When progressive revisionists take control of our institutions, our society, and out art…

It’s difficult to measure the damage that an ideology can do on a society. Often you don’t realize what a mess things are until long after the great looting, and destruction. But you can notice events. Often singular events, and often whispered about quietly. And one such event is the purging of art in favor of the formless and meaningless.

Look at the painting above. It is titled “Consulting the Oracle” and was painted by John William Waterhouse. It’s great right? It’s large. It would occupy the wall in a nice sized living room. It’s 77 inches long and 46 inches high. And it’s beautiful. Right?

This painting was very quietly sold by the museum that held it for £5 ($7.50) to a private individual.

I’ve seen cups of coffee that cost more.

The excuse is that the museum needed the money. Bills needed to be paid, and new works of art needed to be purchased to “keep the museum alive and vibrant”. Of course that old “song and dance”. The excuse, a progressive excuse, that you must destroy the old to make room for the new.

Ok.

I’ll bite.

What “new” art was worthy of purchase. How about millions of dollars for this magnificent piece…

This undeniably strange-looking painting of a woman made Willem de Kooning and his estate a few millions richer. The painting recently changed hands to the tune of $137.5 million. This abstract painting was finished by Kooning in 1953. The painting became rather controversial in the 1970s, because it was refused for exhibit at the Tehran Museum of Contemporary Art. This painting is currently privately owned. It spans 68 inches in height and 48.5 inches in width.

Yes. I cannot believe it. Can you?

And we are not alone either…

This painting is awful. 

I get that it’s an abstract expressionist  painting, but it is so hideous to look at. You honestly couldn’t  convince me to take it if I was walking down the street and saw that  laying on the grass. Clearly that means I have no taste because it sold  for a ridiculous $137.5 million in 2006. This made it the 4^th most expensive painting ever sold. 

It was created by painter Williem de Kooning in 1953. 

The buyer, David Geffen, is worth $6.5 billion, so nobody is going to step in and tell him how to spend his money… but are you kidding me?

-10 Ugly Pieces Of Art You Won't Believe Sold For Millions

Who in their right mind made this decision?

The Art Renewal Center chimes in…

From the Art Renewal Center…

Works of art worth tens of millions of pounds today have  been sold off quietly by museums over the past 50 years for a few  pounds. British art institutions such as the Fitzwilliam Museum in  Cambridge and the Exeter City Museum have disposed of pictures by  masters such as  Van Dyck  and  Henri Fantin Latour . They were sold without public notice, dismissed as too unimportant to  keep. Among the most serious cases is a painting by the 19^th-century master,  John William Waterhouse . In 1965, the Royal Cornwall Museum in Truro sold it for £200 ($300) to a private collector; today it is worth more than £5 million ($7.5 million).         
                      
"Most of the works were sold off as they were deemed to be  artistically worthless", Christopher Wright, a leading Old Masters  scholar, said. He discovered evidence of the sales while preparing a  nationwide study of British art for Yale University Press. "They have  been sold off without public notice," he said. "Many of the museums  didn't dare make it public. They've all been proved wrong."         
                      
Mr Wright expressed disbelief at the decision of the Exeter  museum to "rape" its collection of 160 works - "there is no other word  to describe the destruction of an entire museum collection". The  auctions, which involved selling works for as little as £5 ($7.50),  included Waterhouse's Consulting the Oracle, four paintings by Fantin-Latour and one by  Sir Lawrence Alma Tadema . Caroline Worthington, fine art curator at Exeter, said that the sale  took place at Christie's in 1954, "when High Victorian art was deeply  unfashionable ... We would like them back, most definitely." "We're  talking household names", Mr Wright said, adding that many were bought  by the heavyweight dealers Agnews and Colnaghi, who clearly appreciated  the importance of the artists, even if the museums did not.         
                      
Tamsin Daniel, Truro's curator of art and exhibitions, said  that the museum had needed money for storage and a lift. She conceded  that the loss was painful. The Waterhouse went to a private collector  bidding at Christie's. The £200 ($300) it cost him, she said, was "a bit  different to what Andrew Lloyd Webber paid recently for a Waterhouse":  £6.6 million ($9.9 million).         
                      
Leeds City Art Gallery and Museum,  Mr Wright was told by an insider, actually disguised the provenance of  works when selling them through an auction house. "They were described  as property of Madame X," he said. "The sales were clandestine. They  didn't say Leeds was de-accessioning. They were all Victorian pictures  purchased from the Royal Academy. They got rid of dozens." Nigel Walsh,  curator of exhibitions, expressed surprise at the news, denying that the  gallery had sold anything. Nor did Evelyn Silber, its director, know  anything about it until contacted by The Times. She later discovered  that 37 paintings (nearly all Victorian) had been sold in 1939 under the  then director, Philip Hendey, who went on to head the National Gallery in London. The Fitzwilliam  in Cambridge sold more than 200 works in the 1950s. Although they were  marked "property of the Fitzwilliam" in the catalogs, they were mixed up  with hundreds of other lots, Mr Wright said. "They put them through the  salerooms in dribs and drabs."         
                      
Mr Wright said that the Fortune-teller with Soldiers "was sold off as a copy, but it has since been published as the real thing worth millions".         
                      
Craig Hartley, a Fitzwilliam curator, said: "In retrospect,  this seems a horrific thing to have done." Among other institutions to  have sold off paintings, Mr Wright said, were the National Maritime  Museum in Greenwich; the Cooper Art Gallery in Barnsley; the Holbourne  Museum of Art in Bath; and the Birmingham City Art Gallery.

-Art Renewal Center article by Dalya Alberge

I am horrified.

Just beyond my self.

So who ended up getting these magnificent works of art?

"They were described as property of Madame X," he said. "The sales were clandestine. They didn't say Leeds was de-accessioning. They were all Victorian pictures purchased from the Royal Academy. They got rid of dozens."

Well, you must understand that a museum collects works of art for pubic display and enjoyment. If they no longer wants to display that art to the public, they take if off display and put it in storage. Apparently these works took up too much space, so they sold them to “Art Dealers”. And these art dealers held auctions and auctioned them off to wealthy attendees.

Yes.

That’s right. The art was taken away from public display and sold off to the oligarchy for their own personal use.

What has been going on…

Get the entire picture. From a speech by Fred Ross at the Art Renewal Center…

Ladies and Gentlemen ... Artists,

The art of painting, one of the greatest traditions in all of human history has been under a merciless and relentless assault for the last one hundred years. I'm referring to the accumulated knowledge of over 2500 hundred years, spanning from Ancient Greece to the early Renaissance and through to the extraordinary pinnacles of artistic achievement seen in the High Renaissance, 17th century Dutch, and the great 19^th century Academies of Europe and America. These traditions, just when they were at their absolute zenith, at a peak of achievement, seemingly unbeatable and unstoppable, hit the twentieth century at full stride, and then ... fell off a cliff, and smashed to pieces on the rocks below. Since World War I the contemporary visual arts as represented in Museum exhibitions, University Art Departments, and journalistic art criticism became little more than juvenile, repetitive exercises at proving to the former adult world that they could do whatever they damn well wanted ... sadly devolving ever downwards into a distorted, contrived and contorted notion of freedom of expression. Freedom of expression? Ironically, this so-called "freedom" as embodied in Modernism, rather than a form of "expression" in truth became a form of "suppression" and "oppression." Modernism as we know it, ultimately became the most oppressive and restrictive system of thought in all of art history.

Every reasonable shred of order and any standards with which it was possible to identify, understand and to create great paintings and sculpture, was degraded ... detested ... desecrated and eviscerated. The backbone of the painters' craft, namely drawing, was thrown into the trash along with modeling, perspective, illusion, recognizable objects or elements from the real world, and with it the ability to capture, exhibit, and poetically express subjects and themes about mankind and the human condition and about man's trials on this speck of stardust called Earth ... Earth, hurtling through infinity with all of us along on board, along with everything we know and everything we hold dear.

Reason ... philosophy ... religion ... literature ... fantasy ... dreams, and all of the feelings, emotions and pathos of our every day lives ... all of it was no longer worthy of the painter's craft. Any hint by the artist at trying to portray such things was branded as banal, maudlin, photographic, illustration, or petty sentimentality.

Our children, going supposedly to the finest universities in the world, being taught by professors with Bachelors or Arts, Masters of Arts, Masters of Fine Arts, Masters of Art Education ... even Doctoral degrees, our children instead have been subjected to methodical brain-washing and taught to deny the evidence of their own senses. Taught that Mattisse, Cézanne, and Picasso, along with their followers, were the most brilliant artists in all of history. Why? Because they weren't telling us lies like the traditional painters, of course. They weren't trying to make us believe that we were looking at scenes in reality, or at scenes from the imagination, from fantasy or from dreams. They were telling us the truth. They were telling it like it is. They spent their lives and careers on something that was not banal, and not silly, insipid or inane. They in fact provided the world with the most ingenious of all breakthroughs in the history of artistic thought. Even the great scientific achievements of the industrial revolution paled before their brilliant discovery. And what was that discovery for which they have been raised above Bouguereau , exalted over Gérôme , and celebrated beyond Ingres , David , Constable , Fragonard , Van Dyck , and Gainsborough or Poussin ? Why in fact were they heralded to the absolute zenith ... the tiptop of human achievement ... being worthy even of placement shoulder to shoulder on pedestals right beside Rembrandt , Michelangelo , Leonardo , Caravaggio , Vermeer and Raphael ? What did they do? Why were they glorified practically above all others that ever went before them? Ladies and gentleman, they proved ... amazing, incredible, and fantastic as it may seem, they proved that the canvas was flat ... flat and very thin ... skinny ... indeed, not even shallow, lacking any depth or meaning whatsoever.

And the flatter that they proved it to be the greater they were exalted. Cézanne collapsed the landscape, Matisse flattened our homes and our families, and Pollock, Rothko and de Kooning placed it all in a blender and splattered it against the wall. They made even pancakes look fat and chunky by comparison. But this was only part of the breathtaking breakthroughs of modernism ... and their offshoots flourished. Abstract expressionism, Cubism, Fauvism, minimalism, ColorField, Conceptual, op-art, pop-art and post modernism ... and to understand it all ... to understand, took very special people indeed, since the mass of humanity was too ignorant and stupid to understand. Like that famous advertisement in the NY Times said so many years ago ... Bad art ... or Good art? You be the judge, indeed.

Of course, to justify this whole theoretical paradigm, all the artists that painted recognizable scenes with depth and illusion had to be discredited ... and discredited they were, with a virulence and vituperation so scathing and merciless that one would think they must have been messengers of the devil himself to deserve such abuse. And to put the final nail in their coffins, all of their art was banished and their names and accomplishments written right out of history. I graduated with a Master's in art education from Columbia University, and I'd never heard of Bouguereau , much less that he was President of the Academy and head of the Salon ... the most celebrated artist of his time who single handedly, using all of his influence as the most respected leader of art world, opened up L'Ecole Des Beaux Arts and the Salons to women artists for the first time in history.

During most of the 20th century, the type of propaganda that has been hurled at academic artists is so insidious that people have been literally trained to discredit, out-of-hand, any work containing well-crafted figures or elements, or any other evidence of technical mastery. All the beauty and subtlety of emotions, — interplay of composition, design and theme, — the interlacing of color, tone and mood, — are never seen. The viewer has been taught that academic painting on a prima facie basis is bad by definition — bad by virtue of its resorting to the use of human figures, themes or stories and objects from the real world.

Prestige suggestion causes them to automatically assume that a work must be great if it's by any of the "big names" of modern art, so they at once start looking for reasons why it must be proclaimed great. Any failing to find greatness is not considered a failing in the art but in the intelligence and sensibilities of the viewer. Students operating under that kind of intimidating pressure, you can be sure, will find greatness - no matter what they are looking at.

The reverse of this has been trained into them when they view academic paintings. They have been taught that works exhibiting realistic rendering are "bad art" and therefore any good that is seen is not due to qualities inherent in their artistic accomplishments, but are rather due to a lack of intelligence and taste in the viewer. The same intimidating pressure works in reverse to ensure that a work by Bouguereau , Lord Leighton , Burne-Jones , Gérôme , Frederick Hart , or any of the rest of you here, will not be seen as anything other than bad by definition.

No student in a school with this kind of dictatorial brain-washing will ever risk exploring or even listening to opposing views, for fear of being stigmatized from that point on, with some undesirable label and being universally despised ... sadly, a very effective deterrent to independent thought. Thus the visual experience of well-drawn representational elements is perceived as a negative, ad hominem, that proves with knee-jerk automaticity the presumed "badness" of the art and its creator.

It is especially ironic that these are the same people who trumpet the virtues and inalienable right to freedom of speech, while they surreptitiously and steadfastly conspire to remove that freedom from those with whom they disagree.

Equally ironic is the charge that academic painting is "uninspired," a proclamation issued by critics who are unable to see beyond the technical virtuosity for which they condemn it, to see what is being said. This rich visual language is wasted on eyes that will not see. It would be no different than dismissing out-of-hand a piece of music as soon as it was determined that notes, chords and keys were used, or dismissing any work of literature upon noticing words arranged in grammatically correct sentences.

That is not to say that all academic art is great, or above criticism - certainly, it is not. It would be no less fallacious to issue blanket praise to an entire category than to condemn it. Academic painting ranges from brilliantly conceived and deeply inspired, to trite and silly, depending on the subject and the artist.

That being said, I find even the worst of it more meaningful than art based on the ridiculous notion that it is somehow important to prove the canvas is flat, and/or that one needs no skill or technique to be an artist - views generally embraced by those who condemn the entire category of academic art. Their point seems to be to elevate to legitimacy that which has removed all standards and prior defining characteristics of art. In other words, by defining non-art as art, the logical conclusion is that art is non-art.

Modern artists are told that they must create something totally original. Nothing about what they do can ever have been done before in any way shape or form, otherwise they risk being called "derivative". How utterly absurd.

These critics like to say Bouguereau's work is really only derivative, harking back to earlier artists. Only in the 20th century has such a thing ever been scorned. To this I have one thing to say:

What, dear friends, is wrong with being derivative?

That's one of the core beliefs of modernism that must be soundly vanquished by common sense and logical analysis. Nobody can accomplish anything of merit if they are in fact not derivative. Only by mastering the accomplishments of the past and then adding to it can we go still further. Every other field of endeavor recognizes this truth. Without the knowledge of the past we are doomed to everlasting primitivism.

And, as far as holding our works up to the old masters, that's what we want to have happen. If we are to accomplish things of true merit and excellence, we must germinate and nurture great masters in the next millennium, too. Bouguereau was quite aware that his work would be compared on the altar of past accomplishments, as did his contemporaries. It was precisely because they mastered the techniques of the past, built upon them and then opened them up to an avalanche of new subject matter and Enlightenment ideals, that they accomplished the greatest half-century of painting in art history.

And when we talk about the basic criteria and parameters of the academic tradition that built from the 14th through 19^th centuries, Bouguereau , Lord Leighton and Alma-Tadema were second to none.

Could Bach and Beethoven and Mozart have achieved their masterpieces if someone before had not discovered scales and the circle of fifths? Does that mean these musical giants were nothing but derivative too? In fact all great literature exists due to the existence of advanced language. This upside down thought process would make Dosteovsky, Balzac, Chekhov, Shakespeare and the Brontë sisters derivative as well. If you think about it a bit you will see that these are exact analogies. There is nothing any more derivative about these 19^th century Traditional-Humanist-Academic masters.

Being derivative is entirely different from copying. Copying itself can have value, but only for the purposes of instruction. Obviously, a copied work is not original art. But modernist ideologues have disingenuously dismissed all realist art as "derivative" as if that were the same as copying.

Additionally, students today are taught that every parameter upon which any standard for quality and excellence can be deduced is improper, because it's "limiting to freedom of expression."

There can be no story, for then you have to stay within the "tight boundaries" of the tale.

There can be no illusion, for then you are "chained" by the need to recreate a sense of three dimensions.

There can be no drawing, as that can be "limiting" to objects or people or things taken from the real world.

