I am not in America. I live in China, and I am getting these occasional “feelings” that indeed something was wrong. Something inside of America is seriously wrong.
Not “wrong” as in… The Fourth Turning is in process.
Not wrong as in “get your SHTF” preps in order.
Not wrong as in “Uh oh, the USA wants to start World War III”.
Wrong as in “why are my cats hiding, and where is my dog? Hey! Where are the birds?” And why is the sky so dark? Wrong.
Of course, I know all about the Fourth Turning. I know about the collapse of empires, and I am aware of the social upheavals that can occur when empires collapse.
I’ve written about them extensively, and I have suggested that others get on a “lifeboat” and sail off away from the United States to safety. It’s just that I never…
…in my wildest dreams…
…thought that the idea that you need to abandon the USA would become a meme, or a widespread theme that many others, not just preppers, would embrace.
And so, yeah. I knew all about the changes and the collapse and I have written about it extensively. It’s just that the full extent of what must be going on RIGHT NOW inside of the USA, just surprises me.
…
It’s not just for preppers any longer…
I suppose it all began when Nomen Nescio said this in a comment…
“Yes, they still believe Democrats are the worst, Biden sucks, Pelosi is the devil, etc, but they still feel pretty burned right about now. They went from FNC to Bongino to Infowars to Rush to Breitbart, back to FNC, over to NewsMax, on to QAN, and... ...finally, now, many have just found some new hobbies.”
Does that mean that Americans have pretty much “given up” and succumbed? That they no longer believe in the “news” or in a political “savior”, or hope in change from the Washington DC establishment?
What happened to the America that I grew up in?
Yes, boys and girls, change is upon us all. But there has to be some kind of baseline of hope. Even if it is far away off in a far away land. There is always hope.
When I was in my darkest days in Prison, I still had hope.
Hope is what keeps us going on. Hope is what anchors us down and in place while the hurricane rages, and hope is what energizes us to calm down, accept things as a fleeting passage of time.
Hope.
All my SHTF writings relate to a handful of survivalists who are paying attention to what is going on, and are thus taking the necessary steps to assure survival in a contentious and changing environment.
But something unexpected is also going on.
Mr Joe and Suzy Average seems to be accepting the prepper meme. Many want to “get out of Dodge”. And that is shocking (to me) and illustrative of the late stage of societal collapse that is in process.
So it’s no longer “just” a small minority of Americans that want to bail (out of the insanity), but it is an ever growing proportion.
And as this proportion grows and increase in size, very bad people; very crazy people, very silly ideological-minded people can use the fright and fear that these people hold, and manipulate it to bad ends.
Then, I read this on the UNZ…
...I thought of these curious examples because, recently, a 31-year-old wanted my guidance. Not the best idea, but sure, why not, so we chattered via Skype. A Vietnamese-American married to a Filipina, he was pondering moving to Vietnam. “How many times have you been there?” I asked. “Actually, none.” “Wow! Why not?” “I never had the opportunity.” “Have you traveled much?” “No. I’ve only been to Canada.” “Man, you’re in for a real culture shock. You might hate it! Just go there, and see how you feel. Who knows? Has your wife been to the Philippines?” “A couple times.” “Hey, why don’t you move to the Philippines? Your wife will fit in better, and you can get by with English. Many Filipinos speak English. They’re all over Asia, singing American music!” I laughed. “First, though, you must go there and see how you feel. Do you have money saved up to last a while?” “Yeah.” “You’re probably ten times richer than me, so just go there and see how you feel. Don’t overthink it. Just do it!” Why would someone with a decent job in the federal government consider moving to a country he knows almost nothing about? Because there’s no sanity or security left in America, and no meaningful resistance. Constantly cowed, everybody is hiding and, hunched over, guarding his cans of baked beans, with the only boldness unleashed pseudonymously online, nearly always against the wrong targets. Unlike Hamas or Hezbollah, Americans don’t even know who they must fight!
Why indeed?
Why would an American with a good job want to leave it for a nation where he has never been to?
As in…
"Hey! You know my mail is late again. Where is that pesky post-person? I'm sick of this. It's time for me to move to Greenland!"
