating his extreme belligerence against a Russian ally. The entire Russian “election meddling” charge is preposterous but is damaging to him nevertheless. The US has a pay-to-play political system where the voters are used as pawns in a delicately gerrymandered scheme. It uses a fine-tuned divide-and-conquer algorithm to determine which set of Washington/Wall Street insiders gets into office. But in case of Trump’s election victory this system misfired badly. It appears that the voters have finally decided that they aren’t going to vote for any more Washington/Wall Street insiders no matter what. The establishment’s face-saving solution was to blame Russia.
Now, this may seem strange at first. It is not as if foreign powers aren’t allowed to meddle in US politics. Israel practically owns most of Congress through AIPAC—but don’t say that too loudly or you’ll be called an Antisemite. The Saudis financed a huge chunk of Hillary Clinton’s election campaign. Even some shady Ukrainian oligarchs got to throw a few million dollars at the Clintons. Lots of other foreign powers apply leverage to the US political establishment in a wide variety of ways. The Russians are actually the exception. Where are the Russian lobbyists? Where are the bags of Russian cash being thrown at American politicians? There are just the allegations of “hacking” and “trolling,” all entirely unsubstantiated. The reason “blame Russia” actually works is, strangely enough, that Russia is blameless—and is therefore safe to blame without running the danger of uncovering some nest of corruption within the US political establishment. Since this tactic works on the level of words and gestures, Trump’s grand gesture of blowing up a handful of elderly Migs in Syria is enough to “prove” that he is not “Putin’s poodle.”
Second, Trump has succeeded in dramatically lowering the expectations as far as any negotiations with Russia are concerned. During his election campaign he promised that he would normalize relations with Russia. But it is difficult to deliver on this promise because the Russians have developed a distinctly anti-American stance, given such recent developments as the US-led government overthrow in Kiev, NATO warmongering in Eastern Europe, US and EU sanctions against Russia, the constant demonization of Russia and of Putin personally in Western media and numerous other slights and insults, such as the banning of Russian Special Olympics contestants from international competition. Improving relations with Russia would require the US to take a long list of actions to which the US establishment would not consent, and even then Americans need to understand that Russia is just not that into them any more. With US Secretary of State Rex Tillerson heading over to Moscow, it would have been awkward for him to come back empty-handed. But now that the US has bombed a Syrian airbase and has publicly accused Russia of “colluding” with the “Assad regime,” Tillerson is just going to have some nice dinner at a Moscow restaurant with Maria Zakharova, the bright and personable Foreign Ministry spokeswoman, perhaps exchange some pleasantries with Sergei Lavrov, and hop right back on the plane. Problem solved!
Third, the fiasco with the Tomahawks took place while Trump was meeting with Chinese president Xi Jinping and completely overshadowed Xi’s visit, thus saving Trump from the embarrassing lack of anything tangible that Xi’s visit achieved. Having trumpeted loudly about being a great dealmaker, it would have been rather awkward for him to admit that all he can do is waste important people’s time by making smalltalk at a golf course. Can someone please do something about North Korea? Not unless you don't mind turning Seoul into a cratered wasteland! Also, there is a good chance that Xi told Trump to his face that the US is no longer the most powerful and influential country in the world—China is—and nothing like that could be allowed to leak into the public consciousness in the US.
Fourth, Trump has managed to herd the warmongers within the US establishment, who have been pushing for a full-scale war in Syria for some time now, into a cul de sac of their own creation. Now their war planning has to account for the fact that they can’t operate in Syria without triggering a wider international conflict. Simple questions, such as “How much damage will there be?”, “How much will this cost?” and “How long will it take?” will be enough to keep them bogged down in the planning stage. As they struggle in vain to find plausible answers to these questions, Trump can preen and posture, declaring loudly that “something must be done,” then adding sotto voice that the costs have to be reasonable, the potential damage contained, and it better be over by the next election.
Fifth, this event seems to have given this rather unlikely—and unlucky—White House occupant a new lease on political life. Trump’s presidency, only a few months old, is circling the drain. Repeal of Obamacare has failed, his tax reform plan appears to be dead on arrival, there is deafening silence on the subject of raising the debt limit, which is what is required to avoid a government shutdown this summer, and his infrastructure development plans are nowhere near being realized. Even his notorious wall along the Mexican border remains purely conceptual. His approval rating, already abysmal, was falling further and further as he battled forlornly against a rabidly hostile Washington establishment. But now, thanks to this Syrian incident, his standing with the atrocious miscreants who populate this establishment seems to have improved somewhat while his former supporters among the general population recoil in disgust. Of course, no one knows how long this bounce will last, or whether his supporters will ever forgive him.
In all, this event, though minor, casts an unflattering light on the current state of the erstwhile American global hegemon: militarily impotent, diplomatically an object of derision and ridicule, politically dysfunctional and internally conflicted, economically and financially precarious and led by a ridiculous buffoon who can’t stop himself from blowing up everything and everyone around him, including himself. Mind you, the US is still quite dangerous, but at this point it is dangerous mainly to itself.
The Mystery of American Violence. Dmitry Orlov, ClubOrlov. Apr. 18, 2017.
In a recent article, Paul Craig Roberts examined the violence unleashed on the world by a succession of recent US presidential administrations. Most of these acts were either partly or entirely illegal under international law, and all of them without exception were initiated with bogus justifications. Roberts concludes that “Washington is a collection of morons, people stupid below the meaning of ‘stupid’.” Yet he himself sounds dumbfounded: “What is the reason for all the death and destruction and the flooding of the West with refugees from the West’s naked violence? We don’t know.” The only rationale he can find is that “…violence is what America is. There is nothing else there. Violence is the heart of America.”
Undeniably, there is a lot of truth to that. But what is missing in his analysis is explanatory depth and predictive ability: what are the underlying mechanisms that make this violence inevitable, and what has recently exacerbated this tendency toward gratuitous violence, leading Trump to risk a possibly suicidal confrontation with heavily armed and fortified, and quite possibly nuclear-armed North Korea? The charge of stupidity certainly stings, but while even very smart people often have trouble following the thinking of other very smart people, a stupid person is more or less an open book. If the hive mind of Washington is indeed perfectly stupid, any smart and experienced person, such as Roberts, should be able to predict its every stubbed toe, rake to the forehead and pratfall. And yet, says he, “We don’t know.”
Clearly, there is something else going on—something lurking beneath the deceptively idiotic surface of New York Times/Washington Post/CNN “fake news” coverage, beyond exasperated presidential tweets and unrelated to asinine White House press conferences. There must be some hidden force driving America’s lurch toward self-defeating violence and, no, it’s not Putin’s “hackers” or “trolls.” We could waste a great deal of time looking in vain for a secretive yet rationally self-interested actor, be it “the swamp,” the “deep state,” Wall Street, the military-industrial complex or a cabal of globalist bankers. For all of the above, the upside from a surge in violence and instability is tiny (remember, the US government is $20 trillion in the hole, pensions are woefully underfunded, infrastructure is falling apart, Obamacare is rigged to blow, economic growth is dead, yadda-yadda). On the other hand, the downside—of a humiliating military defeat—is huge, and possibly fatal to everyone who relies on and profits from the status quo. Let’s keep in mind that the US military is the most expensive in the world, but also one of the most impotent. It’s been 15 years and it still hasn’t been able to pacify Afghanistan. The only “facts on the ground” it is reliably able to create are humanitarian disasters. And now this teetering pile of obsolete military junk commanded by pampered incompetents is steaming toward North Korea… Let’s even bother looking for a rational explanation.
I have developed a theory that nicely accounts for these facts. Since in the current fraught political atmosphere some might regard my appraisal of the situation as incendiary or seditious, it will remain hidden behind a paywall. Rest assured that I am not attempting to exercise my right to public free speech, should any still exist. You have to pay for it, it is private, and it is being offered in confidence. Your payment of at least $1 is a contract for the conveyance of private information intended for your eyes only.
My explanation relies on the introduction of a certain nonphysical entity which is both necessary and sufficient: swing your Occam’s razor all you like, and you won’t be able to cut it out. For the sake of discussion, let us assume that human affairs are largely controlled by entities called egregores. These are autonomous psychic entities made up of the combined, harmonized thoughts of a group of people. Egregoric entities can sometimes be conceived of as gods or demons or cults of personality. They can be immensely powerful entities, even though they are imaginary, because they concentrate the power expressed through thoughts, speech acts and behaviors of a possibly very large group. Egregores are ubiquitous in centers of political power: “For all the gods of the nations are demons…” (Psalms 96:5).
Egregores have a will, or agency, that can be very different from the groups they control. In absence of egregores, people tend to generally take it easy—“chill out,” as it were—but in the service of egregores they are forced to struggle and may achieve great things such as trips to the moon and the construction of pyramids. Egregores exercise control over groups through the mechanism of preference falsification: people think certain thoughts to themselves but more often than not they decline to express these thoughts in public for fear of negatively affecting their inclusive fitness within the group. If, by speaking the truth about their preferences, they run the risk of being fired, denied access to resources, shunned, sanctioned, imprisoned or assassinated, they will think twice about doing so, and adhere to the publicly repeated falsehoods. If they benefit from the status quo, they also fear change, and refuse to object even when the demands of the egregore become disagreeable to them. When people falsify their preferences, they tend to look for ways to justify this falsification in order to avoid cognitive dissonance, and then the falsified preference displaces their true preference. Ambition drives social climbers to falsify their preferences, who see such dishonesty as a means to an end. Meek people falsify their preferences by repeating what others say and doing as they are told.
Egregores can be quite powerful, but their reliance on the mechanism of preference falsification, which is in essence voluntary, also makes them quite fragile. A single truth-teller can inadvertently subvert the entire preference falsification scheme, prompting an entire group of people to publicly thump their heads and say “What were we thinking?” Some people—children especially—are simply incapable of sensing the presence of an egregore and falsifying their preferences to suit its demands. Their outbursts of truthfulness are often dismissed with “But they are just children!”—although sometimes—when the egregore happens to be particularly vulnerable—they hit a nerve and cause it to suddenly wink out of existence. The paradigmatic example of this is served up in Hans Christian Andersen’s short story The Emperor’s New Clothes. Here is the entire plot, copy-pasted from Wikipedia:
“A vain Emperor who cares about nothing except wearing and displaying clothes hires two weavers who promise him the finest, best suit of clothes from a fabric invisible to anyone who is either unfit for his position or “hopelessly stupid.” The Emperor’s ministers cannot see the clothes themselves, but pretend that they can for fear of appearing unfit for their positions, and the Emperor does the same. Finally, the weavers report that the suit is finished, they mime dressing him, and the Emperor marches in procession before his subjects. The townsfolk play along with the pretense, not wanting to appear unfit for their positions or stupid. Then, a child in the crowd, too young to understand the desirability of keeping up the pretense, blurts out that the Emperor is wearing nothing at all, and the cry is taken up by others. The Emperor suspects the assertion is true but continues the procession.”
Andersen stops short of describing the inevitable outcome of the situation. Clothes do make a man, an emperor especially, and a naked emperor is no longer an emperor. The egregoric halo above the naked emperor’s head promptly vanishes, and the emperor becomes simply a naked man promenading self-importantly down the street. When an egregore that is attached to such an important figure vanishes, what often transpires is a revolution. Preference falsification suddenly reverses: those who are still pro-emperor quickly revise their thinking and become anti-emperor. And when the reaction or the counterrevolution comes, it flips again. After a few rounds of this the populace becomes completely cynical and begins to refuse to engage in preference falsification. But this is hardly the end of egregores, because the people then find that they are set upon by smaller, nastier egregores—ones attached to thugs, warlords and criminal gangs—who assert their control through a fallback technique: acts of barbaric, unspeakable violence. In an effort to avoid certain death, people again begin to falsify their preferences, and the cycle repeats.
Egregoric entities don’t necessarily have to attach themselves to very important persons such as emperors or very violent ones such as warlords. A good example of a more humble egregore is exhibited in the frequently reenacted plot of “a captain’s daughter.” A certain boat captain, concerned that his homely daughter might end up as an old maid, tries to socialize her by bringing her aboard for an ocean passage. Some members of the crew, starved for female company, instantly become infatuated and set upon the poor girl, plying her with flowers and chocolates. To justify their infatuation, they compulsively describe the girl’s imaginary charms while standing watch (the main activity aboard boats, and an immensely boring one). The non-infatuated members of the crew then face a choice: they can either remain neutral—and raise suspicions that they are homosexuals—or they can falsify their preference and join in the chorus of the infatuated. To avoid cognitive dissonance, even those who were not infatuated gradually become infatuated, and as they do an egregoric halo lights up above the girl’s head. In due course almost the entire crew finds itself masturbating vigorously while imagining the girl’s charms. But then the steward discovers the girl in a storage locker having sex with a pimply young cabin boy, whose conquest of her is based on just one thing: his complete lack of imagination. He simply couldn’t perceive the egregoric halo above her head. Consequently, he didn’t to act like an infatuated idiot while around her. Aroused by all the attention, she had to choose someone and, by default, she chose him. As soon as news of the steward’s discovery leaks out, the egregore folds up and winks out leaving no trace, and the crew goes back to watching porn on their tablets and laptops.
Largely because of the way human brains are wired up (I like to refer to this arrangement as MonkeyBrain 2.0) egregores must possess certain attributes. One of these is a recognizable symbol, be it the cross, the crescent or a cartoon rodent. Another is a certain fixed iconography, such as the emperor’s clothes (which can’t be invisible). Another is an ideology or a belief system. Yet another is an obligatory set of empowering rituals. Keeping these in mind, let us examine the egregore in question: the Egregore of the President of the United States of America. Of the symbols, there is the presidential seal and the flag, but the real egregorically amplified symbol is, quite clearly, the White House. Move the presidential residence, and the egregore is automatically weakened. The fact that the First Lady (who is an essential part of the presidential iconography) has failed to take up residence at the White House and stayed in her Manhattan penthouse with her son was a heavy blow to the egregore.
But another part of the egregoric iconography has been restored to proper form. According to the iconography, the POTUS needs to be a male white Anglo-Saxon Protestant. This is quite an elderly egregore—one of the oldest in the world, alongside those of the Pope and the Queen of England—and you can’t teach an old egregore new tricks. Of the 45 presidents, 43 were WASPS, one Irishman (Kennedy, who didn’t last long) and one mulatto (Obama). Once the Irishman was taken out, the presidential egregore was kept strong by a steady succession of WASPS—until the mulatto, who caused it to weaken quite a lot. Having the mulatto succeeded by a woman (Clinton) would have perhaps sapped it of all remaining strength and caused it to wink out entirely, but the egregore managed to rescue itself by maneuvering another WASP (Trump) into the position. The fact that the entire official establishment saw Trump’s election victory as very unlikely demonstrates the fact that the egregore has an agenda of its own—separate from that of those it controls.
As far as dress code, the iconography of the presidential egregore requires the president to always wear suit and tie. Most presidents pull this part off quite well, with a couple of exceptions. Jimmy Carter appeared in the Oval Office wearing a cardigan, perhaps sealing his fate as a one-term president. Obama allowed himself to be photographed wearing short pants, but at least the setting was a golf course rather than the office. Hillary Clinton’s gaudy bag-like outfits would have been a disaster for the egregore. Here at least Trump is on safe ground: he is well and truly a “suit.”
But it is still too early to declare that the presidential egregore is safely settled in the person of Donald Trump for the duration. It is robust as egregores go because it only attaches to a given individual for a limited period of time—either four or eight years—before it is presented with another host to inhabit. After a public inauguration ceremony, followed by a strange love bite in private, the former president is disgorged into relative obscurity as a spent, gray, flaccid nonentity.
This is quite different from the presidential egregores found in any of the Arabic-speaking countries. There, to be effective, the egregore requires a cult of personality and attaches most firmly to a person or a family. Take out the one key individual (Saddam Hussein, Muammar Gaddafi… Bashar Assad?) and the presidential egregore vanishes along with the entire state, which then reverts to a group of warring tribes. The presidential egregore in the US can simply relinquish its old host and find a new one. This is a far more robust egregoric survival strategy, but far riskier for its human host, because the egregore may decide to have the host either impeached or killed before his term is up—and sometimes does.
In addition to having the proper iconography, in order for the presidential egregore to become ensconced in its new host, the host has to espouse the correct ideology and follow all of the proper rituals. Absence of the First Lady from the White House is a violation the iconography, but this is a relatively minor matter. More importantly, Trump’s election victory has been disputed (based on zero evidence) by claiming that it was brought about through “Russian meddling.” This called into question the correctness of the sacred ritual by which the egregore moves to a new host. Obama’s love bite worked, but the egregore is not entirely satisfied with the new host.
To make matters worse, Trump has run afoul of the sacred ideology: the POTUS has to be “the leader of the free world” and the most powerful man on Earth. To start with, the president must command the respect and secure the support of members of his own party, and here we saw Trump unable to rally the Republicans to repeal Obamacare—something that they have tried to do almost endlessly under Obama. Being unable to move the Washington establishment in any direction, in spite of representing the majority party in both houses of Congress, how can Trump show that he is the biggest alpha-male of the entire planet? This must have the presidential egregore truly worried.
Finally, Trump has sinned against the presidential egregore in yet another way, which is perhaps the most serious. You see, US presidents do not serve the people—they serve the presidential egregore. The people support the president not because he serves them but through preference falsification. They are always presented with a false choice between people they dislike, but they pick one or the other for fear of appearing unpatriotic. Then, if they refuse to support whoever ends up being president, they risk being singled out as the enemy. But this particular president has made some major, rather specific promises—such as stopping uncontrolled immigration, bringing manufacturing jobs back from countries to which they have been offshored, making the health care system less of a ridiculous extortion scheme, restoring the crumbling infrastructure and reestablishing friendly relations with other countries. This is not untypical; presidential candidates make the darndest promises to get elected—this is called “lying like you are running for office”—but most of them have the presence of mind to renege on these promises as soon as they are sworn into office. But Trump, being something of a babe in the woods politically, actually made noises as if he were going to fulfill his campaign promises!
All of these failings and shortcomings dealt a severe blow to the presidential egregore. It is down, but it certainly isn’t out: it set all of the people within the Washington establishment who feed off it to start looking for ways to save it and make it well again. It quickly turned out that the only way to do this was by following a standard deification ritual to elevate the presidential egregore’s errant new host above all other humans.