They want to remove the "shackles" of modeling, perspective, or subject matter of any sort.

There certainly can be no attempt at harmonizing of the above parameters with composition, color and tonality, for that would "restrict" one to making everything work together.

On the contrary, they have been propagandized by modernism into believing that only those works that break boundaries, ignore standards, and show no interest in skill or technique can be truly "original" or "inspired." In fact originality of methods take precedence over all else. If something has been done before, or is derivative in any way of anything that was done before, it thereby loses value proportionate to those similarities. In such a "Through the looking glass" world, every would-be "artist" is placed in the untenable position of trying to create an entirely new art form in order to be considered relevant. The sheer glaring reality is that nothing could be more imprisoning, binding, restricting, chaining and shackling than the impossible limitations of modernism and post-modernism, that remove from the would-be artist every tool (including training) that could give him or her the ability to create great works of art. The simple truth is that each and every one of us (and I mean nearly every human being), is capable of thinking of something that has never been done before. Does that make it worth doing and the work of genius?

For example:

(1) I could carefully (with enough money) dig up an old bombed out tenement building in the Bronx, and have it transported to a special slab built for it in Central Park. Rope off the structure and aim lights at it at night and give it a title, and with enough pomp and circumstance think of twenty reasons why this is sheer brilliance and genius.

(2) I could boil the entrails of several different animals and then preserve them by imbedding them in clear plastic. I could then hang them from a mobile with similarly preserved body parts of cadavers, and have critics claim that this is the greatest artistic statement about the horrors of war since Guernica

(3) I could imbed into the walls, ceiling and floors of a small room, pieces of neon lights, parts from broken machines and engines, and broken pieces of structural building materials like bricks, beams and cinder blocks. Then I could glue between everything millions of nails, nuts and bolts, and have clever writers and critics point out how this room (which could be installed at MOMA or the Guggenheim) is the quintessential statement of the effects of the industrial age on human psychology.

Well, those three ideas took all of 3 minutes to think of. MY GOD! This must mean I'm three geniuses rolled into one. Why, at this rate I could come up with more brilliant ideas for Modernism than all of the modernist geniuses put together, if I just would put aside a week or two.

The thing here that really is interesting is not their art at all, but the statement it makes about the nature of our species — that so many seemingly intelligent people have been so easily snookered by the tongue-twisting, convoluted illogic of modernist rhetoric. Clearly for many people it is more important to feel that they are some part of an elitist in-group that is endowed with the special ability to see brilliance where the bulk of humanity sees nothing and is afraid to say so.

Since most people aren't devoted to or educated in fine art, they have successfully intimidated the bulk of humanity into cowering away in silence, feeling foolish for their inability to understand. The average person shrinks away from believing the reality of his or her own senses in the face of seemingly overwhelming numbers of people in this 20th century "establishment" who authoritatively dictate what is great art and what everyone should be seeing.

Modern and Post-modern Art is nihilistic and anti-human. It denigrates humanity along with our hopes, dreams, desires and the real world in which we live. All reference to any of these things is forbidden in the canonistic halls of modernist ideology. We can see that their hallowed halls are a hollow shell, a vacuous, vacant vault that locks their devotees away from life and humanity. It ultimately bores the overwhelming bulk of its would-be audience, who can find nothing with which to relate.

It has been called exciting and cutting-edge, but the sad truth is that it is incredibly humdrum and monotonous. Whether you glue together pieces of plastic or shards of glass, assemble metal scraps or piles of feathers. Whether you dribble little dollops of colors or drag fat uneven slashes of black. Whether you compile a mountain of paper or wrap the Statue of Liberty. The effect is always the same. MEANINGLESS PRIMITIVISM.

Modernism is art about art. It endlessly asks the question, ad nauseam: What is art? What is art? Only those things that expand the boundaries of art are good; all else is bad. It is art about art. Whereas all the great art in history, my friends, is ART ABOUT LIFE.

Of course, this isn't exactly the first time in history that ideas which were complete shams managed to engulf the belief systems of entire cultures and civilizations. In many of those in the past, the lunacy was enforced by the severest of punishments for anyone who would dare to speak out.

At least we live in a time and place where it's possible to speak against this consummate con that has been perpetrated against the greatest period of artistic development and achievement in the history of Western Civilization and culture over the last 500 years.

Three-quarters of the 20th century will go down in art history as a great wasteland of insanity — a nightmarish blip in the long road of the development of human logic and reason and art, from which we are only just starting to awake.

The artists of the 19^th century exhibited a deep, abiding respect for humanity and human feelings. A respect for our minds, our spirits and our reason, and a love of beauty, grace and true excellence and accomplishment. Bouguereau , Lord Leighton , Waterhouse , Burne-Jones and the other giants of the 19^th C. tried to capture those things that are good and decent in our species. Their accomplishments are the quintessential high point of hundreds of years of human study and development in the art of painting. They are arguably the greatest painters that history has ever produced. Bouguereau especially fits this description. How fitting and sadly obvious that he should be characterized as the chief villain by those who would destroy rather than build — who celebrate chaos rather than order and beauty.

He continues…

Recently, a contributor to an on-line art forum I subscribe to made the following comments about Picasso,             
                              
I love the way Picasso did that woman all shards and  angles. I don't recall the name of the work. But, he painted the woman  in her turmoil how she tore herself apart within, and how he saw what  her turmoil did to her. He painted the way he saw her, as fragmented as  he saw her. She was a beauty on the outside. Yet, he painted the ugly  face of her turmoil, and in so doing painted his turmoil as well.             
                              
Picasso worked in a turbulent time. I think it's why  some of his works appeared to be reflections in a broken mirror. Shards,  impressions all cut up and each with a voice about his subjects and of  Spain. His work shows a deeply sensitive artist and was a pivotal point  for the Russian avant garde school that said it was okay to feel in  paint, to get all the chaos out in paint ... I didn't love him until I  studied him ...             
                              
- Laurie

And he continues…

I thought it fitting to read here my response to her.

Laurie and Goodart subscribers,

I really need to address these ebullient expressions of praise for Picasso a bit more precisely.

Laurie, this is not to fault you at all, but to analyze the description you have made which reflects the gospel that is taught about him in most art history courses. His name and "achievements" have become so "untouchable" within the sacrosanct walls of modernist cathedrals, that to do any other than you have stated here would be like criticizing the cross or the bible in the College of Cardinals.

Let's look at this one idea at a time.

You said that, "He painted the woman in her turmoil how she tore herself apart within, and how he saw what her turmoil did to her".
I
n fact, all that he painted was a messy characterization of a woman in which the forms and shapes don't align or create any cohesive form. The drawing is virtually non-existent, and the disintegration of all artistic elements are self-consciously laid out for the express purpose of rejecting prior artistic standards.

There is no beauty in her face, or for that matter, ugliness. There isn't even a face ... but elements thrown together with just enough evidence to let the viewer know that it was meant to suggest a face.

Everything about the finished product is utterly awful and would be beneath the capabilities of a talented 12 year old.

Now, what if you are a theorist who needs to justify this hodge-podge of sloppy color and form? What can you creatively think of to place value and meaning, where none exists ... especially, if you are being paid to do just that?

It's simple: you need but approach the work as you would a Rorschach inkblot test, where anyone can use creative ability to make up a story, suggested by little, if any, information. If you want this man's work to be valued highly, you must create a tale of great importance, with meaning, which, when discussed or analyzed in intellectual circles, will be considered profound and meaningful.

The idea of a lady being ugly on the inside is a concept from literature, psychology, and in fact all of human history. Ugliness, mean-spiritedness, and turmoil are major concepts that tint all of human experience. So you simply say that the messiness represents that, and look how brilliant he is to have captured it.

But in truth he has done nothing of the kind. The writers who said that was what it means were the one who did it, and not the artist. Inner turmoil and ugliness on the inside is far more difficult to capture, and takes intense, subtle handling of story telling, composition, drawing, and realistic rendering to successfully convey so that it can be recognized without any words. Waterhouse's Lady of Shalott and Bouguereau's Divideuse both capture beautiful women loaded with inner turmoil, and Cabanel's Cleopatra testing poisons on slaves portrays intense inner ugliness within a beautiful face and figure infinitely better than these broken blotchy messes on canvas by Picasso.

But when the modernist professors say that's what it means, then implicit in their words is that if you don't see it too you're stupid and tasteless. Also to not see it becomes associated with not seeing how wonderful that subject matter would be. And it is after all truly wonderful subject matter. Only one problem; Picasso didn't paint it.

You say, "his work shows a deeply sensitive artist," but I don't conclude any sensitivity whatsoever. What is there is the sensitivity of a bull in a china shop, who stomps around breaking all the beautiful porcelain, and then with an army of critics lined up with their nostrils flaring dares anyone to criticize the dump he just left in the your living room.

"Either you love my turds or you are against freedom of expression."

If you don't want it in your museum, you're the enemy of freedom of speech. Faced with such intimidation surely many would rather line up in support. But there is truly nothing there. It's a trick of words and intimidation. An Illusion of social pressure and fearful conformity.

His school, "... said it was okay to feel in paint, to get all the chaos out in paint ... I didn't love him until I studied him."

Of course you didn't love him until you studied him. What you learned to love was all the explanations about worthwhile concepts and subjects. And with a training right out of Pavlov, you were taught to salivate when you were shown things that caused associations to those worthwhile ideas.

But Laurie, WHERE'S the BEEF? You're salivating at a symbol much the way people react to their country's flag. The flag comes to be seen as beautiful because it represents family, home and hearth, friends, loyalty, and the things we love. You've been taught to react to symbols instead of responding with the freedom of independent thought to works of art that are not supposed to be flag-like-symbols of great artistic ideas, but the great works of art themselves, which communicate, through a readily discernable visual language, some aspect of the human condition.

You had to be taught to love Picasso, because nobody would love him otherwise. But people don't need to be taught to love Rembrandt , Michelangelo , Bouguereau , or for that matter Chopin, Beethoven, Bach, or Tom Sawyer, The Grapes of Wrath, Alice in Wonderland, or The Christmas Carol.

Teaching and information can add to the depth of understanding of great works of art, but they are great initially by their ability to capture the soul and imagination of the viewer, without thousands of words to instruct us on how to deny the evidence of our own senses and to deny our innate sense of truth and reason.

Of course, what tends to happen to people who have allowed themselves to be convinced that the emperor is wearing beautiful clothes, is that they have become "ego invested" due to years of having parroted the same falsehoods ... and the associated humiliation that goes with acknowledging that one has been had. The more years, and the more said in support of Modernism, the greater the difficulty in breaking through the gestalts, and taking off the iconic blinders, shedding all the preconceptions and looking again with "innocent eyes" and describing what is really there (at least to yourself), and then comparing it to the maligned academics like Waterhouse , Bouguereau , Lord Leighton , Burne-Jones , Gérôme , and Alma-Tadema , and deciding with freedom of thought and an honest wish to find the truth, which of them indeed are works of art, and which are snake oil salesmen."

He continues…

And so I ended that letter.         
                      
The change in people's perceptions about this is happening  now very quickly. Even this austere institution, probably the greatest  museum in the Western Hemisphere, just a couple of summers ago had a  major retrospective of one of these maligned 19^th century  masters, Edward Coley Burne-Jones. 

And in their literature on the show  declared him one of the three greatest English artists of the last  century, along with Constable and Turner. In fact, the Metropolitan  Museum deserves great credit for being one of the first great  institutions to once again hang their Bouguereaus and Gérômes,  Meissonnier  and Burne-Jones, on permanent exhibit in the face of scathing criticism from the press back in 1980.         
                      
Soon after, Laurie followed this with a good-natured post  saying that although she felt that I may have insulted her intelligence,  she loved me all the same. To which I responded:

And …

Laurie,             
                              
It was not my wish to insult your intelligence. The very  brightest of people are just as vulnerable. It is in human nature to go  along to get along. I certainly did it too when I was in college and  grad school in fine art. Even when I was finally willing to speak my  mind about Pollock, de Kooning, Rothko and Warhol .... Picasso was  somehow sacrosanct, and I would pay lip service to his brilliance while  the works of the other modernists I allowed myself to see as they were.             
                              
It wasn't until I hit about 40 years old that I started  to more fully recognize the power of prestige suggestion and social  intimidation in forming opinions.             
                              
To truly judge your own feelings and opinion about a  work of art, you need to look at it as if it were painted by a complete  unknown, perhaps some student in another town, and then ask yourself  what your opinion of that work would be then. Would you think it was one  of the greatest works in the history of civilization, would it even be  great ... or good ... or mediocre .... or just plain bad?

So true.

He continues further…

I know now absolutely that nearly all the works by most of the famous Modernists are truly awful on all fronts.

I also know that the best works by Bouguereau and Waterhouse would thrill me to my bones even if they had been painted by complete unknowns. When I saw a Bouguereau for the first time, I had never heard of him, but my response was immediate unambiguous and self-validating. I needed no books or texts or convoluted explanations. The strength of the work was powerful, unique, immediate and overwhelming.

It was exactly as I had felt in the presence of Michelangelo's David. Ah, but when I saw the David I was already predisposed to see what history considered one of humanity's greatest masterpieces. However, it was that seminal experience at 18 that excited my interest in art. The Bouguereau that I saw, Nymphs and Satyr, was when I was 32 years old, and it's effect was equally profound, changing the course of my life, ultimately leading me to this podium here today.

Don't let pride get involved here. Don't even answer me. Just ask yourselves and answer honestly.

One common claim that you hear repeatedly is that the proof that some abstract expressionists were great artists, can be found in their high quality academic student drawings. My answer to this is that it's really irrelevant whether or not they could do a decent student drawing. If anything it only makes it sadder that promising young talent was wasted. The quality and value of their "mature" work is not helped a bit by showing that they could draw decently when young.

The best way to prove that is to consider the inverse.

Would Raphael or Bouguereau's mature work be somehow made the worse if their student drawings from decades earlier had been of poor quality? Their great paintings would still be just as great, and de Kooning's hideous smears for which he is so famous are still just as awful.

I am quite certain that every artist in this audience paints better than all of the famous modernists and post modernists, and is more deserving of societal attention and praise. Yet still, so-called "major works" of theirs can sell for between 2 and 25,000,000 dollars at auction. The dirty little secret, however, that the modernist establishment and the press has been hiding, is that those same works sold for two to three times those prices back in 1988 and 1989. While the prices of all the icons of modernism peaked at that time, and any money invested then has declined a whopping 50 to 80%, the market for Gérôme , Waterhouse , Bouguereau , Alma-Tadema , Burne-Jones , Rossetti , Millais and Lord Leighton , has increased between 2000 and 10,000 percent since 1975.

Every year, records are being broken again and again.

In 1977, the world record price for a Bouguereau was $17,000. Now, in the past 3 years, the world records for his work first topped a million dollars in 1997, then a million and a half in 1998, two and a half million in 1999, and last May, Charity sold for over $3,500,000. Additionally, last June the world record for any Victorian painting was completely trampled when Saint Cecilia, by John William Waterhouse, sold for just over $10,000,000 in London to Andrew Lloyd Weber.

There are only 826 Bouguereaus and about 465 Tademas in the world. Do you know how many Picassos there are? Can anybody here guess? There are 80,000 of them, and the balance between supply and demand has faltered, and like the dot com stocks of last year they will soon come crashing down along with hundreds of billions of paper profits lost in the dust of history. Like the tulip bulbs in the 17th century, or Tokyo Real estate in the 1980's, investors will be decimated. If I owned a work by any of those "Abstract artists" I would be racing to cash it in before the fall, and that has been my recommendation to dozens who have asked me.

Many of my friends in and out of ARC have told me that I shouldn't talk so much about the modernists. One of them recently wrote to me saying, "I really don't think we help our cause by helping talentless modernists get press coverage." Another fearfully said, "Don't criticize the modernists, just focus on what's good."

I replied as follows:

His reply…

When have the modernists ever held back from criticizing traditional and academic art? The problem with this attitude, while I also find it very appealing, is that our not talking about the modernists doesn't really mean much.