Maybe for something like this…
I mean, I understand why I left the States. But I was different. I had no other options. No friends. No family. No money. No ties. No job. No job prospects, and forced to live as a third class slave. So I left.
It made sense for me.
Living in flop-houses, eating at soup kitchens, and living alone with no job, no job prospects, and shunned from society is not a life.
And, of course, if I rode in a car …
…and the driver owned a gun, or a cell phone…
…or even had an outstanding warrant for jay walking…
… I would immediately violate the law, just by being in close proximity of that person. And then…
…boom!
I would go back to prison as a two-time offender and looking at forever-prison as a consequence. I did not want to go back to the ADC. I did not enjoy working on the chain gangs, and I most certainly hated hoe-squad and picking cotton. And don’t even get me started on the institutionalized gruel that was “Global” that they fed us.
Nope. I did not like it.
But…
But what of the rest of you all in the “bright and shining castle on the hill”? You still have work. You still have jobs. You have family, friends, clubs, associations and roots. You don’t have that same kind of Damocles‘ sword hanging over your head. As I did. You all don’t need to leave. It’s just a tad bit uncomfortable for you. Not really lifestyle-threatening.
Is it worth chucking it all away?
What would your ancestors think?
Then he adds…
“Something very evil is coming,” I wrote to a Pennsylvania acquaintance, “but it won’t just be in the US. In Albania, there won’t be race riots, at least, as stoked by the Jews. I don’t know what your work or family situation is, but it would be wise to at least think about leaving the country, just in case life there becomes too dangerous or just unbearable. “You should also consider what to do should they shut down all airports and close all land borders. You can also escape to a safer and saner place inside the country, of course, but you must think ahead about the possibilities. This is not paranoia. All the ominous signs are there.
Yes. I know all about the social re-engineering efforts.
But, if people have jobs, a career, and a chance to build a life, it all fades into the background. You just go to your job. You put food on the table. You invest your money and you plan for your family and their future. You spend time with loved ones, and you don’t worry about life or “what might happen”.
I just cannot imagine that the “woke” reality has saturated American culture to such an extent that people want to flee the USA.
Seriously is all this “woke” culture all that bad? It’s not like you are being forced to wear golden stars of David on your lapels, or being chased down the streets by mobs with clubs. Is it?
It’s not like you will lose your job for not having the right political viewpoint, or not getting a promotion because of the color of your skin. Is it?
So what is actually going on?
Yes, flee the USA for better opportunities. Flee the USA to avoid insurrection, riots, and discord. Flee the United States police state.
But to flee it because a minority of vocal woke activists are spouting nonsense is absurd.
So what is going on?
What is really going on?
Is the “woke” culture far more invasive than it appears to me (sitting outside the USA), or has Americans become just too sensitive to handle a diversity of opinion?
You just don’t leave a comfortable life with loved ones simply because of an expression that you read about on social media. You just do not.
Chances are you might read about it, and maybe ponder it, but you won’t take action on it aside from a trivial Google search, or an article or two. You won’t be traipsing down to get a visa for the nation you want to go, and you won’t start emptying out your bank accounts. Will you?
So what is really going on?
You are too busy making a life than to worry about chucking it all away and fleeing to a “third world cesspool” to quote Mike Pompeo about the rest of the world.
Certainly the people that are “running” the United States today are bat-shit crazy, dysfunctional and insane. Their toadies might be more capable, but hardly, and the ship that they set in motion is far too difficult to steer, to navigate and to dock.
All the “noise” in the daily media barrages cannot compete to the reality that you are working, that you have a paycheck and a chance at the “American pie”.