Gods differ from us mere mortals in that they are not bound by human law, and it is to demonstrate their divine nature that American presidents strive to become war criminals. As Roberts put it, “Our country has had four war criminal presidents in succession. Clinton twice launched military attacks on Serbia, ordering NATO to bomb the former Yugoslavia twice, both in 1995 and in 1999, so that gives Bill two war crimes. George W. Bush invaded Afghanistan and Iraq and attacked provinces of Pakistan and Yemen from the air. That comes to four war crimes for Bush. Obama used NATO to destroy Libya and sent mercenaries to destroy Syria, thereby committing two war crimes. Trump attacked Syria with US forces, thereby becoming a war criminal early in his regime.” Let’s not quibble over exactly how many war crimes have been committed and concede that their number is sufficient to prove conclusively that US presidents strive to rise above human law by murdering scores of people with impunity. They wish to be like Zeus casting lightning bolts from Mount Olympus on a whim or Poseidon bringing forth great storms that sink entire navies.
Let us not neglect to mention a minor but important state ritual: that of the presidential pardon. Sentenced criminals can appeal to the president, and some of them are pardoned. The number of the pardoned is too insignificant for this to be regarded as a move to restore justice; instead, it is a way for the president, as the ultimate criminal, to bestow the right to commit crimes with impunity on other, randomly selected criminals. Making the president into a figure of supplication and prayer for fellow-criminals is a way of affirming his divine nature.
Another divine attribute of the US presidency, and one that the Trump administration is avidly embracing, is freedom from the tyranny of facts. It is only humble humans that are bound by what is real, while gods can create their own reality. To this end, Trump and his administration cultivate a disdainful attitude toward facts, letting the “intelligence community” act as an oracle, divining the fact that, for instance, Assad’s air force attacked Khan Sheikhoun in Syria’s Idlib province with chemical weapons—based on no investigation and no evidence. Intelligence sources state that they have “high confidence”—meaning that if you don’t have similarly high confidence in their fabrications, then you a doubter, an apostate from the state religion and a “conspiracy theorist.” Truth in the US is no longer a result of an investigative and deliberative process—it is the product of divine revelation.
As an aside, it bears mentioning that the strategy of “truth through revelation” does not play well outside of the echoey confines of the US establishment and mass media. Last week, US Secretary of State Rex Tillerson flew to Moscow. After a polite but thorough tongue-lashing from his formidable counterpart Sergei Lavrov he spent a couple of hours cooling his heels in Putin’s waiting room. Then Putin took a few minutes out of his busy schedule to stop by. I am pretty sure that Putin said a few things to Tillerson’s face, such as: Russia did not invade Ukraine; Crimea always was Russian and always will be; putting NATO troops on Russia’s border is in violation of an international agreement; putting missile defense systems on Russia’s borders to defend Europe against nonexistent Iranian nuclear-tipped ICBMs is ridiculous and unacceptable; the chemical attack in Khan Sheikhoun was a false flag; the US cruise missile attack on the Shayrat airbase near Homs in Syria was illegal and because of it US-Russian deconfliction protocols remain suspended; and, last but not least, the presence of US troops on Syrian soil is a violation of Syria’s state sovereignty. It is not possible to win the peace by repeating lies, which is what Tillerson was sent to Moscow to do. It was a fool’s errand and, although hardly anyone in the US cared to pay attention, an international humiliation. We can be sure, however, that the presidential egregore took note, felt humiliated, and tasked Washington’s hive mind with looking for new ways to lash out at the world: good bye, Syria, hello, North Korea!
Roberts is quite accurate when he says that “Violence is the heart of America.” And now we understand the reason: violence is at the center of the state cult by which the human host of the presidential egregore is deified. This same process is reproduced fractally throughout society: when police in the US shoot scores of civilians, or when mass shooters open fire in crowded venues, they are engaging in an act of communion with the supreme being—the Criminal in Chief, worst on the entire planet and beyond the reach of human law. To assure yourself that this is so, take a look at Trump’s favorability rating among the general population in the wake of his entirely ineffectual cruise missile attack on Syria: it has reached 50% for the first time ever.
By now, this cult of violence is all that supports the presidential egregore. Previously, people were quite willing to falsify their preferences in a great number of ways for the sake maintaining a reasonably good chance at an old age pension, paying off their loans, a hopeful future for their children, health care they could actually afford and so on. But now all that remains is a voyeuristic share in the senseless violence. There are just two ways to participate in this cult: as a perpetrator or as a victim. Perpetrators falsify their preference not to commit senseless crimes; they acquiesce in the crimes and enter into communion with the Criminal in Chief by espousing the notion that the US somehow still stands for peace, justice and democracy, or some hollow words to that effect. Victims falsify their preference for acting forcefully to bring down this cult of violence because they are fearful; at the same time, they avoid cognitive dissonance by speaking out against it ineffectually, pretending that this somehow restores their stolen virtue. Although many of them talk about it, few of them have the courage or the determination to do all that they can do at this point: get a different passport, get their money and their family out and leave the US for good.
Of course, there is also the option of doing nothing and simply waiting. Supported by nothing more than gratuitous violence and blatant lies, with a bloviating Trump for a host, the US presidential egregore does not appear to be long for this world. At this point all it would take for it to fold up and wink out of existence is a resounding military defeat—exactly the sort of coup de grace that North Korea has been itching to deliver to this gradually decrepitating superpower for decades now. Even if North Korea’s plan doesn’t pan out, there will be lots of other opportunities for the US military to get the stuffing beaten out of it. The US has run out of weak countries to destroy; any of the remaining ones are strong enough to destroy it in return. And even if the US finds some more weak countries to destroy, there is a limit to how many military fiascos the already overstretched and depleted US military can juggle at the same time. Yes, you can simply wait; but what would you be waiting for? When the presidential egregore finally winks out of existence, what other meaner, nastier demons will rush in to fill the void?
You can read about what happened when the Soviet egregore suddenly vanished, and how an analogous event is likely to map onto the US, in my book Reinventing Collapse: the Soviet Example and American Prospects. For a realistic fictional description of how the US military might go down in defeat, read John Michael’s Greer’s novel Twilight’s Last Gleaming.
Obsolete Maps, Unfamiliar Landscapes. Dmitry Orlov, ClubOrlov. Apr. 25, 2017.
In his recent blog post, A Matter of Mercy, James Howard Kunstler compared the common state of mind of the USA to that of an Alzheimer’s patient. Themes pop up in the news and mass media mouthpieces wax hysterical about them. Then, abruptly, their mouth music stops, and thème du jour vanishes from view. “Russian meddling” in the US presidential election made a lot of noise; and then… crickets. Moving right along, there was an alleged chemical attack in Syria (of which there is still no verifiable evidence); therefore, “Assad must pay” (by having a handful of unused 30-year-old jets blown up). Awkwardly, only about a third of the very expensive Tomahawk cruise missiles manage to reach the target (the wrong end of an airfield). Even more awkwardly, the Russians take this opportunity to tout their previously top secret electronic warfare equipment: never mind the Tomahawks; they can zap the entire US Navy into floating upside-down. And then the story dies (just as the US refuses to authorize an investigation into the chemical attack). And then it’s on to North Korea. And so on, endlessly.
Kunstler makes the point that the national dialogue in the US is plumbing the depths of senility: disturbing images flash across the screen; some number of supposedly well informed and right-thinking people make loud harrumphing noises about them along the lines that “something must be done,” and then… nothing! That, indeed, is what we have been observing. But what are the root causes of this serial national amnesia? Even if it looks like senility, may this be just a symptom of an entirely different national ailment? After all, Washington gerontocracy aside, not everyone in the US is senile… A much better explanation is not hard to find. Let’s delve.
There is a very natural human tendency to continue trying to do the things that used to work in your favor even after they have stopped working for you. It is easy to put it down to various human weaknesses and frailties—refusing to acknowledge reality, engaging in wishful thinking, chasing pipe dreams… It is somewhat harder to discern in this tendency a sound strategy—because it is superior to any available alternative.
As we grow up and mature, we are acculturated into a certain mental map of the world that we use to find our way around in the economy, in politics and in society. In order to be useful, this mental map has to accord with the information filtering through our senses. For instance, one’s mental map of the town one grew up in tends to include things called streets, and we tend to go on calling them “streets” even when during every high tide they turn into drainage canals. They remain “streets” after a tornado refashions them into mad tangles of deadfall and wreckage. When such things happen, we expect things to eventually go back to normal. Even if they don’t, we tend to cling to the old map, reminiscing about what once was with a sense of nostalgia and loss. That old map defines who we are, to ourselves and to others. When it fails us, our least bad option is to retreat into make-believe. All the other options are even worse: not only do they also not work, but they also make us feel bad.
For example, once upon a time there was a label on a big chunk of the world’s political map: “USSR.” People fiercely criticized the political entity for which it stood—for all of its many failings—just as they fiercely clung to the idea that it was real. And then, in the early 1990s, it vanished. The map was still there—on paper and in people’s heads—but the terrain under their feet had changed. All sorts of things that agreed with the map before no longer did, and people could no longer use it to navigate the once familiar terrain. This was somewhat easier on the younger people, at least psychologically, because they had much less time and effort invested in the old map. But many of the older people were suddenly rendered helpless—because their tried and true mental map no longer worked. They became more helpless than the young: just as disoriented, but less flexible in their needs and habits and less able to learn and to improvise. A few particularly resourceful and ruthless opportunists did well, but in numerous cases the result was depression, alcoholism and an untimely death.
After a while, a new map took form: with capitalism in place of socialism, federalism in place of internationalism, the Orthodox Church in place of atheism and practicality in place of political ideology. And yet shreds the old mental map still linger. Ask any number of Ukrainians or Crimeans which country they really feel they belong to, and they will tell you, possibly with some amount of chagrin, that it’s the USSR. Modern Russia is a strange land to them, modern Ukraine is a disaster area and a cruel joke, and so the USSR is all that they have left to cling to. Part nostalgia, part respect for a great and glorious past, they refuse to part with it. Rather surprisingly, a lot of these people were either very young or not yet born when the USSR collapsed. Apparently, that old map is still good for something—for remembering how great the USSR was (in some ways more than others).
And now the thing on the map known as the USA is showing similar signs of agreeing ever more badly with the terrain. Things that used to work in Americans’ favor no longer do so. Lacking any other mental map, Americans have no choice but to try to navigate a rapidly changing and increasingly unfamiliar terrain using an out-of-date one. There are, in fact, not one but two very different maps: an international one and a domestic one. Let us examine each of them.
Internationally, the tried and true US script is to get one’s way through bullying. The US is the global empire with troops stationed all over the world assuring “full-spectrum dominance.” It is the indispensable nation, the global policeman, the guarantor of peace and democracy, the bulwark against dictatorship and oppression, the defender of human rights with a “responsibility to protect,” yadda-yadda. This gives US officials the self-bestowed right to show up anywhere they like and explain what it is they want any given country’s leadership to do. If the target country complies, then it is robbed of its resources. If it refuses, then there follows a sequence of increasingly painful arm-twisting maneuvers: political pressure and isolation, economic sanctions, political disruption through color revolutions and, finally, invasion and destruction of the recalcitrant country. If, for whatever reason, this sequence can’t be followed to a point where the country has been compelled to cooperate, it remains a pariah state for many decades. It gets bad press in the US, most of it wrong or, at the very least, prejudiced and tendentious. Clearly, the US is a sore loser. Cuba, North Korea and Iran take the brunt of this mistreatment from both American officialdom and the press. But these are small countries, and the fact that the US can’t really do much of anything about them doesn’t appear to be too significant.
Recently, however, the US has run up against very large, very powerful countries such as China and Russia, which will no longer tolerate such mistreatment at all. Once upon a time Russia was weak and fragmented, but it has since reunified and rearmed, and is ready to stand up to the US politically, economically and, if need be, militarily. Sanctions against Russia have utterly failed; in fact, they have helped Russia develop economically through import replacement. In just three years Russia’s oil and gas industry has become technologically self-sufficient and Russia has made great strides in making it self-sufficient in food production.
This failure, according to the bullying protocol, calls for war but, historically, going to war against Russia is a particularly effective way to rid oneself of any ambitions as a great military power: this is how it worked out for the Swedes, the French, the Germans and the Turks, and this is how it would work out for the US as well. In the meantime, China has developed into a global economic powerhouse and has reached a point when it can flatly demand that the US treat it as an equal and dole out carefully measured doses of punishment in cases of noncompliance. The economies of the US and China are intertwined in so many ways that the US cannot hope to hurt China without inflicting irreparable harm on itself.
One might reasonably think that it would be a good move for the US to throw out the old map and to adopt a new map—for cooperating with other countries through bilateral and multilateral diplomacy. But this turns out to be impractical: decades of bullying have undermined its ability to engage in diplomacy. There is no magic wand that can instantly transmogrify rough bullies into polished, accomplished diplomats. Pathetic and delusional Nikki Haley, the US representative at the UN, is the latest poster child for American diplomatic dysfunction. If she is a diplomat, then I am a seven-time winner of the Miss America pageant! Also, the move to develop a new map requires certain preliminary steps, such as admitting that the old map is wrong, and this would be a politically suicidal move for anyone who is anyone in Washington. Therefore, it is best to just continue to recycle the old tropes, swiftly pulling the plug on a story as soon as reality begins to intrude on the carefully spun fictional narrative.
But this strategy runs amok as soon as it becomes obvious to anyone at all that, never mind any given rapidly discontinued plot line, the overall map no longer agrees with the terrain. You can follow the map for a while in any direction you like, but before long you end up in a dead end every time; then what? The old tropes still work for a short period of time—a few news cycles—but at some point it becomes necessary to produce some sign of progress, or results, or anything at all. You can bully all you want, but if you can’t make the other side cry “uncle” within a reasonable period of time, then it becomes apparent to all that you are not really a bully but are just wasting serious people's time with your rambunctious behavior. Such a realization would be most unsettling and result in cognitive dissonance, because the lack of agreement between the “global superpower” map and the “pathetic, washed-up former bully” terrain would become, to use a precise term, uncanny (or, in Sigmund Freud’s German terminology, unheimlich). Things seem uncanny and unsettling when they look strangely familiar—but also unsettlingly weird. People are drawn to them yet repulsed by them. The effects range from goosebumps to panic to mass psychosis.
This is the precise reason why certain news stories have to be dropped in a hurry: to avoid inducing the fantods and the heebie-jeebies in the audience—cognitive dissonance is the fancy term. “Russian meddling” in US politics—gone! Syria’s alleged yet unsubstantiated chemical weapons attack—gone! Anti-Assad reprisal, a.k.a. feeding Tomahawks to the sharks—gone! Bullying China into “fixing” North Korea—gone! But these things are easy: few Americans are directly affected by what goes on in any of these countries, and so they can easily forget about them once they are no longer in the news.
Internal problems, on the other hand, are much nastier, because they actually directly hurt people, and when people are hurt they tend to remember what has hurt them whether or not it happens to be in the news on any given day. Failing infrastructure, hopelessly underfunded retirement programs, the out-of-control police state, the criminal justice system of modern slavery, an educational establishment hell-bent on preparing students for life on some yet-to-be-discovered planet, industrial agriculture that makes people fat, sick and crazy, a complete joke of a health care system… the list of internal problems is getting to be very long.
The parade of fake foreign policy initiatives seems to be specifically designed to distract people from intractable internal problems. But for how much longer will this trick continue to work? When it does stop working, disagreements between the map and the terrain will surge to the foreground and demand resolution. But resolution will not be forthcoming because the variances that have crept in between the map and the terrain over time cannot be undone. Let me list just three of the most dramatic ones.
1. Virtually all of the decrepitating infrastructure in the US—the highways, the airports, suburban sprawl—has been built with the expectation that energy will remain cheap and plentiful forever. This expectation is at odds with the fact that the US oil supply has peaked around 1970 and is in terminal decline. The recent investment in fracking has produced a temporary glut of oil and, especially, natural gas, but at the cost of destroying much of the oil industry. Financially, fracking has been a disaster: by the end of 2017, it is expected that just a third of US energy companies will remain in business. In spite of all the talk about renewable energy, overall it accounts for a tiny fraction of overall energy use. Even if it were theoretically possible to convert to mostly renewable energy, the prodigious quantity of conventional energy that would be required to do the conversion simply does not exist. The reason oil is currently relatively cheap is because oil consumption is being subsidized with debt, and because oil is no longer particularly potent in stimulating economic activity and generating profits. Thus, the expectation that most Americans will be able to continue to live in houses, drive around in cars and spend their days in office and retail spaces, all equipped with heating and air conditioning, will not comport with reality moving forward. The map says that the population will remain comfortable; the terrain, increasingly, fails to correspond. Increasingly, much of the population of the US will be forced to inhabit barely habitable, largely impassable post-urban landscapes such as Detroit and Flint in Michigan, Camden in New Jersey and numerous other ones.
2. The map still claims that the US is a rich country. This may still be true on average, but looking at just the average wealth and income statistics ignores the fact that the US has been turning into a third-world nation for some time now. There are now three classes: a tiny, über-wealthy elite, a small professional class made up of their salaried servants, and the vast and rapidly expanding permanent underclass. Close to half the population has zero savings and does not earn enough to pay income tax. The map says that the US offers opportunities to those who play the game to win. It also says that those who work hard and save for retirement can expect to live a long and comfortable life. The terrain is of a country that is rigged against its people and lorded over by parasitic racketeers and rentiers, where retirement accounts have been looted at every level, and where more and more people choose to make an early exit from the game of life through alcoholism and drug addiction. The wealth of the über-rich appears real, but only for the moment. Most of it is bound up in paper assets. Their price has been blown out of all proportion to their underlying value by the largest financial bubble in the history of the world. Much of the rest is bound up in unproductive assets such as residential real estate. When (not if) these bubbles burst, they will end up almost as poor as the rest.
3. The map says that the US is a democracy. The terrain is of a rigged system where moneyed interests, including corporations and foreigners such as the Israelis and the Saudis decide the outcomes of elections. It is a pay-to-play system of politics, not a democracy. According to the Washington Post, “Only 107000 votes in three states decided the [presidential] election” in 2016 out of 231,556,622 eligible voters. That is, the election was decided by 0.05% of the electorate. By what standard is this a democracy? What tortured logic could possibly lead one to conclude that Trump has any sort of mandate to govern? While quite a few people celebrated the election of Donald Trump as a triumph for the disenfranchised, nothing could be further from the truth. The disenfranchised has nothing to do with the election, which was, in any case, a false choice was between a member of a political dynasty and an oligarch.
These major disagreements between the map and the terrain can remain hidden only for as long as the people feel that they have something to lose: subsidized housing, food stamps, access to drugs and alcohol, television, video games… But as the terrain continues to deteriorate more and more people will be forced to come to the realization that their map is no good any more. What will happen after that is anyone’s guess, because nobody has a map of that sort of future. Keep in mind that artificial entities such as the USSR and the USA are nothing more than labels on a map.
I disagree with Kunstler that this bout of recurring national amnesia we have been observing is any sort of “God’s mercy.” No, this is just a nation of people who refuse to let go of their old mental map and who are, at least at this point, both unwilling and incapable of developing a new one—one that actually matches the altered terrain. But eventually all of them will be forced to. In the end, some of them will manage to do so, and many of the rest will die sooner rather than later.