The fact is that they are being talked about with high praise, in nearly every university art department and art history course in the western world ... parroting the same things that they were taught. They are also being constantly celebrated and exhibited by the biggest and most prestigious museums and getting rave reviews in the newspapers as often as not.

If somebody doesn't explain to everybody why they're not really any good, and why they're not really even artists, and how the whole thing is a hoax, then they will continue their propaganda and continue brainwashing our children and intimidating them into feeling stupid if they don't go along to get along ... and they'll do it unopposed.

If we don't speak up and tell the world that the Emperor's naked, nobody else will. We may not want to talk about them, but we have to if we are going to have any chance of turning things around. We have to provide a theoretical and philosophical context for the feelings of the tens of millions of people out there who are disgusted and feel an aversion for Modernism ... but feel afraid to say so. They need to know that they are not alone and they need to have their feelings validated. And at the same time, we need to provide alternatives ... rich alternatives with great traditional art and with countless images of the greatest paintings in history.

So well put…

And now ladies and gentlemen ... artists ... portrait artists ... I come at this point ... to you. Who are you? Who do you think yourselves to be? Well let me tell you how I see you. You are beyond doubt, the true artistic heroes and heroines of the 20th century.

Many of you know that I am the chairman of the Art Renewal Center, which you can find at http://www.artrenewal.org. The Art Renewal Center is building the largest on-line museum on the internet, and is completely devoted to the return of standards, training and human themes and subjects in the visual arts. Modern Art is about expanding the definition of art.

They believe that "everything is art", or, "Whatever the artist says is art, is art."

Well, if everything is art, then nothing is art.

Any definition that includes everything is not a definition at all. As I said, Modern art is "art about art", while all the great art and literature and theatre throughout history is "Art about life."

I wrote about all of you, and your teachers, in the published Philosophy of the Art Renewal Center. Here's what I said:

Against all odds, and in the face of the worst kind of ridicule and personal and editorial assault, only a small handful of well-trained artists managed to stay true to their beliefs. Then, like the heroes and heroines who protected a few rare manuscripts during inquisitional book-burnings of the past, these 20th Century art world heroes managed to protect and preserve the core technical knowledge of western art. Somehow, they succeeded in training a few dozen determined disciples. Today, many of those former students, have established their own schools or ateliers, and are currently training many hundreds more. This movement is now expanding exponentially. They are regaining the traditions of the past, so that art may once again move forward on a solid footing. We are committed in every way possible to record, preserve and perpetuate this priceless knowledge.

That's who you are. So if some of you are having trouble selling your work, or haven't been able to command the prices you deserve ... if you feel infuriated at piles of bricks and elephant dung filling museum galleries, while you can only pay to have space allotted to you for an evening in a great museum like this ... don't despair.

Your time is coming. You have done humanity a service of such magnitude, that sadly you will never be properly repaid. Keep painting your great portraits, and when you can find the time, paint what your heart tells you to paint, too.

The modern world is a boiling cauldron of all sorts of great and absurd ideas, feelings, pathos, pathologies, psycho pathologies, humiliation, and dehumanizing ideas ... and yet ... yet even beauty, too, is still here amongst us, here in this hall and throughout the world, and her manifestations in modern times have been insufficiently expressed. So, find her in your homes, find her in the streets, find her in your communities and in nature, and especially, find her in each other ... and save her ... save her ... protect and cherish her ... and exalt her back to her rightful place ... a place of supreme prominence, and bring her back into these our greatest institutions and our highest citadels of society and culture.

Thank you.

So inspiring.

Here’s one of my lost paintings. Destroyed by the “new” America that exists for the few; the oligarchy that controls all.

My art. — I am not a master, but I like to believe that I could have been one. The idea that the oligarchy controlled government can destroy your life’s work, your purposes, and everything that you have created so that they can implement some kind of selfish utopia is distrubing. It show that they are, and the systems that they have created, are pure psychopaths and psychopathic in nature.

Psychopathic systems do not lend longevity to society. Instead they offer a means of destruction.

I aruge that the oligarchy can only continue upon this path that they tred upon by converting everyone to adopt their methodology, or to convert everyone into mindless, emotionless followers.

How about other examples…

"In retrospect, this seems a horrific thing to have done."

Ya. Think?

There are so many examples of great works of art that used to be owned by museums for public enjoyment, but that have been sold off to private collectors. And while some have been repurchased by other museums and are now available for viewing, the battle to obtain these “lost works” was contentious in many cases. We are , and should consider ourselves, to be lucky. Lucky that the oligarchy has allowed us to be able to view these works on the internet. Lucky to be able to recognize that they existed and still exist, and lucky that they were not burned in bonfires of progressive revisionism and fashion.

Examples of artworks that have been sold off…

Let’s look at just some of the art; the paintings that the museums around the world has sold off for the price of a cup of coffee…

Constant Afternoon Langour painting. — **Constant Afternoon Langour** by Jean-Joseph Constant (Benjamin-Constant) (1845-1902, France)

And…

Bramley Frank - A Hopeless Dawn — Bramley Frank – A Hopeless Dawn

And…

Herbert Draper Lament for Icarus — Herbert Draper – Lament for Icarus

Draper's vision of Icarus, crashed and dead on the rocks, stays true to the myth and yet has a drama to it that is definitely the making of a more contemporary mind. Nearly 50% of the canvas is covered by the image of Icarus' gigantic, broken, dark wings. The wings are so huge they are cut off at the top left of the canvas and at the middle right. 

This makes the image seem even larger than life. It is as if we look through a window that is not large enough to hold the view. It is possible that the advent of the camera influenced the artist's eye in choosing this unusual perspective. 

But the impact is successful, dramatic and highly emotional because of the skill in which the wings are painted. 

They are so huge, in fact, that they make shadows on much of what remains of the canvas. They are so immense and yet they have failed poor Icarus so completely. 

Icarus lies dead; a darkening figure still strapped to the useless wings, as a sorrowful and sensual nymph pulls his upper torso gentle towards her. Two other nymphs look on woefully. The canvas creates a heart breaking darkness with small splashes of gold light falling on the nymphs and the far rock wall. The golden light is reminiscent of the hope for freedom that Dadelus had once had for his son Icarus. 

All life, beautiful or not, comes to an end, and all our grand strivings lead us to the same end. The power in this work of art is the sense of loss it projects. If you read the text in the catalogue, it mentions other layers of possible meaning. Simon Toll makes note that Draper's father died shortly before this painting was executed and he suggests that this painting "may also be a private statement of loss." The text also suggests that the painting may be a tribute to the artist Leighton, who died two years earlier.

-ARC

And…

Lady Godiva by Lefevbre Claude Gheerbrant - Musée de Picardie — Lady Godiva by Lefevbre Claude Gheerbrant – Musée de Picardie

Examples of “art” that have been purchased by museums afterwards…

Let’s have a look at the kinds of art that the museums (all over the world) purchased once they discarded the “old” and “outmoded” art…

Would you believe that this ridiculous-looking canvas was sold for $3.8 million? This abstract painting, which is comprised of two straight lines, was created in 1954. Barnett is an American artist who is a strong follower of abstract expressionism.

Abstract Expressionism, broad movement in American  painting that became a dominant trend in Western painting during the  1950s. The movement comprised many styles varying in both technique and  quality of expression. Artists include Jackson Pollock, Mark Rothko,  Joan Mitchell, and Helen Frankenthaler.

-Abstract Expressionism | Definition

This painting, which follows the color field painting style, is one of the few pieces that he has created during his lifetime. Barnett is considered the greatest color field painters of his time. That is the reason why this expensive painting is very popular now.

Or how about a museum considering this to be a worthwhile addition…

This is one of the most basic paintings to date but don’t let its simplicity fool you. It was sold for a whopping $75.1 million during a Sotheby’s auction in November of 2012.

The painter, Mark Rothko, is a known abstract expressionist.

This painting date back 1954 and basically has three blocks of color – and that’s it. Rothko is an American painter with Russian and Jewish Roots. He is known for the color field method style of painting which was popular in New York during the 50’s.

Summary of Color Field Painting

Color Field Painting is a tendency within Abstract Expressionism, distinct from gestural abstraction, or Action Painting. It was pioneered in the late 1940s by Mark Rothko, Barnett Newman, and Clyfford Still,  who were all independently searching for a style of abstraction that  might provide a modern, mythic art and express a yearning for  transcendence and the infinite. 

To achieve this they abandoned all  suggestions of figuration and instead exploited the expressive power of  color by deploying it in large fields that might envelope the viewer  when seen at close quarters. Their work inspired much Post-painterly abstraction, particularly that of Helen Frankenthaler, Morris Louis, Kenneth Noland, and Jules Olitski, though for later color field painters, matters of form tended to be more important than mythic content.

-The Art Story

The idea is to paint the canvas with large blocks of solid colors giving off an impression of an uneven surface and a flat plane. This painting pretty much depicts that, although very simplistic that you can imagine a toddler painting this art piece, it has a surprisingly outrageous value.

To a lot of people, this can be viewed as a real abstract painting with a lot of character in it. There is no doubt about it- but to be valued at $300 million sparks a different kind of conversation.

As with all abstract art, most people can claim they can paint something similar, but in fact, there is more to this painting that meets the eye.

William de Kooning is a New York painter, but is originally from Netherlands. This artwork is an example of ‘action painting’ which is a technique where the artist spontaneously splash paint on canvas versus the traditional painting style that is meticulous and takes time to complete.

Action painting, direct, instinctual, and highly  dynamic kind of art that involves the spontaneous application of  vigorous, sweeping brushstrokes and the chance effects of dripping and  spilling paint onto the canvas. The term was coined by the American art  critic Harold Rosenberg to characterize the work of a group of American  Abstract Expressionists who utilized the method from about 1950.

-Action painting | art | Britannica

It is somehow a form of physical art.

This technique is made popular during the 40’s to 60’s and has coined the concept of abstract expressionism. This painting was made in 1955 and is now housed in the private collection of Kenneth C. Griffin.

This is one of the most boring paintings that you will ever see but you will be surprised to know that this blue colored canvas sold for over $43 million in 2013. It is one of the works of Barnett Newman, a known abstract expressionist. He has done a number of similar paintings such as this and has an entire “Onement” collection, which is basically composed of one dominant color and a division (what he calls a ‘zip’) right smacked in the middle. The zip is used to define the space of his paintings. This New York artist was born in 1905 and has made a following because of his color field art.

If you don’t know better, you might mistake this for a preschooler’s art project. This is actually a painting from the famed painter Paul Klee. It starts off with an odd old maroon color with asymmetrical and disorganized images of triangles and squares, and oh yes, an odd orange circle in off center. One can maybe make this out as a series of houses or even a castle- but, hey, what do we know. Paul Klee is a Swiss-German painter born in 1879. Most of his works are now housed in varied museums all over the globe.

If you hear the word ‘painting’ you might be imagining something with a lot of imagination, color gradients and creative imagery. This painting from Kazimir Malevich is far from being complicated or deep but it is one of the most significant work of art to date.

Malevich is actually the pioneer of geometric abstraction- that is pretty obvious with his love of squares and rectangles.

Geometric abstraction, through the Cubist process of  purifying art of the vestiges of visual reality, focused on the inherent  two-dimensional features of painting. This process of evolving a purely  pictorial reality built of elemental geometric forms assumed different stylistic expressions in various European countries and in Russia.

-Geometric Abstraction | Essay | The Metropolitan Museum of ...

This artwork was sold in Sotheby’s auction for a staggering $60 million and is the most expensive piece of Russian artwork of all time.

To the naked eye, this painting may simply look like a piece of stringy lines splashed around using a yarn, just like those kindergarten art projects kids use to make. This is an artwork done by Jackson Pollock in the year 1948. It is quite a large piece of artwork measuring 8 ft by 4 ft. He is a known abstract expressionist.

This painting in fibreboard uses brown, yellow, white and grey paint. It is often tagged as a dense bird’s nest because of the way the strips of paint overlap each other. This artwork was reported to be sold for over $140 million to a private collector.

This oil painting was done in oil on linen and is now housed at the Tretyakov Gallery in Moscow. As you would have realized by now, the painting is a mere black square. But there is a lot of philosophy and history behind this seemingly plain and dull painting. This piece is dubbed as the ‘zero point of painting’ and a combination of various art methods including futurism and constructivism. This is one of the prime works of Kazimir Malevich, who is the leader in Russian avant-garde art and has several pieces of similar works under this collection. He described this artwork as ‘liberated nothing’.

Conclusion(s)

One afternoon I toured an art museum while waiting for my husband to finish a business meeting.I was looking forward to a quiet view of the art works.
       
A young couple viewing the paintings ahead of me chatted nonstop between themselves.I watched them a moment and decided the wife was doing all the talk.I admired the husband's patience for putting up with her continuous talk.Distracted by their noise,I moved on.
       
I met with them several times as I moved through the different rooms of art.Each time I heard her constant burst of words,I moved away quickly.
       
I was standing at the counter of the museum gift shop making a purchase when the couple came near to the exit.Before they left,the man reached into his pocket and pulled out a white object.He extended it into a long stick and then tapped his way into the coatroom to get his wife's jacket.
        
"He's a brave man."The clerk at the counter said,"Most of us would give  up if wewere blinded at such a young age.During his recovery he made a  promise that his life wouldn't change.So ,as before,he and his wife come  in whenever there's a new art show."
       
"But what dose he get out of the art?"I asked,"He can't see."
        
"Can't see?You're wrong.He sees a lot.More than you or I do."The clerk said,"His wife describes each painting so he can see it in his head."
       
I learned something about patience,courage and love that day.I saw the patience of a young wife describing paintings to a person without sight and the courage of a husband who would not allow blindness to change his life.And I saw the love shared by two people as I watched this couple walk away hand in hand.

-MoFanGe

If you were in the role of the wife (as described above – explaining each painting to her husband), how would you go about describing the more traditional artworks that the museums have sold off? How long would each painting take to describe?

Likewise, how would you describe the new progressive artworks? How long do you think it would take to describe them?

Perhaps this simple measurement, this idea in how to describe the impressions of art that is presented to you, is an element of it’s value and worth. Not that of the amount of currency that is used to purchase it, but rather the emotions and feelings that are generated upon viewing it.

I have argued HERE that the oligarchy is populated with psychopathic individuals that not only are unable to emote, but are unable to feel or express real emotions. Instead they only mimic actions and facial expressions to manipulat others to follow and believe them. As such, these psychopathic individuals see no value in art. Their only value is how they can be used as an element in financial exchange and commerce.

And thus, the study of art, is the study of the oligarchy that rules us.

The oligarchy that rules 99.9% of humans have evolved into a new KIND of human.

They are in possession of a service-for-self sentience, and are extremely good at manipulation, creation and generation of money and currency, as well as the accusition of power as well as the control over others. They are weak in the ability to express emotions and cannot emote. Medically they are known as psychopathic personalities and a healthy society cannot afford to have individuals of this disposition near any positions of power.

As they see no value in the art like “normal” people, they have subverted the institutions that they control; the libraries, the museums, and the art world into something that they understand. They understand money and using objects as trade mediums. They do not conderstand or emote the value of art.

And finally…

This movement towards progressive revisionism can only originate from those that are unable to understand art. They have no idea or concept of evoked emotion via visual stimulation. It is alien to them. They couldn’t understand it in any of it’s myrid forms. Thus…

Indeed, thus…

The entire progressive revisionism movement from art, to culture to society is driven from the oligarchy downward. It is their efforts to redraw the world into a “utopia” that they can understand and embrace.

Do you want more?

I have more posts in my Art index here…

ART

Articles & Links

You’ll not find any big banners or popups here talking about cookies and privacy notices. There are no ads on this site (aside from the hosting ads – a necessary evil). Functionally and fundamentally, I just don’t make money off of this blog. It is NOT monetized. Finally, I don’t track you because I just don’t care to.