He continues…
“In early March of 1975, I was still going to school and taking judo lessons. (then...) By the end of April, I was on a military transport plane to fly to Guam, where I would live in a tent as a refugee. Normality can disappear in a flash.” His response, “I have thought long about where this is all headed. It is pretty obvious that the US is fucked five ways to Sunday. The masses just haven’t figured it out and are slowly cottoning on. “You asked about my family and work situation. I work in the construction field doing semi-skilled labor and maintenance and have started learning HVAC over the last couple years. “I’ve been with the same woman for about 13 years. We aren’t legally married but own a house together. I love her and her family very much. Her mother is widowed and in her 70’s. She has an aunt and uncle that live up the road from us. We look out for them a bit too. “At this point it’s hard seeing a way out. I’ve known a lot of people over the years that have had to flee. I’m old enough to have met Polish and Ukrainians that got out during or right after the War to Save Stalin. Same with people such as yourself. While traveling through Vietnam, I met old ARVN guys who stayed and were ‘reeducated.’ Certainly do not envy them. “Lancaster is a great town. However we did not escape the peace riots of this past summer. This area has been overrun by New York ‘creatives’ and their pets, the various lumpen proles that have moved down because the welfare benefits are good and the Section 8 voucher goes further. “The city council mayor and head of police are all avowed BLM and Antifa supporters. In essence I am behind enemy lines. “My lady is pretty level-headed and no dummy as far as certain non-PC topics are concerned. Working in health care and moving from small town PA to Baltimore will do that, I guess. “However she is reticent to leave the familiarity of family and friends for more rural, less populated areas. Ironic because most of her family and social circle are essentially on board with the whole raft of neo-Bolshevik BS that is being churned out by the multinationals and Zionist Occupied Government… “At the end of the day, I don’t see any real way to get out from under the falling limbs of this dying empire. If I were single, I would be holed up somewhere in the mountains of Appalachia. Possibly west Texas. Maybe overseas.” Although fleeing abroad entails its own complicated and drawn-out set of problems, just about every nationality, save Americans, have had to do so during the last 100-odd years. I’ve fled twice, and am still drifting.
Why does everyone want to leave? What are they afraid of?
Getting yelled at?
Somehow I do not, or cannot, believe that people are terrified of hurt feelings.
Perhaps it a general feeling of discomfort; a generalized anxiety disorder that has entangled vast swaths of the American population. And I do not make this statement lightly. Aspects of this is something that I have learned to live with ever since I was implanted.
Since I moved to China, all my worry (for the most part) ended. The only time that I start worrying is when ever some jackass in the United States tries to lob bio-weapons at my home, discusses firing ICBM's in my front yard, or making arbitrary rules concerning my passport.
Perhaps, living under the thumb of out-of-control psychopaths inside a military empire…
…and see the entire nation decay and collapse as the entire nations is geared, not for serving the citizenry…
…but rather to destroy the rest of the world at the pleasure of the oligarchy…
…is the source of this discomfort.
And like frightened rabbits, the citizenry are trying to run and hide from the voracious wolves that are running all over the fields untamed and unchecked.
Gonzaga says:
For American preppers there’s only one solution: move to a red state. Most red states are in the South. So the best place to ride out America’s collapse is a region with a history of racial tension and antagonism towards the Federal government, a region with a Ford F-150 lifestyle totally dependent on cheap petroleum and cheap imports. Hmm, but guns right? Call me crazy but my native California doesn’t sound so bad in comparison: https://linhdinhphotos.blogspot.com/2015/04/postcard-from-end-of-america-silicon.html. At least there’s some anti-anti-White Asians and Hispanics around. Maybe I’ll go teach English in Asia or live in Europe for a while. Call me a commie traitor but I have no ability/desire to become an Idaho potato farmer / small arms instructor.
Others have different ideas.
Like Frans here…
Franz says:
PJ London says:
Those who have never experienced the hospitality and happiness of ‘poor’ foreigners have absolutely no idea of life. Those with no experience of Albania, or Bulgaria, or Romania, Lesotho, Botswana, Chile etc. don’t have a clue. Mix with the working class (as well as the bankers) if you want to know what life is about. The hospitality of all Arab people is beyond belief. Ignore the USA-USA-USA mob, they are brainless and take their limited horizon as being the whole planet. Thank you for bringing light to those of us who have not the opportunity to visit the east and parts of Europe.
What about those that have already left the USA. What are their thoughts?