If you want to know where you are going, ignore the map and learn to read the terrain.
Revenge of the Polite Men in Green. Dmitry Orlov, ClubOrlov. May 2, 2017.
The US appears to be preparing for a nuclear first strike against Russia. It has installed ballistic missile defense systems in Poland and Romania, with the preposterous claim that they are there to protect Europe against nonexistent Iranian nuclear-tipped ICBMs. These supposedly defensive installations can also be used to launch nuclear missiles into Russia. And recently the US has placed its F-35 fighter jets in Estonia, which is just a few minutes’ flight from St. Petersburg, Russia’s second-largest city. These jets are capable of carrying nuclear payloads. Without any doubt, these steps have made nuclear war more likely, if only by accident.
There are two possible ways to view this aggressive posturing: as defensive or as offensive. Viewed as defensive measures, are they needed, and are they effective? Viewed as offensive measures, are they effective, and what will be the fallout (no pun intended)? And if the US were to engage in the extreme folly of attempting a nuclear first strike on Russia, what would be the effect of this folly, personally, on the aspiring American war criminals who would get behind such a plan? Should they be afraid—very afraid—and what precisely should they be very afraid of? Let’s take a look.
In recent years, Russia has made some very important advances in weapons technology and training. Here is a partial list of them:
1. Air defense systems (S-300, S-400, S-500) that will effectively seal off Russian airspace up to near earth orbit. Americans lack the technology to penetrate these new air defenses. Many components of these systems are mobile, and when on the move they also become very difficult to target.
2. Electronic warfare systems (Khibiny, Krasukha) that can neutralize US ships, planes and cruise missiles, recently demonstrated in Syria, where some 60% of the Tomahawks failed to reach the target area. US and NATO forces have repeatedly found themselves unable to operate in areas where these systems are deployed.
3. A new ICBM (Sarmat) which is not exactly a ballistic missile because it can fly arbitrary suborbital courses all the way around the planet. It can deliver multiple nuclear-armed supersonic maneuvering reentry vehicles. There is no technology that can intercept it.
4. Long-range cruise missiles (Kalibr) that can be launched from small ships or submarines near the US coast and penetrate far inland. They are like the American Tomahawks, but bigger, faster, more modern, more difficult to intercept, much cheaper and, as recent events in Syria have shown, much more reliable.
5. Highly trained, professional special forces with state-of-the-art equipment that can show up pretty much anywhere (no “shock and awe” needed), neutralize enemy forces without hurting civilians, quietly secure the peace without causing any casualties among the civilians and seamlessly shift to providing humanitarian aid and untangling the local politics.
In the meantime, the US military has turned into a very expensive junk heap, a defense contractor feeding frenzy and a ridiculous social engineering experiment. Its junk heap aspect is clear when you consider how the US Army is equipped: with 1970s technology, such as the Abrams tank and the Bradley Fighting Vehicle. Defense contractor feeding frenzy has made the US military by far the most expensive on the planet, but, just as with other US rackets, such as health care and public education, it is clear that being expensive has nothing to do with being any good. As far as social engineering, here is a terse description of what has gone on in the US military since Gulf War I:
“Since, 1991, the US military has been slowly coming apart at the seams. Stress cards, open homosexuality, transgenders on active duty, sensitivity training, pregnancy simulators for male troopers, lactation stations in the field, babies born on US warships, female graduates of Ranger School, including a 37-year-old mother (it’s funny how the women looked so well fed), women in the SEALs, women in Marine infantry units and females in the field artillery (even though most cannot carry a 155mm round) are just some of the insanity that has taken place in the last 26 years, but which snowballed into hell under the Obama administration.” (link)
Keep in mind that as a whole the US is sinking ever deeper into debt and is, at this point, one financial crash from being effectively bankrupt. It is no longer growing economically but shrinking, although for the time being the shrinkage is being masked by a wide variety of financial rackets. Over half of its population is a single accident away from being completely broke. Much of it is mentally ill, obese and on drugs, riddled with sexual deviancy and vice, and plumbing the depths of ignorance due to the failure of the education system which teaches little more than obedience and test-taking skills.
In response to all of these challenges, the US could simply give up, dramatically shrink the size and scope of its federal government, dismantle foreign military bases, bring the troops home and look for ways to shore up its collapsing infrastructure and frayed social safety net. Instead, it is choosing to double down. The Americans are thinking that they might be able to preserve their nuclear deterrent capability by threatening Russia from point-blank range: nukes in Poland and Romania masquerading as ABM systems, F-35s with nuclear ordnance in Estonia, minutes away from St. Petersburg, etc.
As anyone with a good understanding of modern Russia will tell you, Russia is absolutely not the USSR. It has no messianic ideology beyond championing the causes of defending national sovereignty, supporting traditional social and cultural norms and values and adherence to law, both domestic and international. Not only is it no longer an empire but it is allergic to the very concept, having been sucked dry by Soviet republics and satellite countries during the Soviet era. Its military involvements abroad are aimed at preventing the spread of failed states that would threaten its security. It has absolutely no interest in fighting a large-scale war, especially a nuclear one. Russia has no doctrine of nuclear first strike.
On the other hand, the US does reserve the right to strike first, and it is for precisely this reason that Russia is choosing to spend a fair amount of its national treasure (somewhere around 1-2% of GDP) on sealing off its airspace on the one hand and developing nuclear payload delivery vehicles that cannot be intercepted on the other. The point of these preparations is not to get ready to attack the US, but to make sure that the US wouldn’t even dream of attacking Russia.
In the best possible case, it will all end with a phone call from the Kremlin to the White House: “Listen, just give up, OK? Just go home and mind your own business. We don’t want to destroy you along with all your stuff because we want the stuff for ourselves. We are not going to kill you. We are just going to rob and humiliate you, just like you robbed and humiliated us in the 1990s. You’ve had a nice couple of centuries in the limelight, but now it’s over.” And at that point the Americans will just take the deal, because it is better than any of the alternatives.
This would be the rational outcome: the US simply folds. But there are two irrational forces at play. One is that Americans are very good at projecting the shadow: America is good by definition, Russia is bad because it isn't America, and therefore America’s evil tendencies (such as the propensity to bomb other countries with nuclear weapons) is projected onto Russia. Americans can’t trust themselves to do the right thing, and therefore they can’t trust Russia to do the right thing either. The other irrational force works in the opposite direction: Americans are unable to imagine that they aren’t the most powerful nation on earth and, watching Russia demonstrate its new weapons, their only choice, psychologically, is to think that their own weapons must be even more awesome, all evidence to the contrary. There is a chance that the mental defectives who exhibit these tendencies do find a way to unleash a nuclear first strike on Russia. How, then, would it go?
First of all, it is preposterous to think that the Russians would have no advance warning of the attack. Washington leaks like a sieve already. All the dirty laudnry is already being hung out to dry on Wikileaks. In a situation where a war crime of stunning proportions is being planned, some number of people who know about the plan would be sure to leak it. They would do so for at least two good reasons: to attempt to save their immortal souls from an eternity in hell; and to do the moral thing and try to save as many lives as possible by making the attack fail.
How would it go wrong? The orders would be to attack at a predetermined time, using bombers, cruise missiles launched from ships and ballistic missiles launched from submarines—all while maintaining radio silence so that the Russians wouldn't know how to retaliate. Land-based ICBMs would not be used, to keep the Russians from figuring out where strike back in retaliation. But then a few minutes before that predetermined time most of the ships and the submarines would be sunk by Russia’s supercavitating torpedoes and anti-ship ballistic missiles—while they maintain radio silence. Likewise, most of the bombers would be shot down using Russia’s air defense systems—also while maintaining radio silence. A few of them would leak through this initial gamut and blindly carry on with the already doomed mission.
The next layer of defense will be more air defense activity combined with electronic warfare. Flying into a very large microwave oven set on "high", almost everything that manages to get through initially will veer off-course and fail to reach the target. Some of the ordnance will fail to detonate and some will detonate somewhere in the tundra hundreds of kilometers away from the nearest settlement.
Now, suppose that just one nuke reaches a target—the wrong target, but a target nevertheless. The city of Yopta, population several hundred thousand, is obliterated, while the smaller Ust-Yopta, located barely 300km from the epicenter, survives the blast but becomes contaminated with radioactive fallout.
The Perfumed Princes of the Pentagon who unleashed this nuclear barrage listen intently to the radio silence, which lasts much longer than planned, and wisely choose to remain in their bunkers chewing on their nails.
Seeing that the damage is limited, the Russians choose to retaliate asymmetrically. They use conventional high-precision weapons to attack the US. They take out the electric grid, the internet, water supplies, oil and gas pipelines, railway and highway bridges, jet fuel tanks at airports and bunker fuel tanks at seaports. Then they wait a little while—perhaps a week—until the US becomes a sufficiently soft target for a limited ground invasion.
And that’s when the polite men in green show up. They have lists of those who launched the attack and coordinates of their bunkers and hideouts. Their orders are to bring them all in, preferably alive and not too physically damaged, and pull out immediately. This they do.
And then we have the Nüremberg Tribunal times one hundred. The Perfumed Princes of the Pentagon are charged with genocide using nuclear weapons—the ultimate crime against humanity. None of them ever get see their families again—or much of anything else, because they spend the rest of their lives excavating by hand the radioactive rubble in and around the city of Yopta, where it is perfectly dark four months out of the year. Their job will be to look for human remains, then bury them in graves dug into the tundra using picks and shovels. They will all die of cancer from radiation exposure.
The Perfumed Princes would be well advised to get some psychological counseling beforehand so that they stop projecting the shadow and get their egos deflated. Then they can confine themselves to useful activities, such as repatriating the troops and shutting down overseas military bases.
Olduvai on the Dneper. Dmitry Orlov, Club Orlov. May 9, 2017.
I have been in the collapse prediction business for over a decade now, with relatively good results overall. One aspect of predicting collapses that remains troublesome is their timing. The reason why it is troublesome is well understood: collapse is a sort of phase transition, and phase transitions are notoriously difficult to time with any precision. It is also nearly impossible to establish what has triggered any one of them. When will a raindrop of supercooled water suddenly turn into a snowflake? Only the snowflake knows. What triggered the collapse of the USSR? If you too have an opinion on the matter, please stuff it. Thank you.
Another aspect of my method that could be improved is its lack of quantitative rigor. I have been able to make a great number of fairly accurate qualitative predictions, all of them based on reasoning by analogy. For example, after observing the collapse of the USSR and its immediate aftermath, then imagining, using thought experiments, how it would map onto the collapse of the USA, I was able to formulate something I called Superpower Collapse Soup. Its key ingredients are: a severe shortfall in the production of crude oil, a large, systemic trade deficit, an oversized, bloated military budget, an outsized military incapable of victory, crippling levels of runaway debt and an entrenched, systemically corrupt political elite incapable of reform. During the decade since I came up with it, the events I have predicted have been unfolding with some precision. The USA has been steadily losing its economic and military dominance; it can no longer get its way in the world diplomatically; the last straw will be the loss of its financial stranglehold over the global economy.
It is fun and instructive to watch superpowers jostling for position and eventually collapsing, but that is just a backdrop to a far more important phenomenon that is starting to unfold with increasing speed: the waning of the industrial age. Here is another analogy: the idea that ten years from now most of the currently industrialized world will be clearly, obviously far along on the path toward deindustrialization seems just as outlandish now as the idea that the USA would rapidly lose its position as the world’s one remaining superpower seemed a decade ago when I first broached the subject.
But there is also an important difference: industrial activity is far more easily quantifiable than such matters as political and military dominance. In particular, Richard Duncan’s Olduvai theory provides a good guide to the upcoming events. Its longer name is “the transient-pulse theory of industrial civilization.” Its main idea is that the industrial age will span roughly a hundred-year period, from 1930 to 2030, with a peak somewhere near the middle. His prediction is that by 2030 industrial activity will decrease to 1930 levels.
The specific metric he decided to track is per capita energy use. His theory has come under some criticism in recent years because of two factors. First, instead of decreasing, in recent decades per capita energy use has in fact increased modestly. Second, various technological advances, including the ability to move information in the form of electronic signals rather than bulkier carriers such as paper, has led to improved efficiencies and has made it possible to increase the level of industrial activity given the same level of per capita energy use.
This criticism falls short on both counts. First, sustained and even slightly increased levels of per capita energy use have been enabled by constantly increasing debt that has temporarily compensated for the rising costs of energy production. The overall effect of this has been to depress both energy consumption and economic growth. Energy prices are low because that is all the consumers can afford and energy produces are forced to borrow to make up the difference between their production costs and their earnings. When economic growth stops and goes into reverse (what the French call décroissance) the debt burden becomes unsupportable, energy companies go out of business and per capita energy use drops precipitously. Thus, the phenomenon that has allowed per capita energy use to set some modest new records has produced an Olduvai plateau, which will be followed by an even steeper Olduvai cliff once this scheme, essentially one of attempting to borrow against the collateral of a nonexistent future, eventually fails. This moment is not far away: as I write this, the energy business has largely stopped being profitable, and there is a growing wave of energy companies entering bankruptcy.
On the second count, it is important to understand the key ingredient behind all of the modern technological efficiency gains. Yes, we have gained the ability to communicate electronically instead of moving pieces of paper about. We now have global supply networks and just-in-time delivery systems that have made it possible to largely eliminate the costs of maintaining local inventory. We have automated, robotic manufacturing and process control systems that have made industrial production far more efficient in the use of both materials and energy. But what is behind all of these advances? It is the availability of the electric grid; none of them would be possible without universal access to reliable sources of electricity. And it is precisely the demise of the electric grid that Richard Duncan saw as the signal event that will indicate the end of the industrial age.
When the trick of borrowing from a nonexistent future in order to maintain a high level of per capita energy use finally fails (as it is already showing signs of doing) energy availability will drop, electric grids will fail, and all of the technology-driven efficiency gains will be wiped out—all at the same time. Richard Duncan is not the only engineer to have failed to predict the important function that the exponential increase in debt has played in extending the industrial age by a decade or two—while making its end even more abrupt. Engineers like to work with physical quantities, and are loathe to admit that something that is essentially a game played with numbers on pieces of paper—which is what debt is—nevertheless can act as a physical motive force by forcing people to act. Its most dramatic physical manifestation is in depleting nonrenewable natural resources more rapidly and more fully. Once again, the overall effect is to reduce the ability to accurately predict the timing of collapse; as far as predicting the final result, I believe that the predictions of Olduvai theory still stand.
Although all around us we can still observe a hectic pace of industrial activity—highways choked with traffic, lights on everywhere, container ships and supertankers pulling into ports on schedule—there are places in the world that are already in the grip of terminal industrial collapse. To see that this is happening, all we have to do is look at what’s happening a bit more carefully.
The science of collapsology is hampered by the fact that most large-scale collapses—those involving entire countries and regions, empires and civilizations—cannot be studied in a laboratory setting. All we can do is observe them, make comparisons and draw analogies. But since the number of parameters of variation between countries, regions, empires and civilizations is, effectively, infinite, collapsologists always remain open to the criticism that they are comparing apples to oranges. But is this criticism valid with regard to global industrial collapse? After all, there is now just one global industrial civilization. Even North Korea, with its ideology of juche, is no exception, because even there people are now wandering around like zombies, their eyeballs permanently glued to their South Korean-made smartphones, their fingers compulsively stabbing and swatting at the touchscreens. And there, just like everywhere else, the smartphones only function as long as there are functioning electric sockets to plug their chargers into and functioning cellular and wifi networks for them to connect to. And both of these require… the electric grid.
And sometimes we are presented with a collapse scenario that is as close to a laboratory experiment as we could wish for. Suppose a large, highly industrialized, populous European country were to embark on a path of rapid, catastrophic deindustrialization. Further suppose that its electric generation capacity were undermined by a combination of factors that will cause much of it to shut down within just a few years. Finally, suppose that it were possible to draw numerous parallels between this country’s political and social conditions and those of the United States. Wouldn’t that make it a nice case study of industrial collapse?
That country is the Ukraine. Prior to the collapse of the USSR, it was an industrial powerhouse and a cornerstone of Soviet machine building and defense industry. After the USSR collapsed and until 2014 its industrial base was subjected to wholesale looting by its predatory oligarchs, but it still maintained its economic links with Russia. These links supported Ukrainian exports in areas such as rocket, helicopter and marine engines, an array of defense-related products, and numerous other durable and consumer goods such as pipe for gas pipelines and delicious cured pork fat (sálo). All of that changed with the putsch in February of 2014 that overthrew the constitutional government and replaced it with a puppet government managed by CIA operatives and the US Embassy in Kiev. The new government systematically destroyed the economic links with Russia. In turn, Russia was only too happy to disown its troublesome dependent and to start producing domestic replacements for Ukrainian imports. In many cases, the Ukrainian specialists behind the high-tech exports moved to Russia as well. Ukraine was stuck with many railroad cars’ worth of unsold sálo.
Although the policy was clearly an inane one, under political pressure from so-called “Ukrainian nationalists,” who were encouraged by their American fluffers, links to Russian companies were systematically broken, and Ukrainian industrial export industry shut down. The same “nationalists” took great pains to alienate the entire east of the country by attempting to force it to speak Ukrainian—a preposterous idea, given that Russian was, and still is, being used throughout the country for anything more intellectually challenging than singing patriotic songs, shouting nationalist slogans, and ranting and raving on national television. Unfortunately, the east of the country, which has since effectively ceased to be part of the Ukraine, is where most of the coal, used for power generation, used to come from.
Interestingly, even in the midst of hostilities that have taken the lives of some ten thousand people, the eastern provinces continued to supply the rest of the country with coal. This changed earlier this year, when certain “nationalists” illegally blockaded the railway links to the east, blocking the coal trains. Instead of arresting the perpetrators, the Ukrainian government swiftly acted to legalize the blockade!
This may seem bizarre, but only until you consider the larger picture. The Ukraine has no choice but to use coal from the east—either from its own former territories, or from Russia. Coal cannot be effectively imported by water due to lack of deep water port facilities. It cannot be imported by train from the European Union because of a difference in railway gauge. And so the Ukraine now imports coal—its own coal—from Russia, at higher cost: Russia imports the coal from eastern Ukraine and exports it to the rest of the Ukraine—for a fee. Since money is tight, the quantity of coal is much lower, resulting in shortages.
Now, this may beggar your imagination, but those who are in power in Kiev see this situation as a net positive. First, they have been able to appease the “nationalists” by legitimizing the blockade of the east. Second, they are now paying more for coal, meaning that there is a bigger pool of money for them to embezzle. The main activity of the ruling elites in the Ukraine ever since the USSR collapsed has been looting the country, and while, as the country has grown progressively poorer, overall opportunities to loot have dwindled, these shenanigans with blockading their own coal trains and resorting to coal imports have provided them with a new “profit center.”