To go to the MAIN Index;

Master Index

You can start reading the articles by going HERE.
You can visit the Index Page HERE to explore by article subject.
You can also ask the author some questions. You can go HERE to find out how to go about this.
You can find out more about the author HERE.
If you have concerns or complaints, you can go HERE.
If you want to make a donation, you can go HERE.

Please kindly help me out in this effort. There is a lot of effort that goes into this disclosure. I could use all the financial support that anyone could provide. Thank you very much.

[wp_paypal_payment]

If you enjoy what you see, it would be helpful if you could assist in hosting this forum. A donation would be appreciated.

Contemporaneous American youth as a consequence of the United States successful stratification of society into rulers and serf peasantry via education

There’s a lot of things that you can say about all the changes going on in America today. I have written about this extensively. But one area that I hardly touched upon is the way that the American public education system has been geared up to produce peasants.

Yes, you read that correct. Peasants.

The rulers, and the wealthy (aren’t they one and the same?) send their children off to private (for profit) expensive schools for education. Everyone else, by law, must attend “public” schools, where the government decides what will be taught, when and how.

These “public schools” indoctrinate. They train young youth to become reactionary (as opposed to free-thinking), and to obey authority without question. They learn that they must work within the systems provided, pay taxes because it is necessary, and conform at all costs.

Which results in some really stunning changes to the population…

Now, this subject has been covered elsewhere by other authors on both sides (heck, all sides) of the political spectrum. Neither side likes it.

The traditional conservatives are horrified at what is being taught, and want to eject their children from the educational system and home-school them.
The progressive liberals are concerned that the schools are not progressive enough, and that real change is necessary given how messed up the United States is today.

Now…

Don’t get confused.

American peasants. These are the under-employed strata of the peasant class.

Please, it’s easy to get confused, but don’t.

I live inside of (so called) “Communist China”, but China hasn’t been “communist” since the late 1970’s. Instead, it is a single-party, traditional, social republic, internally policed with membership by merit. Which is think is light-years of improvement over the fiasco that Mr. Mao setup back in the 1940’s.

And America…

That “land of the free”, of “democracy” and “liberty” is only a myth perpetuated by the ignorant. America ceased being “free” with the passage of the 11th amendment, and has has six major reorganizations of governmental structure since. Today it is a Military Empire, serviced by American tax-paying serfs, for the well being of the ruling oligarchy.

I argue that the changes to the American population is NOT random or a natural evolution. I argue that it is intentional.

Just like the former Soviet Union tried to remake the Russian population into loyal serfs, so has the United States tried to do so.

Here is an interesting take on this matter by a woman who used to live inside Russia while it was hard-core communist. She teaches inside America and is shocked how little the student understand history and what hard-core Marxist Communism is. Of course, the reader might think that all this has to do with political ideology. I argue something different…

I argue that this is what you see when there is an overt attempt at the stratification of society into separate and distinct classes of people; The rulers, and the ruled.

So don’t look at the following article as “communism being indoctrinated inside of America“, instead look at it as an attempt by the American oligarchy to create a nation of serf-peasants by using the same techniques that successfully operated within the former Soviet Union.

The following is a direct reprint of “A Russian Woman Working as a College Professor in the US Writes About the Sovietization of Amerika” by Rod Dreher Sat, Feb 29, 2020. It was edited to fit this venue, and all credit to the writer.

A Russian Woman Working as a College Professor in the US Writes About the Sovietization of Amerika

I’m in the editing and rewriting stage of Live Not By Lies now, but I couldn’t pass up the opportunity to talk yesterday with a woman I’ll call “Clarissa,” whose stories were so good that I’m weaving them into the book’s narrative.

Clarissa is a college professor who emigrated to the US from Russia as a young woman, a few years after the fall of the Soviet Union. She is yet another ex-Soviet bloc person who is extremely anxious about the emergence of soft totalitarianism here. Of course she can’t use her real name, because she fears professional retaliation. It should tell us something that not a single academic from a former communist country that I interviewed for this book was willing to speak using their own name — this, in the Land of the Free. Why not? Because they were afraid of facing professional consequences for speaking out against identity politics and the “social justice” regime. Below, some quotes from our interview:

I have the feeling of extreme frustration. Our stories of  people in the former Soviet space are constantly dismissed. I have no  idea why. 

I think it happens because people still think that the ideas  that existed in the Soviet Union are basically good – that it was the  execution that was at times excessive. 

My father says what happened to  us was not about the economic system. The economic system was just an  excuse. This could happen anywhere – even under capitalism.

The American serf-peasant class buying necessities at a store.

—

Totalitarianism is something that takes away from people the  unbearable burden of freedom. It allows many people to hound and  persecute with impunity. That is pleasant in many senses. 

There was a  practice in the Soviet Union where people would be told to get together  in groups at work and write letters to the newspaper to denounce famous  poets or artists. 

We see that today in Twitter. People love that because  it allows a little person to completely destroy somebody who has done  something great.

This is very human. Once you have removed any moral or religious obstacles to that behavior, what’s to stop anybody?

—

When I was nine years old, I had a teacher of Russian literature. I  really admired her. 

What we didn’t know was that her father was a high  ranking KGB officer. 

He found out that a little girl in our class,  Masha, was attending church with her parents, and not only that, but was  singing in the choir. The teacher one day pulled that little girl out  in the class and for an hour unleashed a torrent of abuse on this child.  

For what? 

The feeling of power of persecuting that child in front of  the rest of us. This is not happening right now in the US, but it’s conceivable.

—

(On American vulnerability to totalitarianism)

It’s American exceptionalism. 

You all think you’re such special people that you’re going to do it right. 

If socialism comes here, don’t  worry, we’ll make it happen in the correct way. 

Not true! Ten years ago  if you had told me I would be seeing this in the US, I would have  laughed in your face. But now it’s happening. I’m seeing it happening to  my friends. 

It’s like their minds are disintegrating.

American peasant serfs are not taught discipline, care, concern, morals, or basic behavior. Instead they are taught to be automatons for the state. In much the same way that the former Soviet Union instructed unyielding obedience and a squashing of independence. You can see this lack of discipline throughout America today.

—

Once your religion is taken away, you still have a need for an overarching moral law.

You’re going to look for it somewhere else, even outside religion. We’re seeing it now with this identity politics. …

In the Soviet Union when I was young, cynicism was everywhere. Nobody believed in anything. Everybody just went through the motions.

I used to think that cynicism was the worst thing in the world. It’s not. The worst thing in the world is the lack of cynicism and critical difference, and accepting everything uncritically.

These people today, they really believe all this woke ideology. And that’s what’s really scary.

I have a friend who is very woke. The woke ideology is the belief is that if somebody departs from the dogma, even by an inch, that person is an evil, hate-filled bigot.

When I disagree with her, I can see that she genuinely can’t comprehend that I disagree with her. She knows I’m a good person, but here I am disagreeing with her. She can’t understand it. And she’s an educated person! A college professor.

The intellectuals are playing a dangerous game. They think they can control it. They think that once their ideas are imposed on society, they can control it. That’s ludicrous. They’re going to be the first ones the system turns on, because as intellectuals, they can be the first ones to spot the flaws in the system.

Nobody is going to be safe. Nobody can pledge enough allegiance to this kind of system to protect themselves.

—

I mentor early career academics. I used to enjoy it, but not anymore.  These graduate students are not producing scholarship. They’re just  turning in collections of woke slogans. 

I don’t even know what to do  with that. When we start talking to the younger academics, they don’t  understand what we want for them. They were taught this way, and they’re  reproducing it. 

I see this from students who come to college. 

It seems  like all they get in the schools is dogma. They are blank slates. They  have no real knowledge of anything – they just repeat slogans, and when  you ask them to explain it, they turn blank.

In the Soviet Union, when you were a student and assigned to write a paper, you knew that the thing to do was to go straight to the correct books in the library and copy the relevant articles, word for word, with  no deviations. 

That was your paper. 

When my family left, we arrived in  Canada, and I entered the university there. When I was assigned my first paper, I found it impossible to believe that the teacher really did  want me to think for myself. It was an incredible feeling! 

To think  about something, and to say what I really thought about it! It was so  weird, but so liberating.Now, I’m seeing young people who are just like we were in the Soviet  Union. 

They are afraid to think for themselves. They only want to know  what the “right” answer is, and repeat it. It’s depressing.

—

The problem is that many people still associate totalitarianism with  an all-powerful state, and if it doesn’t come from the state, it’s not  totalitarianism. 

What we’re dealing with now is not coming from the  state. None of us are afraid that the government is going to send secret  police and take us to the dungeon. 

That’s not going to happen. 

No.  We’re afraid of being humiliated and deprived of a living. Of being a  pariah, of being marginalized, unpersonned, cancelled. 

You don’t need  the government for that, especially in the age of social media. It  wasn’t the government hounding those Covington Catholic boys, or J.K.  Rowling.

Voting for someone [as a protest against political correctness] is wonderful, but the government cannot solve this problem.

—

Since I started going to church a couple of years ago, I began to  understand what was taken from us. I feel incredibly angry that we were  deprived of something that’s such a huge part of our culture and  civilization, that it taken from us. I take my little girl to church and  Sunday school. I want my child to know this so she doesn’t have to  discover it in her forties, and feel clumsy.

—

I wish we had some form of a secret handshake [on my campus]. I know a  couple of other professors on campus who I suspect are one of us. But  everybody is so closeted, it’s impossible to talk about it.

We have this bias response team that prowls the campus looking  for signs of non-compliance, and to justify their existence. We had the  same thing in the Soviet Union. 

Right now they’re on campus, but  eventually, they’re going to be in every workplace. If you have  everybody in your workplace trained in diversity, then you can treat  your workers however you like, and nobody will care.

(On the culture created by diversity and sensitivity training in the workplace)

All your co-workers are enemies. Either they can get you in trouble,  or they are out to destroy you with an accusation. It destroys all sorts  of uncontrollable communities – friendship, families, church  communities. When you set people against each other, they are much  easier to control. This is what it was like under totalitarianism.

—

By the way, here is a link to Clarissa’s blog, if you’re interested. Here’s a post from a previous blog of hers, about her father’s life as a closeted Christian in the USSR.

Here’s a Clarissa post on teaching a class on totalitarianism.

Excerpt:

The wall-to-wall propaganda that characterizes this new  totalitarianism isn’t state-sponsored either. It’s disseminated solely  through corporate channels. Traditional politicians are squeezed out by  TV and social media stars who represent this new form of power. The  complete dependence of their popularity on Twitter and Instagram means  they will do absolutely anything to avoid being deplatformed. It’s no  longer about courting rich donors to donate to your campaign. Now it’s  all about being a funny enough clown that attracts hits and likes to  enrich the owners of these platforms.

Every day, the power of these giant corporations to unearth a tweet  or a like on a tweet that can sink absolutely anybody grows. There is no  need for a state to keep a dossier of kompromat (compromising  material) on each citizen. This process has been completely  corporatized. And the worst part is that people who are wielding this  sort of coercive power honestly see themselves as powerless victims who  have to defend themselves from coercion.

You know, since I started writing this post, I went to look up the blog entry I posted from my first interview with Clarissa, a year or so ago. I couldn’t find it, except in my notes for the book. I wonder if I ever posted it. Sorry if you’ve already seen it, but I suspect I forgot to put it on the site.

Here’s the text:

Just got off the phone with a Soviet-born academic who teaches in a small state university in the American heartland. She blogs under the name “Clarissa,” but I got her real name, and checked her out. She’s REALLY excited about this book, and told me she would be a source, and introduce me to the emigre community. She’s teaching a class on totalitarianism this semester, and is unnerved to have discovered that every single one of her students thinks that socialism is a good thing.

“I teach in the heart of America, in what a lot of people think of as the Bible Belt, and this is how they think,” she said.

She got her PhD at a top American university (I checked this out), and said that it was a constant struggle there to be heard. Whenever Marxist topics would come up, she would talk about her experience in the USSR, and people would shout her down. “You wouldn’t believe the rage in their faces,” she said. “They did not want to hear it.”

She said that when she talks to her parents and tells her about things she’s seeing as an American academic, within academia, they’re shocked. They keep saying, “It’s like we had it back in the Soviet Union!”

She has learned to be very, very careful about what she says among her colleagues. She knows that nobody wants to hear it, and now she’s afraid of being identified and punished. She said, “I have to live my intellectual and spiritual life underground. I stay silent about so many things with my colleagues because I know that they would honestly and sincerely see me as some kind of monster because of the things I believe, which are in no way radical.”

Yesterday a tenured academic she knows in California wrote to her to say that he withdrew from publication a paper he had written that very mildly criticizes woke dogma (she didn’t say what it was) within the academy, because he lost his nerve. He’s tenured, so he wasn’t afraid of losing his job. He was afraid of becoming a pariah — of his friends turning their backs on him because of his views, and others being afraid to take his side out of fear that they would be seen as tainted.

“To be honest, I wouldn’t want anybody at work to know I read your blog,” she said.

She also said that she can’t stand Trump, but has come to see him as the only obstacle between herself and total progressive madness. “It’s the most frustrating thing!” she said, her voice rising. I told her I agreed with her, and we laughed about that.

The diversity commissars have everybody terrified at her university, she said. Recently the chief diversity officer publicly identified her as “transphobic.” Why? Because a student asked her about use of the term “Latinx.” It came up in class, and as a Spanish speaker, she mentioned that many Spanish speakers hate the term. For this, she was identified as “transphobic” by the diversity office. She said that she didn’t even express an opinion about the term, only noted that it’s not popular among Spanish speakers. So now she’s on the watch list.

Here’s something really interesting: she said that one of her research interests is how multinational corporations undermine the nation-state. She said that wokeness in corporate America is a weapon used by white-collar professionals to weed out competitors for increasingly scarce jobs. She said, “People find ideological purity tests useful to weed out people who compete for jobs you cover. Progressive forces are completely allied with globalist capitalism.”

She also said that people have no idea how vulnerable they are to this mindset, because of social media. “You will not be able to predict what will be held against you tomorrow. You have no idea what completely normal thing you do today, or say today, will be used against you to destroy you. This is what people in the Soviet Union saw. We know how this works. This is why people like me are so upset today. I’m so glad you’re writing this book. Thank you for calling me and letting me vent.”

Metallic comments…

It’s so easy to read this and fall into any one of the many “pigeon hole” narratives that we have been programmed to follow. Much like Pavlov’s dog, we must look at everything as political ideology. And that is the way that this professor looks at it. And that is the way that the author looks at it.

But that is not whats really going on.

What is actually going on is the [1] the system for social stratification used by the former Soviet Union,has [2] been ported and adopted by the United States and [3] it’s implementation has been through the American educational system.

It has created an environment that favors a Ruling Class that is served entirely by an under-educated peasant / serf class.

And we can see how this system has resulted in RADICAL changes to American society…

The following article is a complete reprint of “America 1950 vs. America 2020” by Michael Snyder on September 14, 2020. It was edited to fit this venue, and all credit to the author.

America 1950 vs. America 2020

If you could go back to 1950, would you do it? There would be no Internet, no cellphones and you would only be able to watch television in black and white. But even though they lacked many of our modern conveniences, people genuinely seemed to be much happier back then. Families actually ate dinner together, neighbors knew and cared about one another, and being an “American” truly meant something. Today, we like to think that we are so much more “advanced” than they were back then, but the truth is that our society is in the process of falling apart all around us. Could it be possible that we could learn some important lessons by looking back at how Americans lived 70 years ago?

Of course there has never been any era in our history when everything has been perfect. But without a doubt, things are vastly different today than they were back in 1950…

In 1950, Texaco Star Theatre, The Lone Ranger and Hopalong Cassidy were some of the most popular shows that Americans watched on television.

In 2020, a Netflix film entitled “Cuties” is so trashy and so disgusting that four states have sent a letter to Netflix asking for it to be removed because it is “fodder for those with criminal imaginations, serving to normalize the view that children are sexual beings.”

When an isolated ruling caste controls over under-educated peasants, there are apt to be conflicts and turmoil between the uneducated serfs.

In 1950, television networks would not even show husbands and wives in bed together.