TheBoom says:
That is a key reason why I moved out of the US. I see no hope for at least a few generations. Whites are very uncomfortable addressing the blatantly anti White hate that is permeating nearly all institutions. The JQ is completely off the table for 90 percent of whites. Asians see what is happening so they increasingly mimic Jewish hatred of whites even though most don’t actually hate whites. Whites spring from one simplistic solution to another. The most recent is Secession. Thinking that Secession can happen requires not dealing with the reality of the country. Even if the country did break into two, that would just mean that the Jews had two countries to rule and spread anti white hate and degeneracy. I just can’t see being associated with a country that flies the BLM flag at its embassies and publically worships a repeat felon who died of a drug overdose. Sometimes societies are just too stupid to survive. It is a big world out there and there are pockets where things are much saner than the US and not under a Jewish stranglehold
But according to the news media everything is just fine.
Just hunky-dory.
Emslander says:
Don’t believe for a second that the majority of Norteamericanos believe the claptrap that is being promoted by the digital minesweeping social media or the coastal newspapers. That’s the mistake. Election results don’t mean much in the scheme of things, except in 2020. I live in a county that voted 75-25 for Trump. All of the counties in this region have similar numbers. I’ve obtained this information from NYT election data, so it’s not my wishful thinking. Every county in America outside of those where open blatant ballot box stuffing took place have similar results. Since Trump accomplished nothing governmentally important and even advanced policies I find disgusting, he has to be seen merely as an indicator of discontent with the Ruling Class. The Ruling Class has corrupted the entire education system, has made economic progress meaningless and has insulted anyone with a modicum of traditional morality. A Trump vote was a protest vote, both in 2016 and in 2020.
The article itself soon fell apart with the “Jews, Jews, Jews” narrative. Jeeze and I stopped reading. But I am still wondering (pondering) about these various comments. It seems like these “proud” American are very unhappy. And so, I wonder how can that be?
Joe Biden announced that “America is back!” to a hysterically joyous crowd, and all the indicators show that crime is down, unemployment is down, the Coronavirus has been tamed, and it’s the beginning of a “New America“. So what the heck is going on?
The mutterings that I am hearing just don’t match the “news” that is being reported.
Why is that?
Fundamentally, the media must reflect the opinions and feelings of it's readership, or else the people reading it will leave. So eventually, "news" becomes an echo chamber for the readership. Yet, what I am apparently seeing is that all flavors of the "news"; Alt-Right, mainstream to Alt-left are out of touch with what the vast majority of Americans feel.
The speed of the collapse
I admit that I am a little stunned that the collapse has moved ahead so quickly in what seems like a matter of months. For it has been less than six months that the general American population has suddenly embraced fundamental prepper beliefs, and most regard America falling into a SHTF situation.
This is FAST.
And while I have announced that I believe that the year 2020 was the climax of the Fourth Turning, I have never the less been stunned by the rapid conversion of most Americans to “abandon ship”.
What is going on?
Well, here are the four signposts of American Collapse that the Soviet Union experienced when it collapsed.
Article from HERE. All credit, etc. This article from the Russia Insider archives and was first published on RI in June 2018. You guys all know the drill.
"Having witnessed one collapse, and now witnessing another, the one approach I would definitely not recommend is doing nothing and hoping for the best."
In thinking through the (for now) gradually unfolding collapse of the American empire, the collapse of the USSR, which occurred close through three decades ago, continues to perform as a goldmine of useful examples and analogies.
Certain events that occurred during the Soviet collapse can serve as useful signposts in the American one.
Thus, allowing us to formulate better guesses about the timing of events that can suddenly turn a gradual collapse into a precipitous one.
When the Soviet collapse occurred, the universal reaction was “Who could have known?”
Well, I knew.
I distinctly remember a conversation I had with a surgeon in the summer of 1990, right as I was going under the knife to get my appendix excised, waiting for the anesthesia to kick in.
He asked me about what will happen to the Soviet republics, Armenia in particular.
I told him that they will be independent in less than a year.
He looked positively shocked.
I was off by a couple of months.
I hope to be able to call the American collapse with the same degree of precision.
So what to expect?
I suppose I was well positioned to know, and I am tempted to venture a guess at how I achieved that.