A similar situation obtains with respect to natural gas. Officials in Kiev saw it as both politically and financially beneficial to remain in arrears to Russia on gas payments and to refuse to negotiate gas contracts with Russia in good faith. As a result, the Ukraine is forced to import natural gas from the EU—Russian gas, that is—at a higher price and a lower volume. And because the prices are higher, there is more there to skim from. The Russians are not pleased with this scenario, but all they can do is hurry up and build gas pipelines that circumvent the Ukraine. This is what they are doing, and in a couple of years Russia will shut off the Ukrainian gas spigot once and for all.
In the meantime, coal shortages have forced many thermal generation plants to shut down, forcing nuclear power plants to pick up the slack. The 15 nuclear reactors still in operation now provide over half of the Ukraine’s electricity. This is not a safety-conscious strategy. Load on the grid fluctuates in a diurnal cycle, and different methods of power generation provide better or worse alternatives for ramping it up and down. The fastest and safest means of maneuvering in response to fluctuating electric loads are the hydroelectric installations. Previously, the Dnepr Hydroelectric Cascade provided a lot of maneuvering space, but since water levels on the Dnepr have been low lately, this is not much of an option. Next are the natural gas-fired power plants, but since gas is now scarce and expensive this is not an option either. Coal-fired plants are next, but coal shortages have forced many coal-fired plants to shut down, limiting their ability to maneuver as well.
Finally, there is the least-safe option: ramp nuclear reactors up and down in a diurnal cycle. Since nuclear fuel decays through an entire sequence of isotopes, each with a different half-life and emission profile, nuclear power plants are best operated in a steady state. When cycled up and down daily, the resulting chemistry and physics become increasingly unstable and dangerous.
Sure enough, the Ukrainian nuclear energy sector has been setting new records in the number of emergency shutdowns: more than ten so far. In due course, these emergency shutdowns are not going to be followed by restarts. Of the 15 remaining nuclear reactors, only three are due to remain in service after 2020; the rest will have to be permanently shut down because of their advanced age. If attempts are made to keep them running past this date, they will carry a severe risk a Chernobyl-style meltdown. Need I mention that there will be no money left over for decommissioning or for the safekeeping of the spent fuel?
And so here we have a bankrupt, collapsing nation, at war with itself. It is being run by thieves who interfere with the operation of its electric grid by playing games with key suppliers in order to please “nationalist” fanatics while simultaneously feathering their own nests. You would be right to think that this situation is rather bad. But no matter how bad things are, there is always the possibility of making them even worse.
First, the Ukrainians saw it fit to sever relations with the Russian design bureau responsible for engineering their nuclear reactors. Typically, after every emergency shutdown the design bureau gets involved, performs root cause analysis, advises on remediation procedures, oversees their implementation and recertifies the affected reactor as safe prior to restart. Since 2014, this has not been happening.
Second, the Ukrainians decided to stop buying nuclear fuel from Russia and instead started buying it from Westinghouse—a US company—in a politically motivated effort to get rid of all things Russian. The Russian nuclear fuel assemblies are fabricated to a very high standard which Westinghouse was unable to replicate, and as a result their fuel rods have shown a tendency to warp and jam, causing emergency shutdowns, requiring expensive repairs and courting disaster.
And then Westinghouse went bankrupt. There is no reason to expect that they will continue to be able to keep Ukrainian reactors fueled. The Ukraine's only other option is to turn to the Russians, but the Russians are unlikely to resume nuclear fuel sales to such an unreliable customer—and one that could very well end up sending a radioactive plume across the border.
Third, the authorities in Kiev saw even the nuclear reactors as yet another opportunity for theft, and insisted that inferior-quality, untested materials be substituted in maintaining them. The following telephone conversation between Vyacheslav Tishchenko, Director of Zaporozhskaya Nuclear Power Plant, and his subordinates was recorded, and subsequently leaked, after the emergency shutdown of reactor No. 3 (my translation):
Tishchenko: “Vassily, what the hell is going on? Why aren’t you answering?”Yes, a bit of a problem with the fuel indeed. Russian nuclear fuel rods are hexagonal, while the Americans use square ones. The Ukrainians solved the problem by giving Westinghouse a sample of Russian fuel rods, and the Americans reverse-engineered them and made their own hexagonal ones. Is it any surprise that the improvised, reverse-engineered items are not as good as the genuine ones?
V.M. Turbaevsky, Head of Emergency Management: “I am sorry I haven’t been answering, we have an emergency, reactor No. 3 is down. I am already there, Ignatchenko is here, Krasnogorov is on his way.”
Tishchenko: “Why didn’t you let me know immediately? Do you understand what the danger is? We could all go to jail, you included! I am on my way, will be there in a half hour. Fyodor, what’s going on?”
F.M. Krasnogorov, Chief Engineer: “The packing in the upper block isn’t holding up under load. Looks like we’ve done ourselves in with these black market materials.”
Tishchenko: “Stop whining! Don’t you understand? Nobody asked for my opinion on this!”
Krasnogorov: “I was saying even then that this will end badly. We have to run tests. The problem is not just with the packing but with the fuel too.”
The Ukraine was not the only country to find problems with the quality of American nuclear fuel: Czech Republic, Slovenia and Finland all had problems with it, cancelled their contracts with Westinghouse and went back to using Russian-made fuel. The Ukraine would have done the same, except that its government got overthrown… and then Westinghouse went bankrupt... Are you sad now? I am!
Let us summarize. The Ukrainians are now forced to buy their own coal from Russia at a mark-up. They are now forced to buy Russian natural gas form the EU at a mark-up. They are running their nuclear power plants flat out, generating a record-setting number of emergency shutdowns and rolling blackouts. They are not following best practices in figuring out why the shutdowns are happening and remediating them. Most of their nuclear power generating capacity is due to expire in three years anyway. Only a small percentage of the Ukraine’s population is still able to pay their electric bills.
I hope you agree that this situation calls for some amount of profanity. With American help, the Ukrainians appear to have fucked themselves for arbitrarily large values of “fuck.” But there is another way to look at the situation. Suppose the Ukrainians decided (or were convinced by propaganda that cost the US taxpayers $5 billion or so) that they should be not at all like the Russians and more like the Americans. And it appears that they have succeeded! How is the Ukraine now resembling the USA? Let’s take a close look.
The USA is notionally headed by Donald Trump, an intellectually limited oligarch hell-bent on self-enrichment. To see how that’s going, check out how many international deals Ivanka Trump has already secured by schmoozing with foreign dignitaries while hanging around the White House. The Ukraine is notionally headed by Petro Poroshenko, an intellectually limited oligarch hell-bent on self-enrichment. Donald Trump got in by defeating an uppity crooked woman—Hillary Clinton. Petro Poroshenko got in by defeating an uppity crooked woman—Yulia Timoshenko.
The US Congress is stocked with criminals who bought their positions using large sums of money and use their position in order to enjoy immunity from prosecution for such crimes as insider trading. They have at their disposal a staggering number of ways to enrich themselves and fleece the citizenry. They perpetuate a large number of rackets in finance, medicine, education and law enforcement, among others. The Ukrainian parliament (“Verknovna Rada”) is similarly stocked with criminals who bought their positions in order to gain immunity from prosecution, and who likewise use them to enrich themselves by robbing what’s left of their country.
No matter what goes wrong, the US blames it on Russia. If election results are not what the pundits wanted, this is blamed on “Russian meddling.” When simultaneous blackouts hit San Francisco, Chicago and New York, the instant reaction is to blame “Russian hackers.” If some item of truthful information leaks out and makes it past the mass media gatekeepers, this is immediately labeled “Russian propaganda.” Speak to Russia’s ambassador at a cocktail party—and your political career is automatically in jeopardy.
Similarly in the Ukraine. The government in Kiev has blocked Russian TV channels, which were previously much more popular than the Ukrainian ones. It has barred Russian musicians from performing in the Ukraine. Anybody who says anything vaguely pro-Russian now runs the danger of being charged with “separatism.” While American Russophobia could be seen as a Cold War legacy and explained by the need of the former superpower to find a sparring partner somewhere—anywhere at all !—such rabid Russophobia in a majority Russian-speaking country is clearly an import.
Culturally, the US is at war with itself, rapidly segregating itself on opposite sides of a liberal/conservative divide. Long-standing friendships are dissolving over political arguments. Regionally, the entire middle of the country doesn’t care much for either coast. The South continues to harbor deep-seated resentment against “Yankeeland.” Much of the East Coast believes that Californians inhabit some other planet.
As the situation worsens, these fault lines are likely to lead to open hostility and a renewed civil war. In the Ukraine, where the major fault line runs along a linguistic divide between the Lvov region (where Ukrainian “nationalism” mostly comes from, its two other sources being Canada and Connecticut) and much of the rest of the country, this has already happened: a civil war has been raging between Kiev and the two eastern regions of Donetsk and Lugansk, and civil unrest in other regions, such as Kharkov and Odessa, has taken many forms, including public persecutions and even (as in Odessa) massacres.
In the US, the culture wars are driven by the psychology of victimhood and grievance. The displaced industrial workers blame those who outsourced their jobs overseas, not realizing that it's all about who has the excess energy (Chinese coal) in close proximity to excess labor (displaced Chinese farmers). The blacks blame their poor outcomes on the whites, failing to notice all the poor whites who have it even worse than they do. The women claim to be oppressed by the men, failing to notice that the men have been so oppressed by the women that for many of them marriage (followed by divorce and child support payments) seems like a singularly stupid choice. Even the prosperous whites are now starting to resent the Asians whose overly disciplined, high-performing children are seen as taking opportunities away from their own children, whom they abandon to be brought up by unqualified strangers. White men, who—for better or for worse—have historically been the main motive force behind the country’s development, are now being made to feel guilty for everything that has gone wrong with it.
In place of a positive American identity there is now a largely negative one. Yes, I do periodically run across US military veterans who saw action in Afghanistan, Iraq or both, got emotionally and sometimes physically mangled, but still believe in American greatness. Most of them, if pushed (gently) will admit that they are wallowing in nostalgia.
As for the rest... there is a spot directly between Harvard University and MIT called Central Square where there are no more public restrooms. Because people shoot up in there. You can't get a key to the restroom in the public library without surrendering your ID, and your visit is timed. At Harvard and MIT they are still drinking the toxic Kool-Aid. Everybody else is shooting heroin. Choose your poison!
The reason the Ukraine was so easily infected with this cultural virus is that the Ukrainian cultural identity is very specifically founded on grievance and victimhood. Never quite a real country but an adjunct of, in the best case, Russia, or, failing that, Poland, Romania, Austria-Hungary, or Nazi Germany, episodes of Ukrainian statehood have been episodes of foreign (non-Russian) occupation. To put it simply, there is nothing at all positive about the Ukrainian national identity: it is all about grievance and resentment, about feeling second-best, and the result of that wellspring of bad feeling is self-destructive outbursts and bloodlust, which we now see in full display on the streets of Ukrainian cities and on the killing fields of Donbass.
We celebrate our victories together and we bemoan our defeats alone. The Americans keep talking about building a wall along their southern border, so that they can cocoon themselves and marinate in their own juices, but find that they don’t have the money to build one. The Ukrainians toyed with the idea of building a wall along the border with Russia, but found that they didn’t have the money… so they dug a little ditch instead, and then gave up and switched to blockading railway lines that supplied them with the coal they need to keep the lights on.
Unable to do anything to improve the sinking fortunes of its citizens, the government in the US tries to justify its existence by dreaming up threats and pretending to counter them. These threats include “Russian aggression,” Syrian dictators, Iranian terrorists, nuclear-armed North Koreans and whoever else. Unable to do anything to improve the sinking fortunes of its citizens, the Ukrainian government mostly just focuses on “Russian aggression,” and pretends to counter it by constantly lobbing missiles in the general direction of the Ukraine’s eastern regions.
Both the US and the Ukraine have largely deindustrialized. In the US, the shrinkage in the industrial workforce has been neatly paralleled by the increase in the ranks of baristas and waiters. In spite of high levels of military spending, neither country appears able to field an armed force capable of anything resembling a victory. The ineptitude of American forces in Afghanistan, in Iraqi Mosul and in Syria parallels the humiliation of the Ukrainian military in the Donbass.
Finally, let’s look at electricity again. The US has an old electric grid that is increasingly susceptible to blackouts. It aging fleet of nuclear reactors—most of them already beyond their design lifetime—used to rely on Russian nuclear fuel for about a quarter of the energy, but that deal seems to have gone south recently as relations soured. The US used to generate about half of its electricity using coal, but the coal industry in the US is dying—dynamiting and digging up less and less coal and more and more dirt.
Luckily, the US has been able to switch to natural gas for much of the electricity generation that was previously coal-fired. Natural gas is currently plentiful because of fracking, but with most energy companies never having made a penny of profit from fracking and all of them sinking into debt and courting bankruptcy, this temporary bonanza of cheap and plentiful natural gas is likely to be short-lived.
Isn’t it uncanny that there should be so many parallels and symmetries between the US and the Ukraine? One may be forgiven for thinking that both the USA and the Ukraine are exhibiting symptoms of the same national disorder—which is contagious, and which has spread from west to east. At this point, it is latent in the US and acute in the Ukraine. As the Ukraine goes dark, we will be given a chance to observe what happens there, and to plan for what will happen to the US when it goes dark too. The Olduvai cliff beckons…
A few days ago, on May 9th, Russia celebrated the 72th anniversary of its victory in the Great Patriotic War, or, as it is known in the West, World War II. All but unnoticed in the West, this is a very big deal in Russia. All elements of the parade, the speech, the music—the iconography—are by now beautifully polished. It is a key ritual of Russia’s state cult. Its religious nature is manifested by Minister of Defense Sergei Shoigu, who, emerging from within the walls of the Kremlin standing in a classic Soviet-era limousine, makes the sign of the cross: if you are still stuck in the frame of “godless communism,” you need a rethink. Although the parade is a display of military might, unmistakable in the collection of modern military hardware that rumbles through the Red Square, the overall message is one of peace. “Russia has never been defeated, and never will be” is the overarching message. And although Russians want to be recognized for their tremendous sacrifice in pursuit of victory, they see this victory as everyone’s: everyone—even the Germans—benefited from the Soviet destruction of a perfect evil in the form of Nazi Germany’s genocidal machine.
Victory Day parades have been held ever since the first one was held on June 24, 1945. But over the past two years a new ritual has emerged: throughout Russia, the former USSR and beyond people in their hundreds of thousands and millions parade through the streets with portraits of their fallen relatives. This year, the count throughout Russia was eight million; 600,000 took part in the Ukraine, in spite of threats, harassment and outright violence from the Ukrainian Nazis—descendants and admirers of Nazi collaborators who have recently been posthumously rehabilitated as Ukrainian nationalist heroes.
In English, this popular movement goes by the name of “Eternal Regiment”; and, as usual, something is lost in translation. The word “eternal” in Russian is “вечный” (véchny)—but the word used here is “бессмертный” (bessmértny), which means “deathless” or “unkillable.” And the word “regiment” sounds quite a bit more… regimented than the Russian word “полк” (polk), which is a close cousin of “ополчение” (opolchénie)—a spontaneously formed military volunteer unit, and “ополченец” (opolchénets)—essentially a rebel or a guerrilla fighter. Perhaps the best English can do is this hodgepodge of Anglo-Saxon, French and Spanish: “Unkillable guerrilla.”
The already tremendous and still growing popularity of this movement comes from the potent combination of emotions behind it. On the one hand, it is a veneration of the fallen and commemoration of their extreme sacrifice in the form of public recognition for members of one’s own family alongside all the others. On the other, it is fed by a wellspring of newfound confidence and pride: pride in the most decisive and significant military victory of the last hundred years; and confidence that, should the need arise again, Russia will be up to the task.
There is a popular theory making the rounds in the West that history is just a bunch of narratives, and one is worth another. For example, there is one narrative that the Russians like, in which the Ukrainians now venerated as heroes in the Ukraine were Nazi collaborators complicit in the genocide perpetrated against Jews, Poles and others. But there is another narrative, supposedly just as good, where these same Nazi collaborators were freedom-fighters opposing Soviet Communist oppression and helping fight off Soviet occupation of their homeland by fighting alongside valiant Germans who came to help them. To better make their point, the adherents of this second narrative have been busy desecrating monuments and graves and attacking veterans.
How is an innocent bystander supposed to figure out how to navigate this political and cultural war zone? These aren’t just narratives: people are being hurt and even killed. Nerves are frayed and tempers are flaring. Say the wrong thing to the wrong crowd, and you might end up having to pay for a whole new smile. There is a temptation to declare that “they are all a bunch of evil bastards!” Millions of people of all ages walking with portraits of their dead relatives through snow and sleet are all “evil bastards”? Really? Let’s look at what’s going on here in more detail.
Making sense of another culture, even a familiar one, is always difficult. We have to rely on various left-brain functions, demanding “just the facts” and applying logic and arithmetic to reason things out. In our own cultures, where we are much better oriented, we tend to rely on various right-brain functions—intuition, heuristics, “common sense”—but when it comes to a different culture these can easily lead us astray. And then we can be led even further astray by doctrinal differences, especially by ones of which we are not even aware. And so the first step is to clear the deck.
First, unless you are a Russian currently living in Russia, please shut off your right hemisphere; it won’t help you. If you are one of the people who like to say things like “I don’t like Putin; he is a thug!” then that’s one of those right-brain functions firing off vacuously. But your left hemisphere could certainly be helpful if you have a reasonably good appreciation of opinion polling. Then you could consider that since you have no role in either electing Putin or in suggesting how Russian voters ought to vote (to avoid even the appearance of American meddling in Russian elections) and also take on board the fact that 62% of the Russians polled still approve of him even after several years of recession. And then you might concede that perhaps Putin is doing a good enough job as far as the Russians are concerned, and that this should be good enough for you too since you, not being Russian, have no standing in the matter.
But then the doctrinal differences still get in the way of accurate perception. In the West, Putin is seen as authoritarian and therefore undemocratic. In Russia, this perception is seen as irrelevant. Throughout Russian history the pinnacle of power was occupied by the head of state, be it the czar, the General Secretary of the Politburo or the president. There are no shady oligarchs, international banking cartels, transnational companies or “deep state” to act as invisible puppetmasters.
The head of state works directly for the population, and the population supports the head of state as long as he is seen as effective and successful. Putin is effective and successful, and under his leadership Russia has become more prosperous, more stable, more law-abiding and much more powerful on the world stage. And he is more authoritative than authoritarian, the difference being is that authoritarian leaders have to impose their will by force while authoritative ones are followed voluntarily, in recognition of their authority and its function in serving the common good.