In 2020, “adult websites” get more traffic than Netflix, Amazon and Twitter combined.

With social engineering comes a destruction of morals, when the government becomes the solution to all issues.

In 1950, people would greet one another as they walked down the street.

In 2020, Americans are too enamored with their cellphones to be bothered with actual human contact.

One of the first things to disappear during social re-engineering are societal manners.

In 1950, gum chewing and talking in class were some of the major disciplinary problems in our schools.

In 2020, kids are literally gunning down police officers in the streets.

With the collapse of the middle class, the PTB isolated themselves in enclaves, and the lower serf / peasant classes now merge with the unemployed and under-employed classes that are prone to violence.

In 1950, people would make an effort to dress up and look nice when they would go out in public.

In 2020, most of the population has become utter slobs and “People of Walmart” has become one of our most popular memes.

When you are a peasant, you don’t care about your public appearance.

In 1950, the typical woman got married for the first time at age 20 and the typical man got married for the first time at age 22.

In 2020, the typical woman gets married for the first time at age 27 and the typical man gets married for the first time at age 29.

With societal change comes an evolution from a generalized behavior via the r/K theory.

In 1950, a lot of people would leave their homes and their vehicles unlocked because crime rates were so low.

In 2020, many that live in urban areas are deathly afraid of all the civil unrest that has erupted, and gun sales have soared to all-time record highs.

With a segregated and stratified society are large numbers of unnecessary people. Who resort to crime for entertainment and emotional escape.

In 1950, Americans actually attempted to parent their children.

In 2020, we pump our kids full of mind-altering drugs and we let our televisions and our video games raise our children.

Like the former Soviet Union, people use escape methods to leave a life that is stressful and that they have no control over.

In 1950, Baltimore was one of the most beautiful and most prosperous cities on the entire planet.

In 2020, Baltimore regularly makes headlines because of all the murders that are constantly occurring.  Of course the exact same thing could be said about many of our other major cities.

Along with the collapse of society comes the collapse of the infrastructure that supports the society.

In 1950, 78 percent of all households in America contained a married couple.

In 2020, that figure has fallen below 50 percent.

In 1950, about 5 percent of all babies in the United States were born to unmarried parents.

In 2020, about 40 percent of all babies in the United States will be born to unmarried parents.

A total breakdown in American society structure that favors both parents working in grey cube boxes, and not raising children as family units.

In 1950, new churches were regularly being opened all over the United States.

In 2020, it is being projected that 1 out of every 5 churches in the U.S. “could be forced to shut their doors in the next 18 months”, and the mayor of Lubbock, Texas just said that opening a new Planned Parenthood clinic is like starting a church.

America needs no moral compass. The government controls all. Thus, the oligarchy controls everything.

In 1950, we actually had high standards for our elected officials, and people actually did research on the candidates before they cast their votes.

In 2020, more than 4,000 people in one county in New Hampshire voted for a “transsexual Satanic anarchist” in the Republican primary, and she is now the Republican nominee for sheriff in Cheshire County.

American government has become a joke.

In 1950, children would go outside and play when they got home from school.

In 2020, our parks and our playgrounds are virtually empty and we have the highest childhood obesity rate in the industrialized world.

Children have become isolated, and easy to entertain with sedentary pastimes. Just like the former Soviet Union citizens became.

In 1950, front porches were community gathering areas, and people would regularly have their neighbors over for dinner.

In 2020, many of us don’t know our neighbors at all, and the average American watches more than five hours of television a day.

Americans have become isolated, and easy to control. Just like the former Soviet Union citizens became.

In 1950, Americans used words such as “knucklehead”, “moxie” and “jalopy”.

In 2020, new terms such as “nomophobia”, “peoplekind” and “social distancing” have been introduced into the English language.

Normal change is trivial. But when someone or some nation is involved in social change it will affect everything, including the language.

In 1950, the very first credit card was issued in the United States.

In 2020, Americans owe more than 930 billion dollars on their credit cards.

Americans are in debt and must work to stay alive. The consequence of not working is starvation and possibly prison.

In 1950, one income could support an entire middle class household.

In 2020, tens of millions of Americans have lost their jobs and filed for unemployment, and more than half of all households in some of our largest cities are currently facing “serious financial problems”.

An entire family must toil to pay the taxes and fees, and living costs. All of which benefit the wealthy elite.

In 1950, the American people believed that the free market should govern the economy.

In 2020, most Americans seem to believe that the government in Washington and the Federal Reserve must endlessly “manage” the economy.

Now, people expect the wealthy oligarchy to provide for their needs through a mechanism known as “the government”.

In 1950, “socialists” and “communists” were considered to be our greatest national enemies.

In 2020, most of our politicians in Washington have eagerly embraced socialist and communist policy goals.

From independence to dependence on government.

In 1950, the U.S. Constitution was deeply loved and highly revered.

In 2020, anyone that actually admits to being a “constitutionalist” is considered to be a potential domestic terrorist.

The original constitution supported independence from government. That is a dangerous idea today.

In 1950, the United States loaned more money to the rest of the world than anybody else.

In 2020, the United States owes more money to the rest of the world than anybody else.

America is in dept, as the ruling oligarchy operates above and isolated form the government that it controls. They are safe no matter what happens.

In 1950, the total U.S. national debt reached the 257 billion dollar mark for the first time in our history.

In 2020, we added 864 billion dollars to the national debt in the month of June alone.  In other words, we added over three times more to the national debt in that one month than the total amount of debt that had been accumulated from the founding of our nation all the way to 1950.

The wealthy oligarchy can drive a nation into the ground. It matters not to them. For they exist above and beyond the government.

In 1950, most Americans were generally happy with their lives.

In 2020, the suicide rate is at an all-time record high, and it has been rising every single year since 2007.

It sucks being a poor peasant.

Conclusion

Change is a natural part of life. When you get older, such as myself, you view change with a kind of nostalgia. You miss “the good old days”. But the fact is that most change is artificial.

Prior to the Industrial Revolution, most change was glacial. Entire generations would come and go with very little change in their lives.

So what was driving the change?

Technology?

Yah! Well, that’s the standard “boiler plate” answer.

And yes, it is true that “technology” was what advanced change during the “Industrial revolution”, but it is really only a small contributor. Something else happened at the same time…

It was the power, and the methodology of large government ruled by small groups of men.

Did you notice the changes since 1950? Did you notice what had changed? Yes, everything that changed favored the small elite Ruling Class of America at the expense of the working class. In fact, the working class had become serf / slaves. And that is why the Ruling class treats them like the peasants that they are.

I will say it again, and repeat. What changed everything was…

Large powerful governments ruled by small groups of men.

The major driver of change are governments, for they alone have the power to change society. And society, like it or not, is what drives all the changes in our lives. And the number one method that these governments use to enact social change is the education system.

Thus we have a situation where the United States government has adopted the very same stratification systems employed by the former Soviet Union.

The reason why America is currently “on fire” and such a mess right now is because the stratification process is nearly complete. There are large segments of the society that welcomes their new roles as serfs and peasants (out of ignorance) and large sections that do not.

Unlike the Soviet Union. In Russia, Stalin killed enormous groups of people, and anyone who would oppose him was rounded up, killed outright or sent off to die of starvation. When he implemented his stratification program, he had very little remaining opposition.

That is not the case in America today.

Thus,

The ruling oligarchy is looking at this situation and sees that the former Soviet Union system of control can only happen when there are large groups of opposition forces out of the way. In order to implement their segregation and stratification initiatives, they will need to devise a system to suppress these opposition forces.

What will happen is unknown.

Civil War
An external war of distraction.
A World War.
Nothing, just more of the same ratcheting up in severity.

But the PTB pretty much expect that all this to settle out eventually. One way or the other. And when the dust settles and the fires die out, and the survivors start to rebuild their lives, you can well realize that the world will be quite different going out, than what it is today; going in.

Do you want more?

Do you want to see similar posts?

I hope that you found this post curious. Please take care. You can view other similar posts in my SHTF Index, here…

SHTF Articles

Articles & Links

You can start reading the articles by going HERE.
You can visit the Index Page HERE to explore by article subject.
You can also ask the author some questions. You can go HERE to find out how to go about this.
You can find out more about the author HERE.
If you have concerns or complaints, you can go HERE.
If you want to make a donation, you can go HERE.

Please kindly help me out in this effort. There is a lot of effort that goes into this disclosure. I could use all the financial support that anyone could provide. Thank you.

Some things we can expect when the progressive Marxists take over America.

The progressive Marxists, that call the Democrat party their home, have pretty much saturated every government organization, institution and business in the United States. Since Obama was President, we have had all the Fortune Five Hundred companies hire expensive “diversity officers”, and the “Deep State” has relentlessly pushed progressive Marxism at all levels. It’s only a few short years away from when they will regain the totality of American governance. It is helpful to look at what will happen in America through the lens of what happened in the Soviet Union when they took power.

America is about to become full-on Marxist. It's only a few short years away. But, first you all must be disarmed, and by golly you will be. — America is about to become full-on Marxist. It’s only a few short years away. But, first you all must be disarmed, and by golly you will be.

Get ready, because it’s coming and you will not be able to stop it.

The Soviet Union is the blueprint for much of what the left is selling these days. We can see it all around us. And yet we mistakenly think that it is dead and buried. We mistakenly think that it only exists in Communist China.

That’s really and terribly wrong.

The progressive Marxists in America would have a very difficult time living inside of China. For it is a Chinese Conservative traditional nation with zero tolerance for any of that progressive nonsense. They believe in work, merit and participation. If you don’t agree, they will re-educate you to “cure” your malfunction. The Communist Chinese are communist in name only.

They are a traditional conservative totalitarian nation with zero acceptance of anything else.

It’s not “free” like America is. It doesn’t permit “diversity” as part of “democracy”. It doesn’t allow the “free exchange of ideas and thought” like America does. It doesn’t permit allowances for the “less fortunate” or the “less privileged”.

America has "freedom" and "democracy". — America has “freedom” and “democracy”.

The blueprint for progressive Marxist democrats is not China, it is the Soviet Union.

The Soviet Union was one of the most brutal regimes of the 20th century. Yet, given the significant timescale of its existence and subsequent collapse, many things have been erased from public memory. Today it is remembered fondly by the leadership of the Democrat party, and cherished by their rabid followers.

This is really strange as terms like dictatorship are often used casually in political debate. This is done without a full appreciation of what real tyranny actually looks like. As well as what to expect when it is permitted to thrive and grow inside of America…

Pseudoscience will be endorsed by the Federal government.

While Soviet socialism (typically referred to as communism) was viewed as scientific by its followers, science was unquestionably subject to ideology.

Trofim Lysenko was a Soviet scientist who backed an alternative theory to genetics which would become known as Lysenkoism. He was hostile to the idea of genetics which highlighted unchanging traits. This was at odds with his Marxist beliefs, which stated that with the right conditioning, society and ultimately humanity could be perfected.

What was once consider fringe, became suddenly real when the armed government took control of the narrative. This was true in all historical venues and will be frighteningly true in America as well.

The Soviet government eagerly embraced Lysenko’s ideas and his theory was installed as the only acceptable viewpoint within agricultural science. Any scientists who challenged this were removed from their positions and publicly smeared. Many were imprisoned and executed. Not only was science handicapped in the Soviet Union for decades, these bogus theories worsened the famines of the 1930s.

We can well expect that pseudoscience to be embraced and made the law of the land within America;

Global Warming.
Gender equality.
Mainstream abortions on demand as being natural.

Psychiatry will be used to silence political dissidents

In the Soviet Union, political dissidents were imprisoned for years in mental asylums and forcibly given mind altering drugs for challenging Marxist doctrine. It was claimed that anyone who lived in a socialist system but was still opposed to socialism had to be insane.

The Soviet authorities even invented a new psychiatric term; ‘sluggish schizophrenia’. Its symptoms included obsessing over philosophy or religion, having ‘delusions of reform’ and having inflated self-esteem. But of course, the disorder was completely made up and deliberately vague so it could be attached to dissidents when useful.

In a society that makes no differences regarding gender, would have no problem forcing gender change "therapy" on dissidents. — In a society that makes no differences regarding gender, would have no problem forcing gender change “therapy” on dissidents.

What made this method particularly effective was that once someone’s sanity was called into question, they were not subject to the same due process compared with a criminal case. This gave the State even more power than it normally had as it wasn’t required to inform the accused of basic details of their case. Approximately 20 thousand people were institutionalized under such claims but the total is believed to be significantly higher.

We hear about progressive liberals wishing Trump supporters would die, and they have even taken up arms and weapons to make sure this happens. Imagine what happens when they are in complete control of the medical establishment.

The top Democrat Leadership will all be sexual predators

Funny how the progressive Marxists are all about trying to out Sexual predators. However it’s been my experience that the people who talk the loudest about certain things are usually the one with the problems about that issue.

The democrat party rewards sexual predators.

Lavrentiy Beria was a Soviet politician and state security administrator under Stalin. He began his career as the chief of police in Georgia and eventually became the head of the secret police, overseer of the Gulag prison system and Central Committee member. Stalin warmly referred to him as “my Himmler”.

Aside from being responsible for the murder, torture and false imprisonment of millions of peoples, he was also a well-known sexual deviant. During his free time he would prowl the streets of Moscow and identify young women for his henchmen to kidnap and transport to his private accommodation where he would sexually assault them. After his death Beria’s villa was turned into an embassy and during refurbishments the bones of dozens of young women and teenage girls were discovered buried on the property.

Historian Simon Sebag Montefiore notes that Beria’s depravity was well known amongst the Soviet leadership. While Stalin tolerated Beria due to his reliability, in one instance, when Stalin heard his daughter was at Beria’s house, he frantically called her and ordered her to leave immediately.

Expect, regardless of gender, the top progressive Marxist leadership will be aggressive sexual predators. They will have money, complete and absolute power, and will be able to do what ever they want with out any opposition.

Prisons will be an integral part of the United States economy.

The labor camp system was originally created by Lenin but was at its worse under Stalin. These camps, which would become known as the Gulag, were used to imprison those accused of political crimes. The conditions in the camps were appalling. Abuse and mistreatment were commonplace, and it’s estimated up to 2 million people died within them.

American prisons, both State and Federal, will be repurposed to hold "undesirables", "deplorables" and other misfits that cannot adjust to the new Marxist utopia that America has become. — American prisons, both State and Federal, will be repurposed to hold “undesirables”, “deplorables” and other misfits that cannot adjust to the new Marxist utopia that America has become.

These camps operated as a tool of political terror and also facilitated what was essentially slave labor. The Soviet authorities saw the Gulag as a way of helping the economy and believed it could produce a significant amount of income.

Gulag prisoners were frequently put to work in mines, forests, oil fields and large construction projects. Huge amounts of the resources were produced from the forced labor, creating an entire industry in itself. At Kolyma, a region in the far east of Russia, there were 80 Gulag facilities, all dedicated to mining its significant gold deposits.

However, the Gulag turned out to be an ineffective economic model because unsurprisingly slaves don’t make good workers. The labor camps ultimately became a massive drain on State finances.

Most State prisons within America today operate under a "for profit" model for private enterprise. — Most State prisons within America today operate under a “for profit” model for private enterprise.

Today, throughout the United States, the prisons exist under a “for profit” model. Expect them to be expanded and merged with FEMA and some kind of Social Program along the lines of the CCC to enroll dissidents and control them.

Starvation will be used as a weapon

Several famines occurred within the USSR as a result of farm collectivisation. This was largely due to the fact that this policy simply does not work, but what is also true is the Soviet authorities knew that access to food could be used to control the population.

An enormous percentage of Americans rely on food stamps to live. The government can control these people by withholding their benefits.

This strategy was used in one of the most infamous man-made famines of the 20th century, the Ukrainian famine of 1932-1933, known as the Holodomor. What was particularly cruel about this famine was that it wasn’t solely caused by incompetence, bad policy or denial. Rather it was deliberately manufactured and worsened by Stalin as a means of wiping out the Kulaks, peasant farmers who were economically more successful than the rest of the population and thus, class enemies.