My area of expertise at the time was measurement and data acquisition electronics for high energy physics experiments, not Sovietology.
But I spent the previous summer in Leningrad, where I grew up, and had a fair idea of what was up in the USSR.
Meanwhile, the entire gaggle of actual paid, professional Russia “experts”…
…that was ensconced in various government agencies in Washington or consuming oxygen at various foundations and universities in the US…
…had absolutely no idea what to expect.
I suspect that there is a principle involved:
[1] If your career depends on the continued existence of X, and if X is about to cease to exist, then you are not going to be highly motivated to accurately predict that event.Conversely, [2] if you could manage to accurately predict the spontaneous existence failure of X, then you would also be clever enough to switch careers ahead of time. Thus, you would no longer be an expert on X and your opinion on the matter would be disregarded.
People would think that you screwed yourself out of a perfectly good job and are now embittered.
What he is seeing…
Right now I am observing the same phenomenon at work among Russian experts on the United States: they can’t imagine that the various things they spent their lives studying are fast fading into irrelevance.
Or perhaps they can, but keep this realization to themselves, for fear of no longer being invited on talk shows.
I suppose that since expertise is a matter of knowing a whole lot about very little, knowing everything about nothing—a thing that doesn’t exist—is its logical endpoint.
Be that as it may.
But I feel that we non-experts, armed with the 20/20 hindsight afforded to us by the example of the Soviet collapse, can avoid being similarly blindsided and dumbfounded by the American one.
This is not an academic question: those who gauge it accurately may be able to get the hell out ahead of time.
While the lights are mostly still on, while not everybody is walking around in a drug-induced mental haze, and mass shootings and other types of mayhem are still considered newsworthy.
This hindsight makes it possible for us to spot certain markers that showed up then.
And are showing up now.
The four that I want to discuss now are the following:
1. Allies are being alienated
2. Enmities dissipate
3. Ideology becomes irrelevant
4. Military posture turns flaccid
All of these are plain to see already in the American collapse.
As with the Soviet collapse, there is a certain incubation period for each of these trends.
Each incubation period ended up lasting perhaps a year or two.
And during this incubation period, not much seems to be happening.
But…
… but when it is over everything comes unstuck all at once.
1. Alliances
As the Soviet collapse unfolded, former friendships deteriorated, first into irrelevance, then into outright enmity.
Prior to the collapse, the Iron Curtain ran between Eastern and Western Europe.
After the collapse; three decades later, it runs between Russia and the Baltic countries, Poland and the Ukraine.
Whereas in the post-war period the Warsaw Pact countries derived many benefits from its association with Russia and its industrial might.
But as the end neared their membership in the Soviet camp became more and more of a hinderance to progress.
In effect, hampering their integration with the more prosperous, less troubled countries further west and with the rest of the world.
Similarly with the US and the EU now, this partnership is also showing major signs of strain as Washington tries to prevent the Europe from integrating with the rest of Eurasia.
The particular threat of unilateral economic sanctions as part of a vain effort to block additional Russian natural gas pipelines into Europe.
As well as to force the Europeans to buy an uncertain and overpriced American liquefied natural gas scheme.
Other issues include Huawei, 5G technology, and the BRI.
All of this has laid bare the fact that the relationship between the USA and Europe is no longer mutually beneficial.
And as Britain splits from Europe and clings closer to the US, a new Iron Curtain is gradually emerging, but this time it will run through the English Channel, separating the Anglophone world from Eurasia.
Similar developments are afoot in the east, affecting South Korea and Japan.
Trump’s flip-flopping between tempestuous tweeting and conciliatory rhetoric vis-à-vis North Korea have laid bare the emptiness of American security guarantees.
Both of these countries now see the need to make their own security arrangements and to start reasserting their sovereignty in military matters.
Meanwhile, for the US, being incoherent is but a pit stop on the way to becoming irrelevant.
2. Enmities
Enmity | Definition of Enmity by Merriam-Webster https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/enmity Enmity (which derives from an Anglo-French word meaning "enemy") suggests true hatred, either overt or concealed. Hostility implies strong, open enmity that shows itself in attacks or aggression. Animosity carries the sense of anger, vindictiveness, and sometimes the desire to destroy what one hates.