If this still feels insufficiently democratic to you, then consider what Western democracy look like from the outside. As far as the Russians are concerned, other nations can be as democratic or undemocratic as they like—that’s an internal matter and none of Russia’s business, just as Russian internal politics are none of their business. There are vast cultural differences between countries, some countries (e.g., Iraq, Libya) can only be held together by a strongman, and most Russians recognize this as a basic fact.
But while democracy is optional and open to local interpretations, national sovereignty is mandatory. The fact that Western nations, as well as Japan and South Korea in the east, have largely surrendered their sovereignty to Washington, disqualifies them as role models. As far as the US itself, it is a rogue state that violates the sovereignty of other nations, attacking and invading them without provocation and without proper authorization from the UN or even from the its own congress as required by the constitution. The rationale that is often given for such bad behavior is that the US is the self-appointed guarantor of universal values and rights—such as the right to openly practice homosexuality. But this is preposterous, given that each nation has the sovereign right to determine its own values.
This contradiction opens up what may appear to be an unbridgeable gulf between the West and Russia. On the one side you have a rogue state and its powerless vassals; on the other you have a bastion of national sovereignty and a stickler for international law. And then there is one more toxic ingredient: the US itself has no national sovereignty. Its political system is a pay-to-play scheme that has been statistically proven to be nothing like a democracy: the popular will is virtually never reflected in public policy.
Instead of serving the people, Washington serves the interests of business lobbies: international bankers, transnational companies, defense contractors and shady oligarchs. It took less than 100 days for this combination of players to completely frustrate Donald Trump’s efforts at governing on behalf of the people by following through on his campaign promises. It appears that no-one in the US has the power to reign in these forces, and so the responsibility for doing so falls on Russia, in defense of its own sovereignty along with that of other nations.
It may seem like the peoples of the West could benefit from rising up, overthrowing this corrupt putative “world order” and reestablishing their national sovereignty. But it appears that they are no longer capable of such grand gestures. What’s more, they haven’t been capable of them for quite some time—something like four decades! Here is what Alexander Solzhenitsyn had to say about this problem back then.
A decline in courage may be the most striking feature that an outside observer notices in the West today. The Western world has lost its civic courage, both as a whole and separately, in each country, in each government, in each political party, and, of course, in the United Nations. Such a decline in courage is particularly noticeable among the ruling and intellectual elites, causing an impression of a loss of courage by the entire society. There are many courageous individuals, but they have no determining influence on public life. [Harvard Speech, 1978]This was quite a bucket of icy water thrown in the faces of the assembled luminaries, who roundly ignored and promptly forgot his speech. But perhaps Solzhenitsyn wasn’t even speaking to them; after all, he spoke in Russian. Perhaps he was speaking over the heads of the crowd at Harvard and directly to the Russians who were listening over shortwave—dutifully broadcast into Russia by the Americans.
After all, he did return to Russia from his exile in Vermont shortly the USSR collapsed. Before his death he had a most warm and cordial meeting with Putin. His long sojourn in the GULAG, brilliantly documented in his impressive body of work, did nothing to dampen his patriotism.
This cannot be said about his countrymen: after the Soviet collapse there followed a decade of close to zero civic courage as Russians attempted to slavishly copy Western ways even as they were being robbed blind. Luckily, this disease did not become chronic and the patient has by now fully recovered.
Returning now to the subject of Russia’s victory in the Great Patriotic War and the various narratives that surround it, there is a left-brain—right-brain conundrum for us to sort out. There is a warm and fuzzy right-brain narrative that circulates in the West, which goes something like this:
Hitler was evil and had to be defeated, and so the US, Great Britain and Russia came together to defeat him. The US made it possible for Russia to win with the Lend-Lease policy. Once Hitler was defeated, the three victorious leaders sat down together at a conference in Yalta. But then Stalin turned out to be just as evil as Hitler, and therefore as soon as Hitler was defeated the US started a war against the USSR. It ended up being a cold war, because the Russians were militarily a bit too strong for the US to take on, and then they quickly came up with nuclear bombs of their own and so the US couldn’t just nuke them into surrendering like it did with the Japanese. A big reason to defeat the USSR was that they were a bunch of godless communists. But it turned out that all the Americans had to do was wait, because the communist system didn’t work right and the USSR fell apart pretty much by itself. Nevertheless, it was the US that “won” the Cold War—because the other side forfeited.
This was pretty much the story I heard in a US history class in an American classroom. It sounds flattering for the Americans, but it’s ancient fake news. Sticking to “just the facts,” we can generate another narrative.
From the perspective of the West, Russia has always been the enemy. The aforementioned doctrinal differences—defense of national sovereignty, the inadmissibility of anyone superior to the national leader—played a big role, because they made Russia, with its plentiful natural resources, difficult for the West to exploit like it did just about every other country and continent. The Russian Revolution of 1917 was to some extent a Western attempt to destroy the Russian Empire.
The revolution did result in a civil war, but the effort to destroy Russia did not succeed: instead of the Russian Empire there quickly emerged the USSR. What’s more, in the late 20s, as the West descended into the Great Depression, the USSR announced its first five-year plan, which transformed it from an agrarian nation into an industrial one. People around the world took note: capitalism was failing while communism was succeeding. In response, financial and industrial interests in the West did all they could to set up Nazi Germany as a bulwark against Soviet Communism.
Signs of collusion between the US, the Brits and the Nazis are numerous: Ford sold trucks to the Germans, IBM sold them tabulating machines, for tallying up victims of genocide. The Americans and the Brits turned a blind eye to Hitler’s Final Solution, which dispatched millions of Jews, Gypsies, Slavs, homosexuals and other Untermenschen—all those the Nazis considered degenerate or racially inferior. The Final Solution played well with British and American racism. The Americans refused to accept Jewish refugees—right up to the point when they found out that the Jews were richer than they looked and were bringing in quite a lot of gold, and then they threw the doors open.
After the Nazis were defeated, more signs of collusion emerged. The Americans and the Brits pardoned scores of Nazi war criminals and collaborators, allowing many of them to escape to South America and bringing others into the US and Canada, where their descendants live and prosper to this day. As recently as 2013-14 they were deployed to the Ukraine, to help overthrow the government there and to help set up a Nazi-styled puppet regime that celebrates Nazi collaborators as heroes and liberators.
On this view, the differences between the West in general and its more fascist manifestations (Hitler, Mussolini, Franco, Pinochet, Salazar, Poroshenko, etc.) are superficial, while the civilizational divide between it and the Russian Empire/ USSR/ Russian Federation is fundamental. It is a conflict that has been going on for centuries now, but, focusing in on just the last century, we can observe the following: Russia suffers setbacks and huge losses, but always prevails in the end. The Russian Revolution destroyed the Russian Empire and precipitated a civil war, but in the end led to the creation of the USSR, rapid industrialization and eventual near-parity with the West.
The gambit of using Nazi Germany to destroy Russia caused millions of deaths but eventually led to the defeat and destruction of Nazi Germany and Soviet occupation of Eastern Europe. The collapse of the USSR, which was largely caused by internal problems of the Soviet state apparatus, was at first a major setback. But eventually it resulted in a reworked, more effective economic system and a better system of governance. It also allowed Russia to shed dependents and to start putting its own interests first. And now it has bounced back from this setback as well.
But there is just one victory that is commemorated every May 9th in Moscow—because it’s the only one of its kind for three separate reasons. First, it was a clear triumph of good over evil. By defeating Nazism, the Soviets rescued the Jewish people from complete extermination. They liberated all of Eastern Europe and set it on a path toward political stability, rebuilding and social and economic development.
Second, it is a victory for which they can take full credit. The US took up a hostile stance against Nazi Germany once the Germans started interfering with American shipping. Apparently, the most sensitive part of the American anatomy is not the head or the heart, but the wallet. And the US only got militarily involved in Europe once it became clear that the Soviets were about to defeat the Third Reich. The main reason they got involved was not to defeat the Germans but to keep the Soviets from taking all of Europe rather than just its eastern half. The Soviets were happy to go along with this plan; taking all of Europe would have meant biting off more than they could have chewed. But the point is, they did not need American or British help in destroying the Third Reich.
Third, it is about the only victory of the last 100 years that deserves the name. World War I was a ridiculous class war of attrition in which all sides tried to use up their surplus peasants as cannon fodder—because what they needed were not peasants but industrial workers. Its results solved nothing and instead laid the ground for various future conflicts, including the rise of fascism in Germany.
Between the two world wars, conflicts such as the Spanish civil war and the war between Finland and the USSR certainly do not deserve to be celebrated by anyone.
American victory over imperial Japan is not a victory but a war crime: the US will carry until the end of time the dubious distinction of nuking civilians. Korean war was not won or lost, but fought to an armistice. The Vietnam war was a defeat for the US. Afghanistan was lost by the USSR, and will eventually be lost by the US as well.
The first Gulf War was fought as far as the Iraqi border, liberating Kuwait while leaving Saddam Hussein in place; that seems like small potatoes. The invasion of Iraq, which was made under false pretenses and which, according to a well-researched estimate, caused the deaths of some 1,455,590 Iraqis and also led to the creation of ISIS/ISIL/Daesh, can be considered a victory only by someone who likes mass murder.
The destruction of Libya, as a result of a supposedly “humanitarian” mission (beware of Americans spouting off about human rights) more or less destroyed that country, and is not a success story. What else is there? Kosovo? Ah, let’s not forget the valiant US invasion and liberation of the island of Grenada in 1983! Mark October 25 on your calendar: let’s do a very short victory march off a very short pier! In short, over the past hundred years, aside from the Soviet victory over the Third Reich, there do not appear to be any military victories worth celebrating.
Now, here is a humble suggestion: perhaps, as we celebrate the Soviet victory over the Third Reich and venerate the memory of the fallen, we shouldn’t overlook the person responsible for said victory. By “responsible” I mean the person who gave the orders that led to victory and saw to their execution. And that person, of course, is Joseph Vissarionovich Dzhugashvili-Stalin. If this suggestion makes you recoil in horror, then that’s a good sign! This is a bit of a horror story, and horror stories can be great fun.
There is a fuzzy right-brain narrative about Stalin that goes like this: he was a ruthless dictator, in every way just as bad as Hitler. In fact, he killed as many if not more people than Hitler did. He was a terrible commander in chief, which is why so many millions of Russians died fighting the Nazis. Therefore, anybody who wants to venerate his memory must be some sort of deranged maniac.
That’s nice, but now let’s try it on the left hemisphere, where, if all goes well, facts get processed into conclusions using arithmetic and logic.
1. According to declassified Soviet-era documents, several hundred thousand people got executed during Stalin’s long reign. Some of these were political prisoners; the rest were criminals. The total was well short of a million.
2. During this same period, the inmate population of the notorious GULAGs crested at somewhere around a million and a half. The majority of those who went through the GULAGs survived to tell the story. But over the entire period over a million inmates perished from a wide variety of causes.
3. The number of Red Army servicemen killed and wounded while fighting the Nazis was roughly on par with the numbers for Wehrmacht. Perhaps a third more Soviet soldiers were killed. Most of the German casualties were on the eastern front. Many more millions of Soviet citizens died in the conflict, but they died from cold, hunger and disease. Many of them were marched off to German concentration camps and did not survive that experience.
Conclusion: Stalin was nothing like Hitler. Nazi genocide perpetuated against the Jews, the Gypsies and others also engulfed the population of the USSR. Stalin didn’t kill them; Hitler did. And so those who say that Stalin was just as bad, if not worse than, Hitler, are comparing apples and oranges, to put it mildly—I’ll leave it up to you to sort out which is the apple and which is the orange.
But as far as apples and oranges go, there is another stunningly obvious yet often overlooked difference between the two men: Hitler was a loser; Stalin was a winner. Stalin expired of natural causes. Millions of people came to pay their last respects. His funeral featured an artillery salute. The entire USSR stood to five minutes of silence. Dozens of foreign dignitaries were in attendance at his funeral. He was laid to rest in the mausoleum on Red Square, next to Lenin.
In stark contrast, Hitler shot himself. His few remaining henchmen carried his corpse out of the bunker, doused it in gasoline and set it on fire. To this day, 72 years later, Germans are riddled with guilt and shame over having such a leader. His few fans straddle the fine line between congenital idiocy and lifelong adolescent rebellion.
Someone might still be tempted to argue that Hitler and Stalin are similar in that one fought the other. But that isn’t what happened; one attacked the other, and the other was forced to respond. This fact alone carries a perfectly succinct condemnation of Hitler: he was clearly an idiot for the simple reason that only an idiot would invade Russia.
On the other hand, Stalin’s response was quite reasonable. Faced with attack by the mightiest military machine on the planet, he had no choice but to build an even mightier military machine. To do this, he needed time—about a year—and so he gave the orders to evacuate, retreat, and rapidly convert the economy to military production. Then, just over a year later, on July 1942, he issued his Order No. 227: “Not a step back.” In February of next year the Nazis were defeated at Stalingrad; in August, at Kursk. At that point Hitler’s fate was sealed.
Fast-forward to today: the US and its Western vassals are again trying to play the Nazi card: they are supporting the Ukro-fascists in the Ukraine and the Islamofascists (various brands of terrorist, from moderate to immoderate) in Syria and other wretched places. Their populations seem vaguely nauseated by this spectacle, if they know or care at all, but most of them neither know nor care because their mass media keeps them cocooned and zombified.
And then there are the Russians, marching through sleet and snow with portraits of their dead relatives. Maybe they will be forced to re-fight the fascists. Or maybe the fascists can be persuaded to save everyone the trouble. Perhaps they can just follow their spiritual leader’s—Hitler’s—example, and just shoot themselves in the head and have their corpses doused with gasoline and set on fire.
I will close with another quote from Alexander Solzhenitsyn.
To the ill-considered hopes of the last two centuries, which have reduced us to insignificance and brought us to the brink of nuclear and non-nuclear death, we can propose only a determined quest for the warm hand of God, which we have so rashly and self-confidently spurned. Only in this way can our eyes be opened to the errors of this unfortunate twentieth century and our hands be directed to setting them right. There is nothing else to cling to in the landslide: the combined vision of all the thinkers of the Enlightenment amounts to nothing. Our five continents are caught in a whirlwind. But it is during trials such as these that the highest gifts of the human spirit are manifested. If we perish and lose this world, the fault will be ours alone. [Tempelton Speech, 1983]
A Walk in the Garden of Unintended Consequences. Dmitry Orlov, Club Orlov. May 23, 2017.
“Blow a horse in the nose, and it will swish its tail,” goes one saying. It’s a silly one, but it captures a common thought pattern: do A to achieve B. As we grow up, we learn many such thought patterns, and as adults we expect them to continue working. We don’t necessarily know why they work. We don’t have time for complicated explanations and rationalizations; but we do know that they work. A time-saving approach is to simply try them and see. Do they still work?
And then there is a thought pattern that work at a meta-level: use any given trick too many times, and it will stop working. Blow a horse in the nose too many times, and it will will bite or kick you. “Too much of a good thing is a bad thing,” one might say. This is something else that we learn growing up, and it tempers our enthusiasm as adults for pushing things too far. Very interestingly, this only works at the level of the individual or the small group; as societies, we always push things too far—to the point when they stop working.
When we push things too far, we restrict our future choices. Blow a horse in the nose too many times, and not only would blowing in its nose become a bad idea, but so would harnessing it, riding it or even just walking it. That’s because the horse wouldn’t like you any more. That’s yet another thing we learn as children: once you ruin a good thing, it stays ruined. But as societies we seem to lack such childish wisdom. We keep pushing things too far and then each time we ask ourselves silly questions, such as, “What is the solution to this problem?” Anyone who proposes that we don’t have any options except to suffer through the consequences—which is more often than not the truth—is unlikely to be the least bit popular and is virtually guaranteed to be ignored by those clamoring for solutions.
Another way to look at this is in terms of consequences. Actions have consequences, and at first any given action may produce the intended result: blow in the nose, tail swishes. But later on, if pushed too far, that same action will produce an unintended result: blow in the nose, get kicked. Not only that, but past that point almost any action will produce unintended consequences. Give it water—get kicked. Muck out its stall—get kicked. Try to gentle it—get kicked. The solution to this class of problem, at a meta-meta level, is to first of all admit that there are no solutions. But when a society reaches that point, anybody who proposes that is, again, likely to be roundly ignored.
Running the risk of being unpopular and ignored, I believe that this needs to be explored further. We have lots of complex models to explain to us why things stop working. But we lack simple ones—ones that would be obvious even to a child.
Some quite complex models have been proposed. One is by Joseph Tainter. He has argued that society develops until it reaches some abstract pinnacle of societal complexity, at which point it crosses the point of diminishing returns. There is no mechanism for it to decrease complexity in a controlled manner. Instead, it continues to invest in ever-greater complexity, going from diminishing to negative returns. Complexity consumes ever more resources, and eventually society runs out of resources and collapses; hence, we need to prepare for The Collapse of Complex Societies . But I don’t think this model works any more. Let me explain.
Measures of complexity are… a bit complex, and the accounting needed to calculate where the point of diminishing returns for investing in further complexity lies is daunting as well. First of all, what are we measuring? In an economy that runs on physical or intellectual human labor, we can measure the number of different jobs that exist. But in an economy where the contribution of physical labor is tiny and most jobs have been automated, this makes no sense, because in essence everybody now has one and the same job. It involves sitting in front of a computer and pushing buttons.
But that’s not actual work; most of that residual “work,” as most of us know from personal experience, exists just so that we can look busy. The real work is now being performed by computer algorithms running on workstations and internet servers, where the cost of complexity is low and continuously dropping. The intellectual labor of writing computer code used to be a limiting factor, but with the advent of adaptive algorithms and machine learning this barrier has been breached as well.
A society of underemployed people whose one and only job is to pretend to be busy by pushing buttons can now be arbitrarily complex. Sure, our gut feeling might tell us that it will collapse at some point in the near future, but let’s not kid ourselves that “societal complexity” will offer us any key insights into the process. We are not interested in collapse as an abstract concept but in its physical manifestations, and at this point complexity is largely untethered from anything physical as the number of Watts per zillion computer instructions continues to drop. Sorry, Prof. Tainter, we’ll need to move on to something else, or collapse of complex societies will remain a mystery.
Another, only somewhat more fruitful approach, is to look at finance and economics. Here is an entire realm that is quite intentionally untethered from anything physical. Economists are generally opposed to the idea of physical limits, such as nonrenewable natural resources, energy especially. Their starting assumption is that getting something produced is a matter of having the money to pay for it, and money can be loaned into existence as needed. Note that money is a dimensionless quantity: dollars are measured in dollars. Also note that it is circularly defined: how much something is worth depends on its price, and its price depends on how much it is worth, as determined by the market. For any given thing being traded, there is a demand curve and a supply curve, and they are assumed to intersect; but what if these curves (which don’t really exist) don’t intersect at all? A thing called “market equilibrium” is supposed to actually exist—not just in theory—but what if it doesn’t?