Historians have also speculated that the famine was targeted at Ukraine in order to weaken its national identity. Ukrainian nationalists had put up fierce resistance to Bolshevik rule during the Russian civil war and Stalin was not willing to risk the region rising up.

After seizing crops and livestock, Soviet forces closed off the borders and arrested- or just shot- anyone that tried to flee. It’s estimated that four million Ukrainians died as result of this famine but the true figure will never be known as there was a coordinated effort to cover up the death toll.

Enemies with become friends.

While it is true that Nazism and Communism were bitter enemies, the two ideologies saw they had more in common with each other than their non-authoritarian rivals. After all, both are, fundamentally socialist systems.

Their uneasy but mutually beneficial association peaked in August 1939 with the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact. Officially, this was a neutrality pact but in reality it was also an agreement on which areas of Eastern Europe the two regimes would take over. Poland was the main target of this deal, and within two weeks of each other, the two powers occupied the nation in September 1939. As the Nazis rounded up Jews in their half of the country, the Soviets systematically murdered Polish intellectuals and military officers in their sector.

Chuck Schumer with President Putin of Russia.

Even years prior to this agreement, the secret police of both regimes, the Gestapo and NKVD, had been cooperating by exchanging political dissidents who had fled their respective countries. More bizarrely, the NKVD handed over numerous German communists to their Nazi counterparts. Many of those who were traded between the two agencies would meet their end in either the Gulag or SS concentration camps.

Like the book “Animal Farm” you will see the those in power will embrace the ideologies of other socialist nations, become close working friends and mutually support each other.

Terror and violence will be mainstream.

People who are “woke” have little respect for the thought of others. They go into “brain freeze” and immediately assault you for thinking differently than they do. You can expect this behavior to become sanctioned by the government.

Antifa are the "Brown Shirts" of the American Democrat Party. — Antifa are the “Brown Shirts” of the American Democrat Party.

When the atrocities of the Soviet Union are discussed, much of the focus is put on Stalin. However this means the crimes of other earlier revolutionary figures are overlooked, in particular with the USSR’s founder, Vladimir Lenin.

Lenin strongly believed that there could be no peaceful transition from capitalism to communism. The wealthy elites could only be removed from power by force, not to mention they had to be punished for their crime of exploiting the people. Even after the Bolsheviks had achieved control of the government violence and specifically terror were used to control the population and eliminate any perceived threat to its power.

The Democrat "Brown Shirts";
the Antifa, thrive in Democrat strongholds, but once the Democrats obtain true and complete power, they will be everywhere. — The Democrat “Brown Shirts”;
the Antifa, thrive in Democrat strongholds, but once the Democrats obtain true and complete power, they will be everywhere.

Hundreds of thousands, potentially millions of people, were executed and imprisoned during the ‘Red Terror’, a campaign of violence against those labelled as class enemies. Additionally, during the early years of the Bolshevik government, numerous uprisings were brutally put down.

All of this was organized and endorsed by Lenin. It was under his leadership that the secret police, initially called the Cheka, and the Gulag were established. Moreover, he explicitly stated that the goal was to terrify the population into submission.

This is what the Antifa will look like once the Democrats come to complete and absolute power in America.

“Fake news” will be used to control thought.

We have become accustomed with Google, Facebook, Twitter and all their sub-companies censoring conservative thought. They have also created “fact check” organizations to enforce the legitimacy of their narratives. This is a well known technique and was practiced in the Soviet Union extensively.

CNN news team announces that Trump won the 2016 Presidential Election.

The KGB was the institutional successor of the Cheka and NKVD, operating from 1954 to 1991 and was responsible for state security. Abroad, its primary goals were to foster political unrest and promote Marxist ideology.

One of the KGB’s most well-known activities was planting false stories in Western media and spreading conspiracy theories with the intent of destroying trust in institutions and inciting conflict. Today this is widely known as ‘fake news’ but its origin can be traced back to the Communist intelligence agency who referred to it as ‘disinformation’.

President Trump was the first person to take on the massive American news organization.

One of the most famous cases of a successful disinformation campaign was in 1984 when the US media covered the supposed scandal of the AIDs virus being created by the American government. This was in fact a lie that had been carefully crafted and strategically inserted into foreign news sources by Soviet intelligence until it reached Western journalists.

Within Russia, while the KGB was officially disbanded, its influence and tactics can still be observed today and have undoubtedly been boosted by the emergence of the internet.

Sweeping purges of non-Marxist thought will be common.

Once the progressive Marxists take control there will be no “free thought”. Like at work, you cannot offend anyone, it will be on steroids. You will, and must act and speak in accordance with the proclaimed fashion. If you fail to do so, you might end up in a re-education camp in Alaska.

Historian Stephen Kotkin describes the Great Terror as “an episode that seems to defy rational explanation.” Between 1936 to 1938 Stalin carried out a sweeping political purge of his administrative, military and diplomatic ranks. Hundreds of thousands of people were arrested, tortured, imprisoned and in many cases summarily executed based on imaginary political offenses.

Sweeping purges of non-Marxist thought will be common.

Again, there was no rational reason to inflict this chaos on the country. Historians have been baffled for decades over Stalin’s actions in this period as his position as leader was arguably stronger than it had ever been and there were no obvious internal threats to the Soviet Union.

While several theories have been put forward, Kotkin suggests that the most creditable explanation is that Stalin wanted to psychologically destroy his inner circle so they would never try to undermine him. Alongside this twisted motivation was Stalin’s paranoia towards the influence of his exiled rival, Leon Trotsky, especially after Trotsky published books severely criticizing Stalin.

Not only was the Terror completely unnecessary, it was also damaging to the regime. With many of the Red Army’s most experienced and competent officers purged during the Terror, Soviet forces were severely weakened in their ability to fight back when the Nazis invaded in 1941. This resulted in extraordinarily high casualties for the Soviets.

There will be institutional anti-Semitism

You wouldn’t think this would occur, but it is a foundational fundamental requirement of Marxist control.

Soviet anti-Semitism was inherited to a large degree from the Tsarist era, and arguably communist anti-Semitism can be traced back to Karl Marx himself, who firmly associated Judaism with greed and exploitation.

AOC’s Democratic Socialists chant for Israel’s destruction

Bigotry towards Jews was also closely tied to the Soviet anti-Zionist campaign. It even had an official organization called the Anti-Zionist Committee of The Soviet Public which explicitly stated that Zionists had been collaborators with the Nazis, enabled the genocides in Eastern Europe and had deliberately exaggerated Jewish victim-hood during the war.

Expect this to be the new American Leadership once Trump leaves office.

Though publicly the government claimed to make a distinction between Zionism and Jews, in reality there was institutional discrimination. Jews were prevented from holding certain jobs and were often scapegoated in political witch-hunts. Additionally, as part of the Soviet’s anti-religion campaign, the Jewish faith was subject to, alongside other religious faiths, State oppression in various forms.

The ruling democrat organization will turn on the Jewish people with a vengeance.

Following the Six Day War in 1967, any Jewish-Soviet citizens who applied to immigrate to Israel were denied permission and considered enemies of the people. These individuals, the ‘Refuseniks’, faced severe social and legal consequences, with many being imprisoned for years.

Conclusion

We can see what to expect through the lens of history.

Trump has been unsuccessful in overturning centuries of corruption of the Constitutional Republic. Minor surgery with a tweet here, or an appointment of a judge there is not enough to erase the embedded “deep state” and the progressive tears by Presidents Wilson, FDR, Clinton, Johnson, Obama and Bush.

When Trump leaves, the progressive Marxists will enact sweeping changes and you will be helpless to withstand the onslaught.

What you need to think about is how you will adjust to the new reality and live within it. Fighting is out of the question. You will be disarmed, and if you haven’t left the United States by now, you never will.

It’s gonna be too late.

So plan on how you will live within the progressive utopia that is bounding towards you. It’s inevitable.

Do you want to see similar posts?

I hope that you found this post curious. Please take care. You can view other similar posts in my SHTF Index, here…

SHTF Articles

Articles & Links

You can start reading the articles by going HERE.
You can visit the Index Page HERE to explore by article subject.
You can also ask the author some questions. You can go HERE to find out how to go about this.
You can find out more about the author HERE.
If you have concerns or complaints, you can go HERE.
If you want to make a donation, you can go HERE.

Please kindly help me out in this effort. There is a lot of effort that goes into this disclosure. I could use all the financial support that anyone could provide. Thank you.

Early SHTF advice. What it was like surviving when your entire world is turned up side down. A first Selco interview.

When your world is turned upside down, what is it like? Can you rush to the supermarket and stock up on groceries? Can you rely on the national guard to keep roving gangs at bay? Can you make sure that your home is heated and that you have running water? What is it like?

This is an interview with Selco when he first started posting on the internet. He says a lot of interesting things, and makes a number of points that I would like to underline.

The Siege of Sarajevo was the longest siege of a capital city in the history of modern warfare. After being initially besieged by the forces of the Yugoslav People's Army, Sarajevo, the capital of Bosnia and Herzegovina, was besieged by the Army of Republika Srpska from 5 April 1992 to 29 February 1996 during the Bosnian War. — *The* *Siege* of *Sarajevo* *was* *the* *longest* *siege* of a *capital* *city* in *the* *history* of *modern* *warfare*. *After* *being* *initially* *besieged* by *the* *forces* of *the* *Yugoslav* *People’s* *Army*, *Sarajevo*, *the* *capital* of *Bosnia* *and* *Herzegovina*, *was* *besieged* by *the* *Army* of *Republika* *Srpska* *from* 5 *April* 1992 to 29 *February* 1996 *during* *the* *Bosnian* *War*.

This article is from another article posted, titled ;”How I survived a year of SHTF in 90s Bosnia”. I think that is is pretty good. All credit to the author and the source. I did edit his grammar, for the most part. It makes for decent reading that way.

Introduction

Back in September of 2011, a user named Selco joined the forums at SurvivalistBoards.com and posted “my SHTF experience-wartime,” a thread that would since become legendary in survivalist communities and beyond (you frequently see people reference it to this day on sites such as 4chan and reddit).

In it, Selco details his experience of living in a besieged Bosnian town of 50 to 60k people during the Bosnian War (1992-1995). The siege took away everything modern humans take for granted and tested with extreme brutality Selco’s and his community’s ability to survive.

But what is so interesting about this war story is that it was told to a group of survivalists (preppers) who had questions — lots of questions.

How does barter work and which survival strategies are worthless bunk?
How were the social dynamics when everyone realized there was no law?
What really happens and what kind of tricks do people actually get up to to get by when faced with — essentially — the apocalypse?

Selco’s first post.

OK, i wanna share with you my own experience. (be patient with my English, I am from far away )

I am from Bosnia, and as some of you may know it was hell here from 92-95, anyway, for 1 whole year I lived and survived in a city of 50 000- 60 000 residents WITHOUT: electricity, fuel,running water, real food distribution, or distribution of any goods, or any kind of organized law or government. The city was surrounded for 1 year and in that city actually it was SHTF situation.

We did not have organized army or police force, there was groups of defenders, actually anybody who had a gun, fight for his own house and his own family.

Some of us was better prepared, but most of families had food for couple of days, some of us had pistol, few owned AK-47 when all started.

Anyway, after one month or two, gangs started with their nasty job, hospital looked like butchery, police force vanished, 80 percent of hospital staff gone home.

I was lucky, my family was big in that time (15 members in one big house, 5-6 pistols, 3 Kalashnikov s) so we lived and survived, most of us (that is).

I remember US Air force dropped MRE every 10 days (God bless USA for that) as help for surrounded city, it just was not enough. Some of houses had little gardens with some vegetables, most did not.

After three months rumors started about (the) first deaths from starvation, deaths from low temperatures, we stripped every door, window frame from abandoned houses for heating, I burned all my own furniture for heating, lot of people died from diseases, mostly from bad water (two of my family members), we used rain water for drinking, several times I ate pigeons, once I (even) ate rat.

Money ~~did~~ (was) not worth shit.

We traded things, (the) black market worked. A few examples: for 1 (can of) corned beef can you could have woman for couple of hours (sounds bad, but it was the reality). I remember, (that) most of ~~that~~ the women were just desperate mothers…

…candles, lighters, antibiotics, fuel, batteries, rifle ammo and of course food, we fight like animals for that.

In a situation like that, lot of things change, most of people turned into monsters, it was ugly.

Strength was in numbers, if you were alone in the house, you would have probably been robbed and killed, no matter how well armed (you were).

Anyway, war ended, again thanks to America (and again god bless USA for that). It is not important witch side was right in that war.

It was almost 20 years ago, but believe me, for me it was just like yesterday, I remember everything, and I think that I learned a lot (of things).

Me and my family are (all) prepared now, I am well armed, (well) stocked and (well) educated.

War is never pretty. Nor does it resemble what is portrayed by Hollywood. All is in ruin, and there are no clear friends, sides, or relationships.

It ~~is not important~~ does not matter what going to happen; earthquake, war, tsunami, aliens terrorists, important thing is that something is gonna (eventually happen).

And from my experience, you can not survive alone. Strength is in numbers. Be close with your family, prepare with them. Choose your friends wisely and prepare with them too.

And at the end, this is my first post, and my English is not so good, so don t judge me too hard. ”

Q: How did you get around safely?

Actually, the city was broken in something like a lot of street communities. In my street (15 or 20 houses) we organized patrols (5 armed man every night) to watch out for gangs or enemies.

Cities were death traps and your only hope for survival were your friends and family.

We traded things between people in that street. Five miles from my street there was one street with something (that looked) like organized traders, but it was to dangerous to go there. It worked only during the nighttime (during the day it was sniper alley) and (it was risky) you had a greater chance to be robbed there than to trade. I used that street only 2 times, and believe me, it was only when i really needed something (really) bad.

Selco didn’t want to specify the city, but based on his description it could be Livno, which had 40,600 residents in 1991 (now at 34k). Wikipedia: “After the end of World War II, Livno was a part of Socialist Republic of Bosnia and Herzegovina in Yugoslavia. After its collapse in 1992 and during the Bosnian War, it was under control of Croat Republic of Herzeg-Bosnia.” — Selco didn’t want to specify the city, but based on his description it *could* be Livno, which had 40,600 residents in 1991 (now at 34k). Wikipedia: “After the end of World War II, Livno was a part of Socialist Republic of Bosnia and Herzegovina in Yugoslavia. After its collapse in 1992 and during the Bosnian War, it was under control of Croat Republic of Herzeg-Bosnia.”

Q: What about wood? It looked like there are many forests around your city, why did you have to burn doors and furniture?

First, thank you for your questions, I did not expect this kind of interest in my post.

I ll be glad to share lot of things with you guys because i want to learn lot of things from you.

Anyway:

Bosnia does have a lot of woods and forests when you go and check the map, but I lived in city closer to the Croatian border, more to the South. I really don’t want to mention name of the city, but if you check the map, the southern part of my country closest to Croatia is all rocky.

Yes we had some trees in my city, parks, fruit trees, but most of the city was building and houses. But believe me…

… all the trees in the city are going to be burned very fast when you don’t have electricity for cooking and heating. After that all what you have is furniture, doors, wooden floors… (and believe me that stuff is burning up far too fast)

Death came swiftly from unexpected places and was often sudden and swift.

There was almost no car use in town. This is because: most of the roads were jammed with ruins, abandoned cars, destroyed houses stuff like that, and petrol was like gold (to us).

If i needed to go somewhere I almost always used night time. I never went alone but also I never went in big group either. (We traveled in smaller groups) (2-3 men maybe), always armed, very fast, always in shadows, through ruins, rarely ever openly on the street, actually… always hiding.

We did not have suburbs and farmers, in the suburbs were the enemy army. We were surrounded by the enemy army, and inside town… (well,) you did not know who is your enemy.

You can expect that all government organization to shut down, and the currency that you hoarded to be useless.

And yes, there were organized groups of gangs, 10-15 people, sometimes even 50. But also there were (a lot of) normal people like you and me, fathers, granddads, decent folks, who robbed and killed. There wasn’t too much good and bad guys (black and white), most of everyone was (some shade of) gray, ready for everything.