During the entire period of the Cold War the United States was the Soviet Union’s arch-enemy.
Any effort by Washington to give advice or to dictate terms was met with loud, synchronized, ideologically fortified barking from Moscow:
"The imperialist aggressor is at it again; pay no heed."
This self-righteous noise worked quite well for a surprisingly long time, and continued to work while the Soviet Union was making impressive new conquests.
The Soviet Union continued to advance, in space, in technology, science and medicine, in international humanitarian projects and so on, but as stagnation set in it started to ring hollow.
After the Soviet collapse, this immunity against American contagion disappeared.
Western “experts” and “advisors” flooded in, and proposed “reforms”.
Reforms such as…
- The dismemberment of the USSR into 15 separate countries (trapping millions of people on the wrong side of some newly thought-up border.
- Shock therapy (which impoverished almost the entirety of the Russian population),
- Privatization (which put major public assets in the hands of a few politically connected, mostly Jewish oligarchs)
- As well as various other schemes designed to destroy Russia and drive its population into extinction.
They would probably have succeeded had they not been stopped in time.
Symmetrically, the Washingtonians considered the USSR as their arch-enemy.
After it went away, there was a bit of confusion.
The Pentagon tried talking up “Russian mafia” as a major threat to world peace, but that seemed laughable.
Then, by dint of demolishing a couple of New York skyscrapers…
…perhaps by placing small nuclear charges in the bedrock beneath their foundations (those were the demolition plans that were on file)…
…they happily embraced the concept of “war on terror”…
…and went about bombing various countries that didn’t have a terrorism problem before then but certainly do now.
Then, once that stupid plan ran its course, the Washingtonians went back to reviling and harassing Russia.
But now a strange smell is in the wind in Washington: the smell of failure.
Air is leaking out of the campaign to vilify Russia, and it is putrid.
Meanwhile, Trump is continuing to make noises to the effect that a rapprochement with Russia is desirable and that a summit between the leaders should be held.
Trump is also borrowing some pages from the Russian rulebook: just as Russia responded to Western sanctions with countersanctions, Trump is starting to respond to Western tariffs with countertariffs.
We should expect American enmity against Russia to dissipate some time before American attitudes toward Russia (and much else) become irrelevant.
We should also expect that, once the fracking bubble pops, the US will become dependent on Russian oil and liquefied natural gas…
… which it will be forced to pay for with gold.
(Fracking involves a two-phase combustion process: the first phase burns borrowed money to produce oil and gas; the second burns the oil and the gas.)
Other enmities are on the wane as well.
Trump has just signed an interesting piece of paper with North Korea’s Kim Jong Un. The deal (if we call it that) is a tacit act of surrender. It was orchestrated by Russia and China. It affirms what North and South Korea had already agreed to: eventual denuclearization of the Korean peninsula.
Just as Gorbachev acquiesced to the reunification of Germany and the withdrawal of Soviet troops from East Germany, Trump is getting ready to acquiesce to the reunification of Korea and the withdrawal of American troops from South Korea.
Just as the fall of the Berlin Wall spelled the end of the Soviet imperium, the dismantlement of the Korean Demilitarized Zone will spell the end of the American one.
3. Ideology
While the US never had anything as rigorous as the Soviet Union’s communist dogma, its hodgepodge of pro-democracy propaganda, laissez-faire capitalism, free trade and military domination was potent for a time.
Once the US stopped being the world’s largest industrial powerhouse, ceding ground first to Germany and Japan…
… then to China…
… it went along accumulating prodigious levels of debt…
… essentially confiscating and spending the world’s savings…
… while defending the US dollar with the threat of violence.
It was, for a time, understood that the exorbitant privilege of endless money printing needs to be defended with the blood of American soldiers.
The US saw itself, and positioned itself, as the indispensable country.
A country able to control and to dictate terms to the entire planet.
As such, terrorizing or blockading various other countries as needed.
Now all of these ideological shibboleths are in shambles.