You may be persuaded that these are actual mechanisms, and people do still talk about “the laws of economics” without falling down laughing. Or you may believe that these are convenient rationalizations—politically motivated efforts to explain how things seem to have been working (for a short while) in an attempt to legitimize the capitalist system as just, fair and inevitable. Another approach—the one I favor—is to see economics as a system of social control that works while natural resources are plentiful and while the effects of pollution, environmental degradation and societal destruction are not yet fatal. These conditions only last for a time, and after society pushes things beyond the point of no return the theories and rationalizations used to bolster its system of social control will go down in history as just one more defunct pagan cult. After that point the residual commodity value of money, measured in other commodities, depends on its residual uses—whether as kindling or as toilet paper.
It would appear that at this point in time many of the common economic thought patterns that once worked no longer do. One is that low interest rates stimulate economic growth. But a couple of years ago it turned out that it takes four units of debt to produce one unit of GDP growth. And now that number is closer to 10. If growth doesn’t keep up with debt, that debt isn’t ever going to be repaid. But what if we make it so that the debt can just keep piling up, by keeping interest rates at zero or, better yet, driving them negative?
There used to be a sort of “law of economics” (go ahead, laugh!) advocated by none other than Alan Greenspan, that debt to GDP ratios over 100% lead to hyperinflation and national bankruptcy. Did some major breakthrough occur that has invalidated this “law”? Maybe it’s just a bit slow to kick in for the national bankruptcies of huge entities like the US, Japan and the Eurozone. If so, all we have to do is wait…
If interest rates are at zero or negative, there is no way to safely invest one's savings at a positive rate of return, and the idea of owning money becomes less attractive. Why save for retirement if your savings are going to evaporate over time, eaten up by inflation, which, by the way, is not zero. Ah, but you could invest your savings in equities or real estate or tulip bulbs! You could, but most people who wish to retire prefer to invest in things that guarantee a certain rate of return. In a zero-growth environment, speculative investments become a zero-sum game: somebody wins (usually, somebody who is already very wealthy and has access to insider information and cheap credit) and the rest of us lose.
At this point, the only way to keep the economy from cratering is to take on debt at an ever-accelerating rate while blowing ever-larger financial bubbles. Nobody knows when that horse is going to round up and kick us in the head, but we all know that the moment is coming. And now that we’ve pushed this situation too far, what are our options? Well, none, really. All we can do is wait for the deflationary collapse, as currencies hyperinflate, financial bubbles pop and most of what is currently considered “wealth” turns into a pile of worthless stranded assets—useless things which nobody can sell or afford to maintain in salable condition.
That is probably as well as we can do with a fictional realm such as finance and economics. But perhaps we can do better when looking at physical systems—ones which are described using physically measurable units rather than notional, circularly defined quantities such as USD, EUR or JPY. The obvious place to look is energy, because energy—transportation fuels and electricity—is the vital ingredient which the global industrial economy needs in order to operate.
There is a basic thought pattern that goes like this: the more you drill for oil, the more energy you will produce. This used to be true a hundred times over: use up one unit of energy drilling a well in West Texas, and 100 units of energy come gushing out of the ground. But this doesn’t seem to be true any more. Yes, volumes of oil being produced are still impressive, but how much of that energy gets sucked right back into the ground, in the form of direct and indirect exploration and production costs? Every year, a greater and greater share! And it appears that something broke already. Look at this chart : vehicle miles traveled increased monotonically every year until 2007. After that, oil volumes stayed almost constant, or even increased slightly, but vehicle miles traveled shrunk by close to half a trillion miles per year.
It looks like we took a formula—drilling for oil produces more energy—and have pushed it too far, and are approaching the point where drilling for oil produces less energy than not drilling for oil. But many people believe that we still have other options. Do we?
One proposal is to shift to electric cars. Except for a few applications, mostly having to do with light rail and golf carts, electricity is a very poor source of energy for transportation. The proportion of energy delivered to the wheels is much smaller than with liquid fuels. There are losses in transforming mechanical or solar energy to electricity; there are transmission losses; there are losses in batteries; finally, there are losses in the electric motors. A vehicle that uses internal combustion can be as much as 30% efficient (there are hard thermodynamic limits and inevitable inefficiencies). An electric vehicle, if you cross-multiply all the losses, is at best 10% efficient. Given the same amount of energy, there can be less than half as many electric vehicle-miles as internal combustion vehicle-miles. Perhaps we can convert to electric cars—if we drive half as far or if half of us give up driving.
Another often overlooked fact is that a wholesale conversion to electric cars will destroy the market for gasoline. Nobody is even suggesting getting rid of diesel trucks or construction equipment, emergency diesel generators or locomotives, or ships which run on bunker fuel, or having jet aircraft burn anything other than jet fuel, so petroleum distillates will still be in high demand. But they will now be twice as expensive. You see, roughly half of what can be usefully produced from a barrel of crude oil is what ends up being blended and marketed as gasoline. If that half of each oil barrel can’t be sold, the prices of the remaining liquid fuels will double, as will freight rates. This will trigger a recession that will, among other things, destroy demand for electric cars. If gasoline prices drop through the floor and electricity rates shoot through the roof, what sane person would choose an electric car? And so it turns out that converting to electric cars is a good way to… not convert to electric cars.
But what if we came up with new, effective ways to produce electricity using windmills and solar panels? Would you be surprised if doing so turned out to be a good way to produce lesselectricity rather than more while consuming more fossil fuels rather than less? I wouldn’t. Windmills and solar panels are outputs from an intensive industrial process that includes mining, transporting and smelting ore (which uses diesel fuel and coal) and manufacturing (which uses electricity, most of which comes from burning coal or natural gas). They need to be transported and installed (requiring more diesel). They are an intermittent source of power (wind and sunshine are unreliable) and require fossil fuel-based backups. They can’t be used for base load because they are unreliable; and they can’t be used for peak load because they are intermittent. In all, it may very well turn out that the result would be less electricity than could be produced by just burning the fossil fuels.
As if that weren’t bad enough, there are some more things to keep in mind. Such as the fact that just to keep up with global growth in electricity demand would require covering in windmills an area the size of the British Isles every year. Over 50 years, this would mean covering half of Russia with windmills. Also, there is the fact that such a massive investment in windmills would take resources away from other economic activities, so that even if windmills were erected in such wild profusion, the demand for their electricity might by then evaporate, along with much of the rest of the economy.
Rest assured, none of this is likely to happen. Renewable sources of electricity—wind and solar—account for less than 1% of global energy use, and they are unlikely to ever account for much more, in absolute terms. In relative terms, if fossil fuels become unavailable, electricity from wind and solar, along with hydro and residual nuclear, will be all that’s left—for a while, because none of this equipment can be maintained or replaced without fossil fuels.
Some people accept the situation with gasoline and electric transportation, as well as the severe limitations on the use of renewable energy sources, and then go ahead and propose a huge build-out of nuclear power. Alas, this won’t work either. First, nuclear power plants take a long time and a huge amount of fossil fuel-based energy to build. They soak up energy for the two decades or so it takes to build one; then they pay back that energy with the electricity they produce during the following few decades. That is, unless they melt down like Chernobyl or Fukushima, and if they do, then they end up using up much more energy than they could ever have produced in the resources needed to mitigate the ensuing crises.
Also, nuclear power plants are not very maneuverable, and are safest when operated at a constant load level. But electricity demand fluctuates in daily and weekly cycles, and other sources of power—such as natural gas-fired power plants—need to make up for the fluctuations. Thus, the maximum role nuclear power can play is limited.
The final recourse of those in the “But there must be solutions!” camp is to propose technologies that don’t exist. “Why don’t we build lots of nuclear fusion reactors?” they ask. Sure, why not. I’d like to come over and take a look at the production prototype of your brilliant new nuclear fusion reactor. How about next Thursday? OK then, how about two or three decades from now? Still to soon? And how many hundreds of billions of dollars have been squandered on this pet project of yours? Perhaps you’ve been pushing too hard and it’s time to stop.
People—even children—know that it is generally a bad idea to push something too far. They realize that if you do push something too hard, you need to stop, go back, and try something else somewhere else. But societies seem a lot dumber than even the most dim-witted and wayward child: they just push as hard and as long as they can—until something breaks. And then they demand a leader who will comfort them and tell them where to push too hard next. And I don’t think that the world works that way. Nevertheless, plenty of minor and major crooks will see it as being to their personal advantage to mislead and to offer false hopes. Let us instead hope that those among us who are intelligent will recognize who these crooks are and refuse to follow them.
Collapse Mitigation Strategies. Dmitry Orlov, ClubOrlov. May 30, 2017.
Almost a decade ago I wrote an article in which I defined the five stages of collapse, defined as inflection points at which faith in key aspects of the status quo is shattered and a new reality takes hold.
It is useful to have a taxonomy of collapse, even if it’s a tentative one. Treating collapse as one big ball of wax is likely to cause us to believe that everything will melt down all at once, and, barring certain doomsday scenarios, which are probably not even useful to consider, this is not a realistic or a helpful approach.
Also, one big ball of wax is not what we have been observing in the years since I wrote that article. By now, the Earth is a petri dish populated with various strains of collapse—or a collapse soup, if you will. It is an open-air collapse laboratory running many uncontrolled collapse-related experiments at the same time. Perhaps, if we observe carefully, we can learn to discern the various stages and to determine how they interact.
In this update on my February 2008 article, I tackle the issue of collapse mitigation: What can we do to avoid the various worst-case scenarios?
The five stages of collapse parallel somewhat the five stages of grief which Elizabeth Kübler-Ross defined as denial, anger, bargaining, depression, and acceptance. Both sets of stages have to do with psychological phenomena: hers has to do with emotion; mine has to do with faith. After all, concepts such as the value of money or the existence of such things as a free market, democracy and community all have a Tinkerbell quality: once nobody believes that they still exist, they vanish without a trace.
I defined the five stages of collapse as follows:
Stage 1: Financial collapse. Faith in “business as usual” is lost. The future is no longer assumed to resemble the past in any way that allows risk to be assessed and financial assets to be guaranteed. Financial institutions become insolvent; savings are wiped out, and access to capital is lost.
Stage 2: Commercial collapse. Faith that “the market shall provide” is lost. Money is devalued and/or becomes scarce, commodities are hoarded, import and retail chains break down, and widespread shortages of survival necessities become the norm.
Stage 3: Political collapse. Faith that “the government will take care of you” is lost. As official attempts to mitigate widespread loss of access to commercial sources of survival necessities fail to make a difference, the political establishment loses legitimacy and relevance.
Stage 4: Social collapse. Faith that “your people will take care of you” is lost, as local social institutions, be they charities or other groups that rush in to fill the power vacuum run out of resources or fail through internal conflict.
Stage 5: Cultural collapse. Faith in the goodness of humanity is lost. People lose their capacity for “kindness, generosity, consideration, affection, honesty, hospitality, compassion, charity” (Turnbull, The Mountain People). Families disband and compete as individuals for scarce resources. The new motto becomes “May you die today so that I die tomorrow” (Solzhenitsyn, The GULAG Archipelago). There may even be some cannibalism.
But emotion does play a role here as well: since the triggering of any one stage of collapse is a matter of faith—and not individual faith but the faith and confidence of large groups of people—the process is governed not by rational calculation but by emotion. Here, the governing emotion is not grief but fear: fear of being caught out as the last fool to believe in a lie. Because of this effect, any one stage of collapse can produce panic and cause a stampede from one stage to the next.
Stages of collapse can overlap and can occur out of order. In Yemen it was political collapse that occurred first. Zimbabwe and Venezuela led with commercial collapse. In parts of the United States social and cultural collapse have largely run their course even as the financial-commercial-political realm, with its guardians ensconced in certain key cities, continues to hold together for the time being.
But it still makes sense to define a paradigmatic collapse cascade that goes from Stage 1 through Stage 5.
Financial collapse leads the procession because it is by far the most fragile, thus the most likely to fall over and shatter first. It rests on the premise that it is possible to endlessly borrow from the future and expect repayment. This is sometimes possible, but it requires economic growth to outpace the increase in debt. If the economy grows nicely, debt repayment is not particularly onerous; if the economy shrinks, then debt balloons and eventually has to be written off. In a close to zero-growth environment, which has existed since the financial collapse of 2008, the entire financial realm is hollowed out and turns into a pure pyramid scheme. And as with any pyramid scheme, any disruptive event, even a minor one, can serve to undermine faith in it and cause it to collapse.
Commercial collapse can be brought about by any number of causes (farming collapse in Zimbabwe, oil prices falling below production costs in Venezuela) but what is most effective in bringing it about is financial collapse. Most commercial transactions—such as loading cargo onto ships—require access to credit, and when the financial realm becomes compromised access to credit is usually the first casualty. In a global economy with supply chains stretching across oceans and continents, once the movement of cargos becomes impaired, supply chain cross-contagion sets in. Just one part sourced from across the world can bring production or maintenance operations to a halt, triggering knock-on effects that shut down more and more operations. A point of no return is reached when the affected enterprises, no longer able to provide services or to ship products, but still forced to pay their fixed costs, and unable to borrow to cover them, run out of cash.
In turn, commercial collapse causes the tax base to evaporate, and this triggers political collapse. Governments are incapable of discharging their obligations unless tax receipts are flowing in, or unless they can continue borrowing vast sums for deficit financing, or, increasingly, both. With the mechanisms of credit creation seized up and with commerce at a standstill, governments are forced to make deep cuts in law enforcement, defense, pensions, health care and other areas. This renders the government impotent and useless in the eyes of the people.
Once that happens, the population starts ignoring the government and taking matters into their own hands. The inflection point comes when the government is forced to abrogate its responsibility to maintain a monopoly on violence. (This barrier was recently breached in the Ukraine, where rogue nationalist militia blockaded railway lines that brought in the coal needed to keep the lights on but was not dealt with, and now dictates government policy using the threat of government overthrow.) Once that point is reached, political collapse is assured.
The first three stages of collapse—financial-commercial-political—form a distinct cluster. Although triggering sequences can be different from the paradigmatic collapse cascade described above—commercial failure or political disruption can and sometimes do lead—the end result is always the same: Stage 3 collapse, with society subsisting in conditions of stable disorder that are often termed a “failed state.”
At this point, numerous well-informed people see it as valid to think that the first three stages of collapse are inevitable at the global level: global finance is characterized by already unsustainable yet still exponentially increasing levels of debt; global commerce is underpinned by fast-dwindling reserves of nonrenewable natural resources, fossil fuels in particular, but with fresh water and arable land not far behind, with nothing to take their place; and the very concept of global governance is but a sad joke when numerous national governments, including in the US, have surrendered their sovereignty to transnational business and banking cabals and act as rogue states with regard to international law.
Social and cultural collapse can be tied in with the other stages, or they can exist on an entirely different timeline, depending on the extent to which social and cultural institutions have been financialized, commercialized and politicized, rendering them fragile and unstable. Separatist groups and subcultures—the Pashtuns of the tribal areas of Pakistan, the Roma (Gypsies), the Anabaptists (Amish, Mennonites and Hutterites) in the Americas, off-grid homesteaders, certain indigenous tribes living in remote areas—are sufficiently decoupled from finance, commerce or politics to be able to survive their demise relatively unperturbed.
This is not the case in the developed world, where even personal relationships such as child-rearing and taking care of one’s elderly parents have been largely replaced with commercial or public services, and where even sexual and romantic relationships are often commercially mediated by social media and dating services. And while many rural areas around the world offer at least some opportunities for self-sufficient subsistence, the larger cities have essentially none: they must be continually resupplied with food and other consumer products, either through commerce or through emergency humanitarian aid. A combination of commercial and political collapse is usually sufficient to disrupt both of these.
In view of the above, what opportunities are there for collapse avoidance or collapse mitigation?
With regard to financial collapse, the steps needed to avoid it—repudiation of unrepayable debt, reintroduction of sound money principles, regulating financial services as public utilities and so on—are exactly the same as the steps needed to bring it on. In fact, much smaller steps would be sufficient to trigger it: raising interest rates to their historical average of a few percent, removing initially “emergency” but now structural fiscal and monetary stimulus, perhaps even just reinstating the commonsense requirement that collateralized debt instruments be valued based on current market prices of their underlying collateral. In short, the recommendation for avoiding collapse of the financial pyramid amounts to “Don’t even breathe on it!” But since it’s unavoidable, people should feel free to take certain steps to safeguard themselves. Load up on precious metals, along with guns and ammunition with which to stand guard over your hoard. Create local gray/black economies that circumvent the financial realm. Remain poised to short-sell everything in sight.
Although financial collapse appears to be pretty much baked into the cake, there are certain steps that countries, regions and communities can take to protect themselves from its ravages. Some countries are already taking these steps. Since the US will be at the epicenter of the financial black hole that will be formed by a global financial implosion, it makes sense to avoid the use of the US dollar in trade, pursuing policies of import replacement, establishing bilateral trade relationships based on barter, pursuing self-sufficiency in food and other key commodities, energy independence and so on. But there is a limit to how successful such efforts will be once global supply chain cross-contagion sets in and it becomes impossible to source numerous components without which a technologically advanced society ceases to operate. Also, such efforts get in the way of the wholehearted pursuit of economic efficiency and are likely to result in reduced financial performance. For vastly overindebted countries, such underperformance may be sufficient to trigger financial collapse and to destabilize them politically.
Moving on to political collapse, certain governments are more collapse-proof than others. Democratic systems, which form coalitions and define public policy through the interplay of numerous special interests, are by far the most likely to collapse in domino-like fashion as soon as the financial domino topples the commercial domino. They are also the least likely to pursue economically and politically costly policies that would protect them from the ravages of financial collapse, simply because there is no specific special interest and no group of special interests that is willing to sacrifice their share of public wealth in favor of someone else’s economic security. At the other end of the spectrum lie authoritarian regimes, where there is exactly one special interest—the interest of the state—and where the state can go almost arbitrary far in protecting that interest, even to the point of killing, starving or driving out parts of their populations. At the very far end of this spectrum lies North Korea, with its vaunted principle of juche. There, self-sufficiency trumps just about everything.
Note that financial, commercial and political collapse are all mutually reinforcing. A financial crisis disrupts global trade and triggers global supply chain cross-contagion which hinders commerce. As commercial collapse unfolds, numerous assets can no longer be maintained in working order. They become stranded assets and their collateral value evaporates. This, in turn, invalidates the debt instruments that are based on them, pushing financial collapse further on its trajectory. Also, as commerce comes to a standstill, tax receipts dwindle and governments become unable to provide services such as maintaining law and order or feeding and housing indigent segments of their populations. This triggers a crime wave which further drives down property values, deepening the financial collapse. Thus, collapse is not an event but a cyclical phenomenon, with several positive feedbacks, which continues until a stable condition is reached when a much reduced population finds a steady-state subsistence level.