Q: Did you prep and what kind of skills did you need?

Of course you can ask.

We used what we had, we were not prepared for that situation. We did not know about prepping.

During a SHTF event, it will all be crazy. Currency, and money will be useless. There will be no water, and no electricity. There will be no wifi and no internet. Most furniture will be used for firewood, and people will trade anything to stay alive.

So you can imagine in some aspects we went back to stone age, actually in most (ways we did).

We just used everything what we had. One example, I had in my possession, a propane (or butane I am not sure which) large storage bottle; cylinder (i am not sure is that right word), but I did not use it for cooking or heating, it was too valuable. Instead, I managed to modify that bottle with my friend. I attached a hose and created some kind of refueling mechanism (sorry my English is going down here) so i can refill those disposable lighters, (they are not really disposable if you have know-how) those lighters were worth a small fortune.

During the war, the capital lay in ruins.

To make story short, somebody (would) bring an empty lighter to me and I would fill that lighter up with gas. Usually I took one can (of food) for that or (else) one candle or whatever he was able to offer me.

I hope you understand my example, my English is poor on some things.

One more example, I am a registered nurse, in any time like that, my knowledge was (a valuable thing) for trade.

And yes, be trained and educated, in times like that it worth a fortune if you know how to fix things. Eventually, all your goods are going to be exhausted one day. However, your specific knowledge can be your food.

Neighborhoods will be in ruins. Those with the best or the wealthiest homes will be repeatedly looted and attacked. Even if you do not appear to have a nice house, if your neighbors think that you might have storage and food, you will be looted.

I mean learn to fix things (shoes or people, whatever you can).

My neighbor used to know how to make some kind of oil for oil lamps (oil in glass, peace of rope – “kerosene camping lanterns”) and he was never hungry, he never did show me how he made that oil for the lamps. ”

I believe he used some tree behind his house and small amount of diesel fuel, i don’t know.

My point is to learn things, people always need somebody who knows how to fix things.

It was not survival movie, it was ugly, we did what we have to do to survive.

Nobody wins, we just survived, with a lot of bad dreams.

Q: Wasn’t it religious, the war?

Sorry man wrong info, that was not Cristian vs Muslim war, it was civil war, with lot of switching between sides.

And sorry I will not get into the politics involved, I really don’t care too much about that, I am not going into religious stories. I mean, I believe in God as a higher power, and I am trying to live by his laws, but I do not belong to any dogma, Muslim or Christian.

Q: Who was your support group?

My group was only my family. This was my blood (relatives like uncles, grandmother…), in my street. In my town trips I had some close friends, but my best friend(s) was my family. I never took a stranger into my close group.

Q: If you had three months to prepare today, what would you do?

If I have extra three months to prepare?

Hmmm, I’d probably run overseas …

<Joke>

OK, Now I am very well aware how things can go very bad in very short time, so (today) I have food, hygiene, energy etc. to supply me for 6 months. I now live in apartment with some improved security. I also have a house with shelter in a village some 5 miles from my apartment. In that house are also supplies for 6 months. The village there is a small community, and most of them are my relatives, (and now) most of them are prepared (they learned that from war). I have four kinds of (live) fire weapons with (at least) 2000 bullets for each (sorry, can not go in details, laws are different here for rifles).

I have big garden at that house and some good knowledge about gardening and farming.

I think i have knowledge now to smell trouble. You (do) know that when everybody is saying that everything is going to be fine you somehow know that is everything going to fall apart.

I think I have the strength necessary to do everything what it takes to keep me and my family alive, because when everything is going to shit…

…be sure, you are going to do some bad things to save your kid. You don t want to be hero, but you do want to survive with your family.

I am nurse, also I am paramedic (US standards)

And i am willing to learn from all of you.

One man survivor, no chance ( OK, it’s only my opinion).

No matter how well armed and prepared you are, at the end you are gonna die. I’ve seen that, many times. Family groups or closest friend with lot of preparing and lots of different knowledge (skill sets) will carry you through the SHTF event, I believe that is what is best.

Q: What items should we stockpile?

Thank you.

Well it depends, I guess if you stock only one thing you are not going to survive. (That is), unless you want to survive like robber, then you need only a gun and lot of ammo.

I believe, besides ammo, food hygiene and energy things (batteries etc.) are necessary. You need to focus on small things for trade. This would include pocket knives, lighters, and flints.

Also a LOT of alcohol, the kind that can store long. I mean stuff like whiskey and all that. It’s not not important what kind, you can have cheapest brand. It is a very good thing for trade in desperate times.

A case or twenty of small bottles of whiskey makes for good trading mediums for barter during SHTF events.

Also lack of hygiene things killed a lot of people, I’ve seen that.

You gonna need to have some simple things, like for example lot of garbage bags, I mean a lot, many uses for that, and a LOT of duct tape, many many uses for that (too).

In case of weapon keep it simple. I mean now i always carry a Glock 45 with me, because i like that gun, but it is not a usual gun and usual caliber here…

The G21 is the perfect answer to the gun owners who’re interested in owning a .45 ACP for defense purposes, but have remained loyal to the 9mm because of its capacity.

… so I also have two 7.62 mm TT Russian pistols hidden, because almost everybody has that gun here and a lot ammunition (is available).

Russian engineers decided to develop a round based on the German Mauser’s 7.63 mm ammo. So in the early 1930s, the Soviet was armed with the famous TT-30 pistol. Its construction was based on a simplified version the of Brauning pistol. The TT-30 received powerful 7.62 x 25 rounds that flew out of the gun at 420 meters per second.

I don t like Kalashnikov, but here there is that rifle on almost every 3rd house so…

Most of the time I collected my water from roof in 4 big barrels during the war, then boiled to disinfect it, we also had river in that town, but it was far too polluted but if you can’t choose…

I don t think I am an expert, I am here to learn.

I guess, it depends how far you going to go to survive with your actions, you need to be prepared to do some ugly things.

Oh yes… it changed my perspective on life.

I know now that bad things can happen, and one more important thing, actually I believe it is most important:

I no longer believe government and authority, not at all.

When they really doing their best to assure you that everything going to be fine, you can be sure that something bad is happening.

Do not just believe, (do your own) research.

Q: What about the civil war…and the religious fighting? Did gold and silver help much and how did you get the alcohol and other supplies?

Hello to all. It is me again.

I believe in some point this discussion gone the wrong way, and no I am not offended, everybody have right for opinion, so here are few of my opinions:

It was a civil war, yes there was a great influence of religion, but somebody mentioned “what did you do with people of other religions?”

Well in my family there are people with different religious beliefs so what do you mean with that?

I’ll try to explain you simply; it was an attackers and defenders war. (There were a) lot of switching sides; a civil war.

The war ended without winners, it ended with a truce, thanks mostly to USA.

It was a wrong war, (all for the) wrong reasons.

I did not fight for religion or ethnicity, I fought to keep my family and myself alive.

For the last 15 years we have had peace. We live with people who used to be our enemies. I do not to want to have war and enemies again because ethnicity or religion or for any other reason.

Please do not try to generalize anything about that war, there was no good or bad side, we all suffered and (now) we all try to live together again.

And yes every side did bad things, and every side had both good and bad guys.

I am here for one and only reason- survival, I want to learn, and I can share some useful stuff with you. I don’t ~~think~~ (want to know) about your religious beliefs, your ethnicity or your politic opinions.

Few words about my city before war, it was the usual Bosnian town. (It had a) normal life, decent people, schools, theaters, and parks. (It had a) college, airport, crime rates were very low. (The) town was like most of the smaller towns in USA (I think). I was a young man, just like any of you are maybe.

Now very important think: I am not here to discuss about war reasons, or sides, religion or anything similar.

Thanks to the war, in my town was REAL SHTF situation, and we can discuss only about that, only that is important.

You have a lot internet pages, you can learn everything about that war, and you can choose side if you want. OK that’s it.

About survival.

I don t know about other people on this forum, but I have lot of alcohol stacked now.

At the beginning of the war a tank grenade smashed front wall of small distillery (alcohol factory) close to my house. (It opened up and we were able to access it) so we took something around 500 liters of rakia (it is something like Bosnian whiskey, I guess, it’s made from grapes, and very strong)

It was great stuff for trading, people used alcohol a lot, desperate times I think, we also used it for disinfection.

About hygiene, cups and plates, paper or plastic, your gonna need a LOT, I know, we did not have it at all.

My opinion is that hygiene things are more important maybe than food, you can easily shoot pigeon. If you have a grandmother she may know (about) some of the eatable plants on nearest small hill (my experience) but you can not shoot hand sanitizer

Water purifying pills, all kind of cleaning stuff, sanitizers, lot of soap, bleach, gloves, masks, all disposable. (All are important and needed.)

Here, I copy and edit this in the middle of the cornovirus event inside of China. And this advice is spot on, I'll tell you what.

Take very good care about (getting) first aid training. Learn how to treat smaller cuts, burns or even a gunshot wound. There will not be any hospital (available), even if you found a doctor somewhere he probably will not have any meds, or (perhaps) you won’t have stuff to pay him with.

Learn how and when to use antibiotics and have a lot of it on hand.

Believe me with (some) good knowledge and goodly amount of meds you are gonna be rich.

About gold and silver, yes, me personally gave all my gold for ammunition in that time, but it wasn’t worth too much.

About pets, i did not have any, I did not notice a lot pets in that time, did somebody ate them? I don’t know… probably.

About a small family, hmm, not good.

Usually a few smaller families would get together in the biggest house available and stay together, all relatives (my case).

A small family or a single man, (is) not ~~good~~ (an ideal arrangement) for survival in town (during a) SHTF event.

Maybe in the wilderness (but I don t have experience in that).

Even if you keep a low profile, hidden in your house with lots of food etc, sooner or later the mob will come. And you have maybe have one or two guns… (it’s going to be) very hard (to make it oout alive).

I agree with the low profile policy, it is very important not to attract people with anything. But when they come, (and they will come) you will need to have numbers, people and guns, your best people is your family.

About moving through the city: always move during night time as I mentioned earlier. Never alone. 2-3 man. Move very fast, never attract anything. Look like everybody else. If most folks look desperate, poor, and dirty you need to look the same. There is no need that everybody else knows that you have a good amount of food, ammo, clean clothes and everything else back at home. Look and act like everybody else. (Blend in. Be inconspicuous.)

When somebody attacks you or your family then (is when) you need to show them that you are very ready.

I never walked in big groups, in that time and that situation, (the only) big groups are gangs.

Now, this is all my experience, it was then. I made a lot of mistakes. I am no expert. I am here just like any of you, to learn and share.

For example i don t know too much about wilderness survival, I am here to ~~check~~ learn about it.

Oh yes, few things to the Sedoy: my wife is different ethnicity, and she is also a Catholic, I am not, and to answer you: no I am not going to shoot her.

Q: What happened to those who died? Where did people get firewood?

Well, who ever died or get killed in that period, did not get a proper funeral.

Folks used used every peace of free land, close to their house for burial. Sometimes even in the garden. 2-3 city parks turned to graveyards. After the war most of them are exhumed and properly buried.

There was not nothing like burning bodies or anything similar, as far as I know.

Oh one more interesting thing about fire. Some people used to travel a few miles during the night just to find fire somewhere so they can light a peace of wood and bring it home, and start a fire for cooking or heating. Lighters and matches were really precious, and most of the folks did not have enough firewood to keep a file or embers burning. For most of the people it was constant search for something, fire, wood, food, ammo…

Q: Was salt valuable?

It was valuable yes, but not too much, for example coffee or cigarettes were worth much more.

Q: What about cigarettes?

Hm, I had a lot of alcohol as I mentioned before. I traded almost everything without any problem, let me say it like this: consumption of alcohol was probably 10 times more than during normal times. Not to mention cleaning and disinfection.

On the other hand, you made a very good point, if you have money and time and you have a storage it is probably better to store cigarettes or candles and batteries for trade, or food.

I was not a “prepper” at that time, we did not have time to prepare. A few days right before the SHTF politicians on TV stated that everything is fine. Then, when the sky fell down we just take what you can.

Q: Tell us more about cooking and the foods you were able to prepare. Were you concerned about the smell getting around and alerting people that there was food over there?

About cooking, before the SHTF I used in my house electricity for both, cooking and heating. So when everything started I traded some stuff for some kind of old wood stove. I put it in the kitchen and fix exhaust pipe (right word?) through a hole in wall. I used that for both cooking and heating.

During the summer I cooked in my backyard (walled fence, brick, luckily).

Concerning the smell of the food, hum. I’ll try to (describe for you a) picture (of the) situation: no electricity, no running water, sewage off for months, dead bodies in ruined houses, grime and mess, believe me it was very difficult to smell something nice.

It was not like in movies, it was ugly, dirty, and smelly.

Yes I had a few problems because of cooking, only a few, but as I said before, enough people, properly armed and with the will to defend…

… and you can manage most of the problems with that.

Probably, the situation would be (quite) different in the wilderness.

I ate mostly some kind of pancakes with local herbs (it does not require cooking oil and too much firewood), and of course, everything what I could get and trade (we ate). Rice was good to eat, not too much firewood for that.

I think I had (a lot of) luck, only a few times (did) I eat funny things like pigeons.

I always had something to trade, I guess that saved me…

… and guns of course.

Downtown Grbavica, a suburb of Sarajevo, March of 1996. Sarajevo was also besieged and faced many of the issues described by Selco.

Q: 1. Why would the night be safer than daytime? Outside of the obvious of being easier to hide at night, but were the gangs more out during the days? Also, why only small groups of 2-3? What happened to larger groups?

2. Why would you have to go out at night? For instance, where were you going and why?

3. How did you handle the mob situation when they came for you, or your family?

4. You mentioned trading for bullets, etc. How much shooting were you doing during that time and how much ammo did you have, or would like to have had?

5. How were you able to determine who was an enemy and who wasn’t? How did you manage to get out there trade with people and when/where?

6. What fortifications did you do to your home and what kind of guard, or protections did you have in place?

7. Finally, how did you avoid snipers? What precautions did people take against them?

Firstly, almost nobody went out during the day because of snipers, the line of defense was very close, so whatever you have to do, you do it during the night.

(You) trade something, look for firewood (I can’t express how much this was important (to us) in town, and hard), looking for anything, check somebody, to go to hear news (very very important, lot of people get killed because they go somewhere just to see what happening, or what’s new) remember, no news, no radio ,no TV, nothing, rumors fed lot of people.

Already (as I) explained, you can stay home and die of hunger and cold, or even by infection of some small wound or go out and risk your life, try to find – trade anything useful

I did have situations concerning my house only, there is no need (to get into) too many details, we had more fire power, and (a) brick wall.

Also we had something like a street watch, people from my street were well organized, in case of gangs, now there were a lot shootings.

There was pretty much shooting all over town, I did not have enough weapons at the beginning. (I had) one rifle and one pistol (old world war II vintage), maybe 100 bullets total. Later I traded some things for more rifles and ammo. I remember that I gave away a car battery for 2 rifles.

How much ammo ?

A LOT, as much as you can (get a hold of).

Most of the time you are not able to determine who is enemy or friend. Expect my family and few real friends. Everybody else is a potential enemy. When your friend must choose between his child’s death and your death guess who (he) is going to choose.

Rumors, somebody tells you that some old guy a few blocks away has some cans and he is looking for ammo or whatever. You go there, as I say you are always looking for something. Same some people would came to my street as traders, with some goods.

There was something like trade street during the night, actually it was in the big ruins of sport center. You can go over there and look for something or offer something. However, it was not controlled by anyone so it was too dangerous.

It was primitive pretty much, a brick wall around the house, bags of sand on windows and doors, over that bags we used whatever you can. (There were) big pieces of metal, stones, (everywhere). Inside the house we put all kinds of stuff on the windows, (leaving) only a small opening left for a rifle. (We had a rule) always 5 members of family ready for fight, one always outside on street hidden.

Stone age situation.

To avoid snipers, we would stay home during the day, there were not so many night snipers, even during the night we never walked openly on the streets if we can avoid that, always (using) shortcuts, trough ruins, fast and quiet.

Q: What was your bathroom situation? Where did you go? Did you have anything to wipe with? Sorry ask such personal questions, but this is something that I’ve wondered about in this type of situation.

We used shovels and any piece of land close to house, (yeah) it sounds dirty, and it is dirty; washing with collected rainwater, sometimes (we would) go to the river (most of the time that was too dangerous) Most of the time we did not have toilet paper, even if I had it, I (would) trade it.

It was a bad situation all the time.

If i can give some advice: first to prep is a weapon and ammo, then everything else.

I mean everything, depends how much money and space you have.

If you forget something no problem there is always somebody ready for trade, but if you forget guns and ammo then you may not be able to get to trading places.

I do not see big family or group of really (I mean really) good friends as more mouth to feed, I see them as more guns and strength, it is in people’s nature to adapt.

And keep it simple and use common sense. In the first period (of the war) the weak people vanished, others fought.

Go with small things, lighters, candles, flints.

It is great idea to have a fuel generator (electrical generating unit) but i think a better idea is to have 1000 BIC lighters. A fuel generator is great, but in a SHTF scenario in town it is going to attract a whole army. But, 1000 BIC lighters don’t take up too much space, (they’re) cheap, and you can always trade it for something.

Real SHTF scenario demands a complete change of the normal mindset, (it’s) hard to explain, I’ll try through examples.

Q: How easy/hard was it to get weapons AFTER the SHTF and what could you trade for weapon and ammunition (I remember you saying a car battery for a rifle) and where would I go to find the people who trade in weapons?

Hum, you re right, after the war every house here had a weapon from the war, and yes the police did take some action to take illegal weapons from the population. It depends from man to man I guess, a lot of people find ways to hide their weapons somewhere, just in case.

I also have legal weapon (license), and the authority here has some thing they refer as “temporary collecting”. It basically says something like: “in a case of unusual event (riots, unrest, etc) government has the right to temporary collect all legal weapons”. So I keep always in mind that fact. And I acted like some other people.

You know some people have legal weapon for everyday carry (I have a Glock 45 and Taurus 38) but some people with legal weapon also have illegal weapons hidden somewhere just in case SHTF and “temporary collecting”.

It is not hard to get weapon in SHTF if you have good stuff for trade,. However, the other thing is important. The very first days of SHTF is worst in terms of chaos and panic. So, maybe you’re not gonna have time to get a gun. And to be unarmed in chaos panic and riots is bad.

In my case, the man needed a car battery for a HAM radio I think, and he had some extra rifles, so we traded.

Q: What about medical care for people who were shot or became injured?

Wounds was mostly gunshot wounds of course, without specialists and everything else, if wounded manage to find a doctor somewhere he had like 30% chances to live.

Again it is not (like a) movie, mostly they died.

A lot of people died even from minor cuts infections, I had antibiotics maybe for 3-4 treatments. Of course for my family only.

Simple things killed people. Diarrhea can kill you in a few days without meds and re-hydration, (fluid therapy, IV) especially small kids. Lot of fungal skin diseases, and food poisoning, we could not do too much. Basically we treated diseases mostly with local herbs, and if you had a wound, put rakia (whiskey) on it and tried to find antibiotics somewhere.

So i was good at fixing wounds in term of emergency help, but longer procedure…

…bad prognosis.

What I learned? Hygiene again, and a lot of meds, especially antibiotics. You need to learn to treat lot of stuff, go online, finish some training, EMT maybe, first aid etc.

In SHTF things are different, learn how to open IV, when to use certain drugs, or antibiotics.

Get your self ANA TE (anti tetanus ) shot injections , snake poison kit, adrenaline kit (allergic reactions, different kinds) tick removal kit, (tick related illness can kill you, learn how to remove tick)…

~~Get in~~ Supply your prepper storage some reanimation kit (simple one) like a small oxygen cylinder, a BVM mask etc. It is not really hard to learn to use all of these.

OK let’s be clear about something, of course you can not use anything of this in the “real world” unless you are certified and trained for that ( EMT, nurse, physician ).

But in SHTF nobody will ask you for your license, just learn and have it in your storage big part for medical things.

So to answer question how did I help and treat others? Most of the time everyone was very poor. I helped some with the resources that I had. I took food or something else for exchange, I was badly prepared for that, now I have what I need to have.

Q: Did your local currency/money still hold value? Were you still able to use money to purchase items from other people?

No, not really. I mean sometimes you can use foreign money if you had it to buy something, (dollars or German marks) but even in that rare occasion the rate was unbelievable. For example 1 can of beans for 30-40 dollars (normal value was maybe 0.50). I guess somebody had connections with outside world, black market you know, so he can earn a lot of money. But it was very rare. Trade was main thing to get something.

Local currency crashed very fast, in few weeks or month maybe.

Q: How much space should I keep for alcohol storage? What was security like?

About alcohol first, you are right but you are right in both ways, people needed alcohol more in desperate times then usual, so it is a kind of gambling I guess, it is very good item for trading. I never had problems with alcohol trading and having than problems with trading other things.

Also I am thinking about something else, maybe it is better to fill my storage with something less space consuming but still interesting for trade, like batteries, antibiotics etc.

Thing is I had all that alcohol for free, I did not buy it. I don t know about this.

In most of the situations people attacked me because they thought they are stronger, they did not know for sure what I really had.

About ammunition trade, it depends how much ammo you are going to have, sometimes I would trade ammo for food, and in few weeks again food for ammo. However, I never never conducted trade at my home, and never bigger amounts, very few people knew how much of anything I had in my house.

The point is to store as much of anything as you can store (space , money). (Then) later during the situation you ll see what is most popular. Correction – ammo and guns always gonna held first place for me, but who knows maybe number 2 for trading gonna be for example masks with filters.

About medical issue , I’ll write in my next post what do I have now in my medical part of storage

Defenses were very primitive, again we were not prepared. We use whatever we could, windows were broken, roofs mostly damaged from shelling, all windows were blocked with something, sand bags and rocks. Every night I blocked my yard gate with junk- rubble from the street and I used an old aluminum ladder to get over the (brick) wall, when I came back I called somebody from house to get me with that ladder so I can move back in.

A guy from my street barricaded his house completely. If he goes out at night, he used a hole that he made in one room that was connected with his neighbor’s house, and then go trough his (ruined and destroyed) house out. So, actually he had secret entrance.

It may look weird to say but most secured houses are gone first, of course we had some very nice houses in neighborhood, with walls, dogs, alarms, steel bars on windows, alarms. And you can guess what happened, mobs attacked those houses first, some were defended other not, depend how many guns and hands they had inside.

So i think security is great, but be sure that you keep it low profile. Forget about alarms, if you live in town and SHTF you gonna need simple looking non-interesting secured house, with a lot of guns and ammunition.

Just keep it low profile and not interesting.

On my apartment door now I have a steel door for security reasons, but only to keep me trough the first (brief) short period of chaos, then I am ready to move out to connect with a much bigger group of armed people (family and friends) in the country (I hope).

Well in my case migration did not happen because it happens very fast. The other army just closed up the city in a ring and that’s it. If you ask me where was that army and how we were unable to see them coming, the answer is simple. That army was an ally of the army of my side and people…

… one day we woke up and figured they are the enemy now and they are closing all the ways out. Politics. It is true, it’s one more side of civil war.

But I heard from others parts of country, and my friends who stayed in villages in the other parts in state, that they had much better situations. Their countryside had land, corn, wheat, fruit trees, farms etc. They had enough food, it was bad, but much better than in the city.

I know one thing if we had some way out from the town, we would use it, (unfortunately) we did not have it.

Q: What was the situation with banks and stores?

About banks, loans, credit cards. Complete monetary system died for about one year, so nothing works.

It is complex question in many ways, I’ll try it to answer it in some future posts, (I) need much more time and much much more space to describe it.

Even now, almost 20 years later, folks are in European court suing banks, because they don’t want to admit their savings in banks.

A lot of different things happened in that period. They changed money, I mean (the) monetary name, they changed it 2-3 times , hyperinflation occurred. (All manner of things were lost), lost (all the) paper trails about savings, loans … I remember some people use that situation to get rich, they are still rich.

So I’ll try to describe that in separate post.

There was a lot of problems with proving peoples property after everything. For example: my father had a nice apartment and because of the war he had to leave it. Now, after the war ended he was at court for about 4 years proving that the apartment was his.

Now, the reasons for that were different, because politics in that time, but also he did not have enough paper work to prove that apartment was his (he did not take papers from the apartment when he fled), he had more important things to care about.

On the other side during the worst period, people just moved in the empty house, and that’s it.

I mention rural areas in another post. As far as I remember it was better there.

In that period there wasn’t any running vehicles. Actually I remember a tank at the front line, and Lada Niva (check it on web) with cut off doors and roof and installed machine gun (I think it was an old m53) and those two only moved when they fired (they keep it hidden behind ruined houses).

For let me call it “civilian population” there was no moving with vehicles, streets were mostly under rubble and unusable and fuel was too expensive.

Not to draw attention was a big thing, about clothing, there used to be some sort of town defense, it was not like a real military, mostly mixed civilian clothes with parts of uniforms, different types of weapons, so no rules.

But as soon as we start to go in to those things and try to talk about two armies, their strength, war crimes, politics I am not gonna like it any more, because people gonna start to choose sides, and I think it is not important for us here.

As I said before there wasn’t an organized army, but we all had been like soldiers, we had to, most of us carried weapon and tried to protect ourselves from the enemy army and robbers.

Inside the town you did not want to look fancy because somebody would shoot you and take all your good stuff, you did not want to have a fancy rifle, because probably you not gonna find ammo in that caliber and also you are drawing attention to yourself.

So let me try to put it this way: If SHTF tomorrow, I will try to look like most of the people outside, scared, desperate, confused and I’ll scream maybe, no fancy looking stuff, I’ll not go out in fancy new uniform and yell “I am here, you are finished now looters and robbers”.

I’ll stay low profile, heavily armed and well prepared waiting to see my options, even if I have to go out with all my gear to do things I’ll go out in the night, with my best friend or brother. Maybe it sounds ridiculous, but from my experience it works, be very well prepared, but let nobody outside your house know or see that.

No matter how good your house security is, how good your weapon is, if people see that they have good reason to rob you they probably rob you in town SHTF. It is only matter of time and number of guns.

Don’t ever give them reason to be interesting in robbing you. Stay uninteresting. Now this is my opinion, maybe is not working in different situation.

About robbing grocery store and gas stations; it happened very very fast, as soon as shooting started all valuable things were emptied. There was some effort of authority to keep it together but everything fell apart in the first few weeks.

Bernie Carr from ApartmentPrepper was fascinated with the story and had even more questions, and was able to reach Selco.

Q: On the forum where you described your experience of being under siege, you mentioned that you had no electricity or running water. How did you and your family handle the toilet (sanitary) conditions?

We had a small yard and dug holes for toilets, we thought it was temporary so the holes were small but later on we dug bigger ones because we realized this is long and world might have forgotten us. It was not nice but at least we did not do it in the house like many others did. Whole area started to smell bad anyway, stench from dead people is worse than a bit of poo.

Q: A lot of my readers are women and they would want to know what did the women, children and elderly members of your family do on a day to day basis during the time your city was under attack?

The roles were back to hundred years ago. Before war we were modern society, but as soon as SHTF the women, kids and elder stayed mostly at home. They wanted that, no questions. Happened automatically.

They did the washing, cooking, cleaning and taking care of sick people. Just sometimes when shelling was a bit less some women came along to gather herbs or MRE if food aid was coming that time. Not often. We always had some man protecting the home, women, children and elderly.

Q: From all the weapons that you used, what was your preferred weapons for when you went out into the street OR when you were staying at home and why?

Always had the same weapons, TeTe gun / some Russian gun and AK47. Simple choice, most ammo for these weapons. We had only a few of those so we exchanged them among us. Did a good job, very reliable weapons. AK47 has good stopping power, just not very good on fully auto. Can make a mess out of a human.

Q: A lot of apartment preppers will probably decide to stay in their homes and this has raised a lot of discussions on the pros and cons of staying in the city. Some people say that by staying in the city, the infrastructure will be restored first, and that those living in the countryside would be attacked by roving bandits. The other side states that those living in the countryside have greater chances of survival as they would be more self-reliant and not dependent on resources from the city. Based on you and your family’s experience, which would you prefer and why?

RUN! If you lucky yes, city might be better off but if not it is so much worse. Bug in for a few days until first madness settled and then bug out. Also depends on the weather. Might stay at home in winter and risk getting robbed / murdered instead of going out and freezing to death. Only run if you know where you run to.

Daisy Luther from The Organic Prepper also contacted Selco for an interview. We highlight a couple of the Q&As and you can go to her site if you’d like to read the rest (she focuses on politics and the US situation).

Q: What parallels do you see with events in the US and Bosnia before the SHTF?

US and Yugoslavia (in 1990) on first look do not have anything in common because people are going to say, “The USA cannot have anything similar to any socialistic system.”

This is true but only on first look.

Yugoslavia had somewhere around 20-22 million citizens, six republics (similar to states in the US), 3-4 main religions, and many national groups (ethnicity).

The official state policy was to build Yugoslavian “nationality” (from the end of WW1) and through different ways that effort was successful until the 90s.

We were “something big, united through differences with a strong connection to make something big.”

And then those differences were used to make chaos.

In the late 80s and beginning of the 90s (when democracy came) the problems started and ended up in series of wars and cases of complete collapse.

Things that I experienced in my case prior to SHTF, and things that you might recognize:

Things that make differences between people are more and more problematic (race, religion, political opinion).
Polarization is getting obviously stronger.
People want to come to your country, but they do not want to “assimilate” or contribute to the greater good. They want to preserve their way of life which is often absolutely contradictory to the way that your country (society) works.
The political way of solving those problems often fails, because, in essence, those problems are hard to solve in a democratic way (in the spirit of democracy).
Your freedoms are “shrinking” as a result of that.
Calls for “radical solutions“ for the problems are stronger and stronger.
The media is absolutely working a dirty job, and it is hard to find out what is the truth anymore.
Suddenly people and events from history are “brought back” so people can judge and argue about it, to write history again, to build myths sometimes.

Q: Anything else to add?

I have seen many people killed, a lot of women and children too, civilians. A huge number of people suffered, were hungry and cold and were terrified through that period.

But I can count on one hand the dead or hungry politicians in that time.

Things were good for them through that period. Some of them ended up even richer. A lot of them are still powerful in the same or different parties, and are still talking about “their people” or “ causes” or “fear from others”.

It is the way it works.

Conclusion

This is good stuff, don’t you think?

Take heed, SHTF can come in many forms. Like the biological warfare with the coronvirus here in China. (Just a second ago I stepped outside to check with the apartment complex police. We are still under lock-down. No one can come in or leave the complex.)

Make sure you have a tight group of friends and family.
Stockpile food.
Stockpile sanitary and anti-bacterial supplies.
Have skills or items to barter.
Be able to defend yourself with equipment that you know how to use well.
Lie low key, and hide.

If you enjoyed this post, please be sure to visit the rest of my blog here…

SHTF Articles

Articles & Links

You can start reading the articles by going HERE.
You can visit the Index Page HERE to explore by article subject.
You can also ask the author some questions. You can go HERE to find out how to go about this.
You can find out more about the author HERE.
If you have concerns or complaints, you can go HERE.
If you want to make a donation, you can go HERE.

My publisher went out of business. So I need to set it up using other means. -MM

I want to buy one of your books but it is out of stock on Amazon. Is there a way…

Thanks for that. *sigh* Life can be so interesting sometimes. -MM

Sometimes the words in the 'narrative' need to be precise, at least in terms of 'calendar time'., or else confusion…

" Thanks for the Russian missile movement update via ol’ Panicky-Hal, Metallicman. What would life be like without him!? Meanwhile…