The job of the collapse mitigation consultant does not appear to be a particularly difficult one from an intellectual perspective. How do we postpone (not avoid) financial collapse? “Don’t breathe on it!” (While stockpiling gold, guns and ammo). How do we avoid commercial collapse? Juche! How do we avoid political collapse? Ask the Supreme Leader. How do we avoid social and cultural collapse? Imitate retrograde, illiberal, socially separatist groups.
But the job of the collapse mitigation consultant is thoroughly repugnant (not to put too fine a point on it) from a moral and ethical perspective. None of what is proposed above can possibly be viewed as constructive from a broadly social perspective. It involves chopping away at what many people hold dear: economic prosperity, global competitiveness, democratic and progressive politics, social development individual human rights. And it involves promoting things that many people find repugnant: warlordism, national monopolies, authoritarianism and social and political oppression.
One moral argument that can be made is that what is being proposed is less bad than doing nothing.
There is also the possibility of taking a stance at a meta-level with regard to moral perspectives in general. In light of the looming collapse, most efforts to “do the right thing” are likely to lead to a morass of unintended consequences that will negate the effort. Thus, “doing the least wrong thing” seems like a more viable approach. This has to be argued on a case by case basis, so let us briefly mention some examples.
1. Suppose you view overpopulation as an acute problem and advocate birth control. By so doing you doom to extinction those groups whose reproductive urges you manage to reign in while doing nothing to reign those of religious groups who see it as their sacred duty to take over the entire planet by out-birthing everyone.
2. Suppose you want to help the environment by replacing gasoline-fueled cars with electric ones. By so doing, you destroy the market for gasoline, double the freight rates (because petroleum distillates are now twice as expensive) and… destroy the market for electric cars, because electricity is now much more expensive than gasoline, used gasoline-fueled cars are much cheaper than new electric ones, and only a fool would take an electric car over a gasoline-fueled one.
3. Suppose you believe that the lifetime of industrial civilization can be extended by shifting to renewables and put up lots of wind generators and solar panels. Now you’ve squandered lots of resources on a gigantic set of useless industrial assets with which to blight the landscape. Once global supply chain cross-contagion destroys the supply of products that use electricity (everything that uses electricity is on a replacement schedule) in turn destroying demand for electricity. Of course, the same process would also disrupt replacement and maintenance of wind and solar installations, so that electricity supply would be destroyed as well. In the end, you will have achieved nothing.
4. Suppose you think you can make the world a better place by spreading cell phone service and the internet to every corner of the planet and handing out smartphones. Now young people, seduced by social media and infotainment, lose all desire to till the earth in the manner of their forbearers and crowd into cities to look for work, ideally office work. To feed them, land is bought up and converted to industrial agriculture, poisoning the earth with synthetic chemicals. And when industrial agriculture is blown away by commercial collapse, all this freshly minted office plankton starves. Again, nicely done!
As you see, collapse is not one of these “problems” you can hope to “solve.” Part of what’s going to collapse is the entire value system of the civilized world, to be replaced by something we currently consider far less civilized. There are no good outcomes; but there is always the possibility a less bad outcome. How one goes about advocating for less bad outcomes (either with or without donning Macchiavelli’s cape) is a conversation we need to have. “Things could be even worse” is not the catchiest slogan in the world; but what if that’s all we have?
Past-Peak America. Dmitry Orlov, ClubOrlov. Jun. 6, 2017.
Most places we care to look, we can observe a commonplace pattern: some phenomenon reaches its all-time peak shortly before commencing a swift or a steady decline. Drug habits reach their maximum dosage right before the addict overdoses. Morbidly obese patients attain their maximum weight right before their internal organs give out. Fever reaches its peak right before it breaks, and then the patient either recovers or dies. Water surges to its highest level right before the dam breaks. Financial pyramid schemes reach their pinnacle right before they fail.
Even during the downward slide a temporary improvement is sometimes possible. For example, the US reached its all-time peak in crude oil production around 1970. After that, oil production declined for decades, with a minor, temporary improvement when production from Prudhoe Bay in Alaska went on stream in the summer of 1977, and a major one achieved using hydrofracturing technology and a very large and mostly unprofitable speculative investment.
If you still think that “fracking” is a game-changer, consider that the technique was pioneered by the Soviets back in the 1950s, but they determined it to be a waste of resources and have never used it. What made the Americans turn to this old and discarded technique was desperation: they had virtually nowhere else left to drill except in shale. While fracking has produced a temporary glut of both oil and gas, fracked wells deplete extremely fast, and thus the surge in production is going to be but a blip—an impressive one, but still just a blip—on a trajectory of overall decline.
But this, most likely, won’t even matter. If you look at other things that have recently peaked, are peaking now, or are likely to peak in the near future, there aren’t going to be as many reasons to burn oil in the US. If inexorable decline in crude oil production is paralleled by inexorable decline in other areas, then it will all work out nicely, at least in the sense that it won’t be an oil shortage that will be the main driver of collapse.
Instead, there are many drivers of collapse, and they are of two kinds: the waning of all that has so far prevented collapse from occurring, and the waxing of all that accelerates it. Let’s take a closer look.
Although there is still a great deal of discussion of GDP growth—is it 0.7% or 1.2%?—the real number is negative. The way to arrive at it is to take the dollar amount of GDP increase and to subtract from it the increase in federal debt. And then it will turn out that so far this century the US economy has been shrinking steadily. But this point is not commonly made, and for a good reason: it is very hard to justify piling on more debt onto a shrinking economy. But piling on more debt is at this point essential; it is what is keeping the economy on artificial life support and the various financial bubbles from popping. Not that this is any sort of long-term solution. It is inevitable that at some point any further increase in federal debt will start having the opposite of the intended effect: instead of extending financial euphoria, the patient will get paranoid.
While GDP is just a statistic concocted by economists, there are other, slightly more tangible quantities that are also declining, and that largely explain the decline in GDP. What drives GDP growth is consumer demand—consumers earning and spending money. It accounts for roughly 2/3 of all economic activity in the US. And here we have a major problem: wages have been stagnant for generations now.
While previously the gap between earnings and expenditures has been papered over with consumer debt, this process has now run its course, with federal debt having to pick up the slack from slowing growth in consumer debt. In recent years, most of the increase in private debt has been in the form of student loans and car loans and such a thing as medical debt.
It is notable that all of the different kinds of debt enumerated above are in some sense bad. One person’s debt is another person’s asset, and the value of that asset depends on the plausibility of repayment which, in turn, rests on the earning prospects of the debtor. In the case of federal debt, the debtor is incapable of producing meaningful economic growth in spite of going into debt faster and faster. In the case of consumer debt, it is the stagnating earnings of the consumer that make it risky. In case of student debt, it is the value of the diploma, at a time when something like half of all diplomas granted in the US turn out to be worthless for finding professional employment. Looking at the used car market and the ridiculous number of unsold new cars rotting away in giant parking lots, auto loans seem to be badly out of line with the value of their collateral. And with over half a million people in the US going through medical bankruptcy every year the prospects of collecting on medical debt do not appear rosy either.
The creditors who own all of this debt may appear rich on paper, but taking into account the quality of the debt, they may turn out to be exactly as poor as the debtors. Clearly, the US is not at peak debt just yet, but there are some ominous signs. First, there seems to be a political problem with raising the federal debt limit beyond the $20 trillion or so where it is currently stuck. Second, dramatic cuts have been proposed to a large number of government programs, including in science, education, medical research, environmental protection and the arts.
Third, Trump has recently been circulating about the planet trying to shake down various “allies.” He flew to Saudi Arabia and got the Saudis to sign a weapons deal that may eventually yield $350 billion. Keep in mind that the Saudi military is beyond pathetic, unable to subdue even the Yemenis, and that even with the help of US advisers. Giving them lots of weapons won’t change that; it will be just another ridiculous “train and equip” fiasco, to go with the ones in Afghanistan, Iraq, Syria and elsewhere. But Saudi cash is real (while supplies last) and that is all that matters. Trump also tried to talk up some sort of grand alliance—an Arab NATO—but that plan has already fallen apart amidst a major diplomatic row between Qatar and several other Arab states.
Trump then flew to Brussels and tried to wring some cash out of NATO members. He came very close to telling them that the US will only defend them if they pay up. To make his point, he shoved Mr. Montenegro aside and told him and Mrs. Lithuania (both of them useless as far as buying lots of expensive US weapons) to go stand in the back. This has not produced the intended result. Instead, Frau Merkel started making noises about Europeans no longer being able to count on the US. And then a big chunk of NATO fell off: Turkey, which has the second largest military in all of NATO, has pretty much shut out Germany from its airbase at Incirlik. Not one to mince words, Putin, speaking at the St. Petersburg economic forum, said that “If NATO fell apart, that would be helpful.”
Back in Washington, Trump took another cost-cutting measure by opting out of the Paris Agreement on Climate Change. Nobody ever said that cutting CO2 emissions wouldn't cost money, and money is a problem. First, the Paris agreement relies on increased burning of fossil fuels—to fuel economic growth, of course!—and to offset the resulting increase in CO2 emissions it promises to press into service a nonexistent technology for sequestering the carbon.
Actually, there is a really neat, proven piece of technology for sequestering carbon. It’s called “trees.” You plant a tree, let it grow, chop it down, burn it down to charcoal (while using the resulting carbon monoxide as fuel) and drill the charcoal into the soil. This works like a charm! Soil fertility is improved, and the carbon stays in the soil practically forever. But there isn’t enough land for this, because all of the arable land is needed to grow food to feed people.
Second, since even increased fossil fuel burning would not be enough to power the sort of economic growth that the Paris Agreement signatories wished for, it also calls for increased use of nuclear power. Given the much-worse-than-zero results from events such as Chernobyl and Fukushima Daiichi, the dangerous state of many of the existing nuclear installations around the world, the lack of money to decommission even the existing nukes and the unsolved problem of long-term nuclear waste storage, this seems beyond foolhardy. Still, the enticing smell of government money—for developing CO2 sequestration technology and for building up nuclear power—is making corporate lobbyists line up behind the Paris Agreement and to protest Trump’s decision to pull out of it.
In this, corporate lobbyists are not alone. The Paris Agreement also calls for hundreds of billions of aid to developing countries (promised but so far not even pledged), so that they too can get on with the program of limiting CO2 emissions, CO2 sequestration, and maybe even build a few nukes. That was the main reason that so many of them signed on to the agreement. And now there is Trump, who looks at all of the above—the corporate lobbyists and execs as well as the magnates and potentates from countries whose main source of energy is twigs and dung (which are, for once, renewable!)—and thinks: “Freeloaders! Go stand in the back!” And that is very upsetting for freeloaders. But what do they expect from the leader of a country that is circling the drain economically and financially?
Clearly, Trump doesn’t have the money to fix the climate, so he won't even try. Nor does he have the time: he’s got a little over three years to make America great again. But can he? What if America is already past peak greatness?
The stagnant wages certainly tell that story. If people earned more, they’d spend more, demand would pick up and meaningful economic growth might become a possibility again. But businesses in the US are locked into a vicious cycle: stagnant wages result in soft demand, which calls for cost-cutting measures, and cutting labor costs is usually at the top of the list.
Employers in the US are already quite good at wringing every last bit of productivity out of their employees, with long work hours, short or nonexistent paid vacations, no paid maternity leave (uniquely among developed countries), poor job security to keep people desperate for any kind of work, and the threat of losing access to somewhat affordable health care to top it all off.
But that’s not good enough, and so they are eager to offshore jobs to low-cost countries and to replace people with robots. They are in no position to raise wages; that would hurt their competitiveness, put them in danger of a shareholder rebellion or a hostile takeover, and potentially put them out of business.
Moreover, it seems strange to hope that employers will somehow manage to resurrect peak greatness, because the US appears to be past peak employment. The rosy unemployment statistics, which indicate close to full employment, are being faked by not counting close to 100 million working-age people who are considered “not in labor force.” This number has been growing steadily over the recent years and setting new records.
You’d think that 100 million working-age people could quite easily be put to work making America great again for a fraction of what it has cost to do such things as “training and equipping” a bunch of Arab mercenaries who then go over and join ISIS. These 100 million people could build community clinics to bring down the cost of health care. They could put together community transportation systems (such as jitney services, like the ubiquitous Mexican comunitarios) to bring down transportation costs. They could plant community farms to bring down the cost of food. They could build housing for the burgeoning ranks of the homeless.
Would such measures make America great again? No, of course not! They would undermine corporate profitability and hurt growth, and without growth the debt burden becomes unsupportable. As I mentioned, there hasn’t been any growth anyway once you subtract the increase in federal debt. But few people are willing to discuss this point, probably for fear of popping financial bubbles in such things as stocks, real estate and higher education.
* * *
When things go steadily from bad to worse, it becomes impossible to make money by making things better, but it still remains possible to make money by making things get worse faster. The downward slide automatically produces a large set of perverse incentives.
For example, declining public health makes disease into a profit center. Hospitals stop avoiding medical complications, because they allow them to charge extra. Doctors overprescribe anything they can get away with in order to keep the patients coming back for more. Defense contractors take great pains to make every project into the largest possible boondoggle, in order to be able to charge extra for maintenance. Politicians use domestic politics to poison international relations by making unsubstantiated allegations against foreign leaders.
And all of the above are trying to grab a piece before it all falls apart. At this point, much of the world is thinking, “Look out for Americans; everything they touch turns to shit.” Clearly, the US is nowhere near peak shit yet.
The most pronounced form of self-destruction is likely to be political, with the US becoming increasingly Balkanized along the lines of race, class, religion and regional affiliation. Race is a particularly toxic part of this mix. The US was traditionally a very racist country. After the civil rights movement racism was repressed and its existence denied.
But now a new sort of racism has reared its ugly head. For lack of a better name, I will call it “multi-racism”: you can be any color you like except white. Being female or gay is accepted as an extenuating circumstance, but the unreformed heterosexual white male is painted as an abomination and considered unacceptable. The same incendiary rhetoric that was once used to vilify the Negro—as a potential rapist—is now being used to vilify the heterosexual white male.
Internationally, this multi-racism expresses itself as Russophobia. After all, Russia is the homeland of the unapologetically heterosexual white male, and the woman who loves him and bears him children, preferably male ones. Their typical stance against homosexuality—as an aberration to be tolerated, not criminalized but not to be flaunted, propagandized or celebrated either—is painted as backward and a violation of human rights. And no racist vilification would be complete without overtones of rape: the Russians are aggressive, they invade, they want to dominate! As is usual now, no evidence of such crimes is required: if a few “anonymous sources” say so, that is now considered good enough for a news story.
The Russian reaction to this outburst of Russophobia is quite telling. It is basically the way one would deal with a hysterical girl who is standing on a window ledge screaming her head off while holding a toy gun to the head of a teddy bear. You certainly wouldn’t want to make deals with such a person, but it is important to keep the conversation flowing, keeping it friendly and avoiding any sudden moves. If all goes well, the girl will start sobbing, climb down and want a hug, a glass of warm milk and a cookie.
At last week’s St. Petersburg Economic Forum there was a very large American delegation: all the heterosexual white alpha males you can squeeze into a group photo. And then, rather incongruously for such a serious gathering, there was in attendance a certain Kewpie doll by the name of Megyn Kelly. She was a good sport. She made a fool of herself but she provided plenty of comic relief. She “moderated” the plenary session, and it was quite hilarious.
Megyn kept asking Putin about US intelligence reports of Russian “meddling” in the US presidential election, but she hadn’t read those reports. She had only read the public, unclassified versions. But Putin had read those reports (because Washington leaks like sieve; no hacking required) and said that there is nothing in them except unsubstantiated allegations and conclusions drawn from them. Back in his KGB days, he said, they were taught to report names, places and dates; where are they?
That’s about as much of a rise as the multi-racist Team Russophobia is ever likely to get out of the Russians, but things are likely to get risky when it comes to America’s own unapologetically heterosexual white male population. A lot of them are militarily trained, heavily armed and, at this point, rather short-fused. Those who are pushing the US toward increasing cultural and political Balkanization while poisoning international relations for the sake of domestic partisan advantage better knock it off, and soon, because we all want the US to remain very much past peak civil war.
The Terrorizers, The Terrorists, and the Terrorized. Dmitry Orlov, ClubOrlov. Jun 13, 2017.
The word “terrorism” is getting thrown around a lot. Wipe it out in one place, and it pops up in another. Outside of various places in which terrorism forms a backdrop of foreign invasion and civil war, such as Iraq and Afghanistan, where the drumbeat of terrorist attacks is constant and increasing, terrorism is not one of the primary causes of death. Among Western nations, death due to choking on food is still far in the lead, not to mention fatal falls due to broken furniture and accidental impalements on household implements. But such deaths are hardly ever staged as public art pieces, whereas acts of terrorism are quintessentially public acts, designed to panic large numbers of people and to cause even larger numbers to feel unsafe in public spaces and while traveling—for a while, until the effect wears off. And then it’s time for another one.
The current spate of terrorist attacks in the West smacks of Commedia dell’Arte: there are set, mask-wearing types enacting scripted roles, with some improvisation. Certain touches, such as a perpetrator’s passport, in undamaged condition, left at the scene of the crime, have become de rigeur. It is also important that the perpetrator be known to the authorities charged with fighting terrorism, to maximize the sense of insecurity and the general embarrassment.
The battle cry of “Allahu akbar!” is used to signal that this is not an unsuccessful experiment involving kitchen cutlery, the inability to keep a car off the sidewalk or the result of technical difficulties with one’s explosive vest. Those would be suicides. Yes, special effects such as detonating a small nuclear charge 50m in the bedrock under a skyscraper or two (or three) lend credence to your cause, but really all you need is a box cutter... and a warm bath.
Terrorism used to be a tactic used by popular insurgencies. The Zionists terrorized the Palestinians (using money from American Jews), the IRA terrorized the Unionists (using money from American Irish), and so on. There was usually some financial support for such groups, and normally it came from abroad. Because funding terrorism has traditionally been frowned upon in polite company, such funding had to be kept clandestine, and the schemes that were hatched to keep them that way sometimes became quite Baroque. A prime example is the funding of the Nicaraguan Contras by the Reagan administration, which sold weapons to Iran in circumvention of an arms embargo and tried to funnel the proceeds to the Contras. A rare moment of terrorism-inspired hilarity was afforded by Oliver North, the “mute Marine,” when he appeared before Congress and was asked to explain himself, giving rise to this bit of comedy.
Terrorism has long been a favorite form of combat among certain groups because it is a lot cheaper than other types of warfare. To field an army, you have to provide it with quarters, rations, uniforms, pocket money, medical care and much else. And then when you send it into action, they better not die; anything over a 10% casualty rate causes morale to plummet. Also, for an army to be effective, it has to consist of first-rate people: intelligent, fearless and fit.
Not so with terrorism. Here, you have to provide just three things: indoctrination, training and weapons. Everything else—shelter, food, medical care, pocket money—are provided free of charge by the target society once the terrorist has been inserted into it. A 100% casualty rate is generally considered acceptable and does not cause morale problems, because the explicit goal of the terrorist is to die heroically.
Indoctrination is by far the most important factor in reaching this goal. Its best targets are weak-minded, weak-willed, easily dominated individuals with an acute sense of grievance—losers, essentially. The best candidates come from a long line of losers, so that their ancestors’ grievances can be weaponized as well. The ideology that can be used most effectively to brainwash them is a sort of mystical primitivism: you have suffered because of infidels; become one of the righteous, kill the infidels and ascend unto heaven.
The rest of it consists of lessons on how to be righteous—not at all like the filthy infidel pigs—and the most important aspect of the training is the operant conditioning for blind, unquestioning obedience using both positive and negative reinforcement. Some weapons training may be provided as well. Such weaponized losers are far easier and cheaper to produce in large quantities than competent and talented military cadres.
Producing an effective terrorist onslaught requires good cost control; because terrorists are disposable items, you need many more of them. Indoctrination is by far the most expensive part of the production process, and for purposes of indoctrination the brand of militant Islam practiced by the Wahhabi sect (which rules Saudi Arabia and Qatar) seems the most cost-effective. Other Moslems, be they Sunni or Shia, refer to Wahhabis as a “vile sect” or a “Satanic cult.” But Wahhabism does solve a problem: it is perfect for indoctrinating losers and turning them into mass murderers.
Unlike dim-witted angry losers, candidates for competent and talented military cadres are in short supply throughout most of the developed world. It’s still possible to scare some up in a pinch, but only for a worthy cause, such as defending the motherland. If what you need is an expeditionary force to die so that the bankers can go on getting richer, or to seize control of natural resources from which the bankers want to profit, then the best you can hope for is the same caliber of recruit that makes good terrorists—slum dwellers or the rural poor with no other job prospects.
You can also hire mercenaries, who can be slightly more competent than those recruited from among the underclass, but effective mercenaries are expensive and not the least bit dispensable. In fact, mercenaries tend to be downright allergic to dying, and so the best that can be done with them is to use them to “train and equip” what are euphemistically called “local security forces.” Or you can just skip the whole silly charade and “train and equip” some terrorists.
After losing in Vietnam, the US military found that it had a major problem. There were still geopolitical skirmishes and natural resource grabs on the agenda, but it had nobody to fight in them because the US military was suffering from the Vietnam syndrome and had to remain confined to barracks. Yes, terrorists could be pressed into service for various local, low-grade conflicts, to grind down some uncooperative regime, but that wasn’t enough to help with the big picture of superpower geopolitics.
And then an evil genius by the name of Zbigniew Brzeziński came along, and with Jimmy Carter’s help hatched an ingenious plan to use Saudi-brainwashed, CIA-armed terrorists (called mujaheddin at the time) to defeat the Soviets in Afghanistan. The Soviets eventually decided that they had had enough and pulled out. Their big mistake was in trying to do the right thing: to establish and support a modern state in what was and remains to this day an essentially Medieval, feudal, tribal country. The Americans tried to do the wrong thing—wreck Afghanistan as a way of handing defeat to the Soviets, and then ignored it and let it collapse—and in this alone they have succeeded.
Brzeziński died earlier this year, to enthusiastic rounds of applause and loud cries of “It’s about time!” The evil that his genius plan had unleashed on the world has given us the Taliban in Afghanistan (soon to be in charge there again, alongside ISIS, once the Americans finally give up). Turning Afghanistan into a terrorist breeding ground then gave us 9/11. However you wish to spin it, that event featured some terrorists—whether as essential personnel or as props and extras. That, in turn, gave us Iraq and Afghanistan. And Iraq gave us ISIS, first in Iraq and then in Syria. And now ISIS has spread to Libya, Afghanistan and the Philippines. Had Brzeziński died 40 years ago—from choking on his food, say, or from a freak accident with kitchen cutlery—then there is a good chance that none of this would have happened.
If it weren’t for Brzeziński, the children of the many millions who died or were displaced as a result of the Soviet collapse, which was triggered in some measure by the fiasco in Afghanistan, would perhaps still be alive and living at home today. The success of the “train and equip” terrorist mission in Afghanistan then convinced the Americans and the Saudis to try the same thing in Russia’s province of Chechnya. The USSR was by then no more, but, just to be thorough, they also wanted to destroy Russia. In went the Wahhabi brainwashers and the CIA weapons peddlers; out went corpses of Russian servicemen, along with plenty of dead Chechens. Two bloody wars later, the Russians won. This, by the way, makes Russia the only country in the world which has the knowhow to defeat terrorism. They proved it in Chechnya, which is now loyal, stable and prosperous, and they are proving it again in Syria.
Meanwhile, Brzeziński, unable to rest on his laurels as the most evil-minded fucker ever born, hatched more brilliant plans: he decided that Russia could no longer be an empire without the Ukraine, and that therefore the Ukraine should be brainwashed into a sort of anti-Russia. He was by then too senile to notice that Russia was no longer an empire and had no desire to become one again, but everyone in Washington just nodded. The Ukrainian Nazis—a special cultivar imported from the US and Canada—provided the congenital loser raw material to weaponize.
That plan was fully operationalized by 2014, and since then the Ukraine has been plumbing the depths of each of the five stages of collapse. I am only 99% unhappy with this result; 1% of me thinks, “What a wonderful case study of collapse!” But the now very poor Ukrainians, once the richest, most prosperous Soviet Socialist Republic, certainly didn’t deserve any of this. Here, Russia’s anti-terrorist knowhow has so far been of limited help: it froze the conflict, but it could not stop and reverse the slide into failed-statedom. Nevertheless, victory in the Ukraine has proven as elusive for Zbignew’s Mousketeers as in Chechnya or in Syria.
Meanwhile, other events have overshadowed the fiasco in the Ukraine: the all-but-assured defeat of the Mousketeers in Syria has spelled trouble in the Wahhabi-terrorist paradises of Saudi Arabia and Qatar. Preposterously, Saudi Arabia, along with Trump (who is soft-skulled when it comes to foreign policy, along with much else) has accused Quatar of sponsoring terrorism! “You mean, just like you? No! We couldn’t possibly afford to keep up with you!” would be a most reasonable Qatari retort. Clearly, this is all complete nonsense. But then what is really going on?
I believe it’s simple. Everyone can see that the US military empire is circling the drain. All you have to do is look at the action in Mosul and Raqqa. To forestall the inevitable, Trump trying to milk the Saudis for all they are worth, and to shake down NATO “partners” (which Putin has recently downgraded to “vassals”). But even firing a money cannon in the general direction of the US military-industrial complex isn't going to help because of certain inconvenient facts on the ground.
Syria has been lost, and with it the long-cherished plan to build a gas pipeline through it running from Qatar through Turkey and then on to the EU, providing an alternative to Russia’s Gazprom. The other plan, which the Russians prefer, is to run a pipeline from Iran, through Iraq, Syria and Turkey, to the EU. Qatar and Iran share a giant offshore gas field that would provide the gas for this new pipeline. Qatar will pay plenty for access to that pipeline, because shipping liquefied natural gas, as it is forced to do now, is even more expensive.
Apparently, now that terrorism isn’t working like it’s supposed to, Wahhabism is turning out to be not so useful and the Wahhabis are starting to terrorize each other. Hate-filled zealotry is no longer enough to keep the lights on and the air conditioners humming. Of course, if it stops working in one place, it may simply be time to try it in another. But perhaps not; in this networked world, you can't be a complete loser somewhere without becoming known as a complete loser everywhere.
With terrorists, as with insects, you can swat at the individual ones, or you can lay out some bait for them to take back to their nest. The idea of Qatar buying into the Iran-Iraq-Syria-Turkey gas pipeline is just such bait: it is making the Wahhabi terrorist sponsors turn on each other. This is actually a most welcome development. I hope that Hell has cable television for Zbigniew to watch as he is slow-cooked to perfection.
Are Humans Even Necessary? Dmitry Orlov, ClubOrlov. Jun 20, 2017.
The next assumption to question is that the machines serve human needs and wants. Yes, there is still plenty of evidence that they do, for quite a lot of people, and in the more stable and prosperous societies most of the people are provided for in some manner. But there has been a marked tendency for societies around the world to become less stable and less prosperous over time, as resources are depleted and the environment degrades. The typical solution to that has been the imposition of austerity, which deprioritizes human needs over those of the machines—industrial, commercial and financial—which must continue functioning in order for the rich to continue to get richer. Perhaps the situation where the machines serve human needs is a transient one? Perhaps most humans are just a legacy cost, to be eliminated in the next round of cost-cutting?
To be sure, the machines would still be required to serve the needs of the billionaires, and the millionaires who serve them. But as for the rest of humanity, perhaps at this point it is just an unnecessary burden from the machines’ point of view? Indeed, it would appear that many different efforts are underway to whittle away at this burden. Let us take a trip down memory lane, to see where we came from, and then try to catch a glimpse of where we might be headed.
Once upon a time, so the story goes, there lived some humans. They lived in bands and tribes, close to nature. They fished, hunted, gathered or cultivated food, made their own clothing and shelter, brought up their own children and took care of their own elderly relatives. The men were manly and made war on each other as they saw fit. The women were womanly and ruled the home and the hearth.
Fast-forward a bit, and the story changes. Now these same humans are found living in boxes constructed for them (called “housing”), dress in clothes made for them by machines, eat industrally produced and processed food packaged in plastic and allow their children to be brought up by strangers while the adults—men and women both—work in factories, producing things for others to consume, in exchange for money. Men and women no longer have distinct roles (aside from child-bearing) and become non-gender-specific abstract units of production. They no longer produce things for themselves because that wouldn’t be as efficient. Instead, they specialize, and are paid to produce things they generally don’t need, so that they can consume other things they generally don’t need, generating piles of trash that are now visible from orbit with the naked eye.
Fast-forward a bit more, and the story changes again. Now these humans don’t even have to work to produce much of anything because most of production has been automated. They are transported in driverless cars and live in 3D-printed houses. It is still their job to consume, but the money to pay for that consumption doesn’t come from work. Instead, those at the bottom collect various social support payments, such as the Guaranteed Basic Income, while those at the top blow financial bubbles and get rich on speculative investments. Those who are particularly well-behaved and obedient still manage to hold on to some administrative functions, but more and more these functions are becoming automated as well. A few more people occupy themselves as “prosumers” who advise others on what to consume, or as consumer advocates. If we consider the United States to be the country in the vanguard of this transition to idle consumerism, then the trend is unmistakable: over 100 million able-bodied working-age adults in the US—close to a third of the population—are currently not working. A tiny percentage of this number is made up of the idle rich; the vast majority are the idle poor.
As this story evolves, the amount of environmental damage humans cause increases by leaps and bounds. To be sure, even humans living close to nature as autonomous tribes can cause considerable environmental damage. But that isn’t a requirement, and many tribes have inhabited the same landscape for thousands of years without having much negative impact at all. The original story was the only one we know of that stood any chance of being never-ending. In it, people took resources directly from nature using their own muscle power and wits, alongside some animal power.
With the exception of firewood and the odd windmill or waterwheel, their sources of energy were all endosomatic—from their own bodies. But as the story evolved, more and more exosomaticsources of energy were brought in to power the various specialized production processes, and now the vast majority of the energy comes from fossil fuels—coal, oil and natural gas—with “renewables” such as wind and solar accounting for around 1% of all energy consumption. (The reason the word “renewables” is in quotes is because they can’t be produced without fossil fuels either: no fossil fuels—no renewable energy.)
The ever-increasing use of exosomatic sources of energy depletes natural resources on one hand and damages the environment on the other. In due course, both of these effects start to impinge on the amount of stuff that can be produced and consumed. As this happens, the machines don’t stop, but they start producing more and more waste heat, or entropy. For example, the fossil fuel industry uses more and more energy on exploration and production, industrial agriculture uses more and more chemicals, and more and more wealth is spent on treating man-made, pollution-related diseases such as cancer.
A secondary effect is that as natural resources become depleted, the effort to continue producing them results in greater environmental devastation: oil from tar sands and fracking is far more damaging than conventional oil wells; coal mining through mountaintop removal is far worse than traditional coal face mining. The result is a vicious cycle. It can’t be reversed, but it can be stretched out in time, by running the machines more slowly and having them serve the needs of fewer humans.
The situation at the endpoint of this process seems rather odd: machines (with a minimum of human intervention) dig up, grow, process, manufacture and transport all manner of products and provide them to a huge population of humans the vast majority of whom have almost nothing to do with the entire production process. It would appear that the humans end up serving just one function: by consuming, they give the machines a reason to produce.
But it is possible to think of other ways to achieve that result. For instance, instead of having a million people consume a dollar’s worth of stuff, it may be more efficient, overall, to have a single very rich person consume a million dollars’ worth of stuff. Also, since they are now faced with resource and environmental constraints, the machines now need less of a reason to produce, not more, in order to keep running longer.
All of this would hint at a great impetus to effect a massive population reduction, so that a few wealthy people could keep coasting along, lavishly provided for by machines chewing through the remaining natural resources while destroying the environment at an ever-accelerating pace. This is not idle speculation but a clear trend. We can observe that just about any large-scale disruption is made use of to push down population numbers. Throughout much of the world, financial and political crises are being used as opportunities to defund the underclass and to further enrich the upper classes. The process by which the rich keep getting richer as the poor keep getting poorer, often given lip service as the problem of inequality, which is to be solved, can also be viewed as a solution: as the poor get poorer, their life expectancy and chances of reproductive success decrease, pushing down their numbers, in turn decreasing the burden on the machines that keep them alive. [ed: or there is always the route from The Kingsman]
Economics is a powerful weapon for effecting population reduction, and has been used with great success in many places. For instance, in Eastern Europe, the destruction of the Soviet industrial legacy and trade relationships has caused the populations of Latvia and Lithuania to decrease by almost a quarter since their independence, and even these numbers are dwarfed by the demographic collapse unfolding in the Ukraine. Greece is in similarly poor shape; there, suicide rates have gone through the roof, especially among the now destitute elderly, while some young people choose to prostitute themselves for the price of a sandwich, or to infect themselves with HIV in order to qualify for financial support.
Another way to whittle down the population is through promoting drug addiction. In the US, there is a pipeline that generates addicts: doctors freely prescribe opioids for pain; patients become addicted; when the prescription runs out, the addicts resort to illegal sources of drugs. Afghanistan, which has been producing bumper crops of opium under the watchful eye of NATO troops, has been very helpful in fueling this wave of opioid addiction. Fentanyl—a powerful synthetic opioid used to “enhance” street heroin—produces an ever-increasing stream of overdoses. The life expectancy of heroin addicts tends to be rather low, and their reproductive success is much lower than the general population.
Yet another way to reduce numbers by reducing reproductive success is to promote gender confusion in young people. By teaching young people that gender is not biologically determined but a choice they are gently prodded into joining the LGBTQ population segment. This segment is known for higher rates of depression and suicide and much lower reproductive success. Since mother and father are genetically programmed human archetypes, their children, should they manage to produce any, are likely to do less well as well. Pushing the LGBTQ agenda is also a good way to produce violent conflict with newcomers from traditional cultures that regard sodomy as a capital offense.
But what if such economic, medical and educational means of population reduction are too slow? Then political methods can be pressed into service. One favored technique is political destabilization, such as we are now seeing in Western Europe with the introduction of millions of migrants—mostly restless young men—from largely incompatible cultures in Africa and the Middle East, who quickly turn predatory with regard to the native population. Although this can be viewed as a way to effect a population increase—through immigration—this is like tossing a few snakes into a cage full of mice: the overall number of animals in the cage increases slightly at first and then declines steadily from then on as slightly more snakes eat up many more of the mice. A disingenuous narrative about human rights, founded on an indoctrinated notion of white guilt, prevents people from reacting to this undermining of their societies for fear of being labeled as fascist or racist.
That the human rights narrative is disingenuous is plain to see in a parallel, complementary development: Russophobia. When the USSR fell apart, around 25 million Russians suddenly found themselves on the wrong side of the Russian border, setting the stage of one of the largest human rights disasters and demographic calamities of the 20th century. But it was roundly ignored and suppressed in the West—because they are Russians. The goal has been to portray them as Untermenschen—not quite human, and therefore uninteresting from a human rights perspective—unless they happen to be LGBTQ, in which case they can be pressed into service in order to accuse Russians of homophobia. In the Baltics and in the Ukraine, the West sees as it as perfectly legitimate to consider Russian residents as second-class citizens. This would be considered as a blatantly racist policy were it applied to any other group of people. But these are Russians, and therefore they don’t matter.
Ironically, being confronted with this wall of indifference and hate has caused the Russians to become rather focused. It is in their national character to be somewhat lackadaisical when times are good and to suddenly become tremendously motivated, organized and effective when the situation is dire. This has already become clear in economics, where Russian businesses have achieved dramatic results thanks to—not in spite of—Western sanctions and have made strides in making Russia self-sufficient in foodstuffs, energy-related technology and other areas. The situation is less clear with regard to politics. On the one hand, there is a clear emphasis on taking care of the people: providing them with better housing, better medical care, good education and so on. On the other hand, as was made clear by the recent annual 3-hour “direct line” with Putin, where people from all over the country asked him on live national television for help with problems their local officials had failed to solve, the political system still operates in a manual mode: you have to get through to the president of the country to get a pothole fixed because local officials are still in their lackadaisical mode. But Putin is a talented bureaucrat and is able to convert such point solutions into systemic policies.
In spite of being made the targets of blatantly racist Western Russophobia, the Russians are not demoralized or intimidated, but chugging along under a good head of steam in the form of righteous indignation and renewed self-confidence. But perhaps making Russians into Untermenschen is not even so much about Russians as it is about testing out a general method. After all, if a huge and powerful country such as Russia can be turned into a pariah in the eyes of the people and the human rights of its population roundly ignored, then demonizing, and then successfully decimating, other, less independent, more fragile countries and ethnic groups around the world shouldn’t pose a problem at all.
First they came for the Russians, and people didn’t say anything, or even cheered. And then they came for the native populations of various other countries, and the Social Justice Warriors cheered. And so on… But who do you think is going to cheer when they come for you? Why, the 1%, of course! Because, you see, technically speaking, the other humans aren’t even necessary.
No comments:
Post a Comment