The pro-democracy rhetoric is still dutifully spouted by politicians mass media mouthpieces, but in practice the US is no longer a democracy. It has been turned into a lobbyist’s paradise in which the lobbyists are no longer confined to the lobby but have installed themselves in congressional offices and are drafting prodigious quantities of legislation to suit the private interests of corporations and oligarchs. Nor is the American penchant for democracy traceable in the support the US lavishes on dictatorships around the world or in its increasing tendency to enact and enforce extraterritorial laws without international consent.
Laissez-fair capitalism is also very much dead, supplanted by crony capitalism nurtured by a thorough melding of Washington and Wall Street elites.
Private enterprise is no longer free but concentrated in a handful of giant corporations while about a third of the employed population in the US works in the public sector.
The US Department of Defense is the largest single employer in the country as well as in the whole world.
About 100 million of working-age able-bodied Americans do not work.
Most of the rest work in service jobs, producing nothing durable.
An increasing number of people is holding onto a precarious livelihood by working sporadic gigs.
The whole system is fueled—including parts of it that actually produce the fuel, such as the fracking industry—by debt.
No sane person, if asked to provide a workable description of capitalism, would come up with such a derelict scheme.
Free trade was talked up until very recently, if not actually implemented.
Unimpeded trade over great distances is the sine qua non of all empires, the US empire included.
In the past, warships and the threat of occupation were used to force countries, such as Japan, to open themselves up to international trade.
Quite recently, the Obama administration was quite active in its attempts to push through various transoceanic partnerships, but none of them succeeded. And now Trump has set about wrecking what free trade there was by a combination of sanctions and tariffs, in a misguided attempt to rekindle America’s lost greatness by turning inward.
Along the way, sanctions on the use of the US dollar in international trade, especially with key energy exporting nations such as Iran and Venezuela, are accelerating the process by which the US dollar is being dethroned as the world’s reserve currency, demolishing America’s exorbitant privilege of endless money-printing.
4. Militarism
The Soviet collapse was to some extent presaged by the Soviet withdrawal from Afghanistan.
Prior to that point, it was still possible to talk up the “international duty” of the Red Army to make the world (or at least the liberated parts of it) safe for socialism.
After that point the very concept of military domination was lost, and interventions that were possible before, such as in Hungary in 1956 and in Czechoslovakia in 1968, were no longer even thinkable.
When Eastern Europe rose in rebellion in 1989, the Soviet military empire simply folded, abandoning its bases and military hardware and pulling out.
In the case of the US, for now it remains capable of quite a lot of mischief, but it has become clear that military domination of the whole planet is no longer possible for it.
The US military is still huge, but it is quite flaccid.
It is no longer able to field a ground force of any size and confines itself to aerial bombardment, training and arming of “moderate terrorists” and mercenaries, and pointless steaming about the oceans.
None of the recent military adventures have resulted in anything resembling peace on terms that the American planners originally envisioned or have ever considered desirable:
- Afghanistan has been turned into a terrorist incubator and a heroin factory;
- Iraq has been absorbed into a continuous Shia crescent that now runs from the Indian Ocean to the Mediterranean Sea.
US military bases are still found throughout the world.
They were meant to project American power over both hemispheres of the globe, but they have been largely neutralized by the advent of new long-range precision weapons, potent air defense technology and electronic warfare wizardry.
These numerous “lily pads,” as they are sometimes called, are the opposite of military assets: they are useless but expensive targets located in places that are hard to defend but easy for potential adversaries to attack.
They can only be used for pretend-combat, and the endless series of military training exercises.
Such as the ones in the Baltic statelets, right on the Russian border…
… or the ones in South Korea, are meant to be provocative, but they are paragons of pointlessness…
… since attacking either Russia or North Korea would be a suicidal move.
They are basically confidence-building exercises, and their increasing intensity testifies to a pronounced and growing deficit of confidence.
People never tire of pointing out the huge size of the US military budget, but they almost always neglect to mention that what the US gets per unit money is ten times less than, for example Russia.
It is a bloated and ineffectual extortion scheme that produces large quantities of boondoggles—an endlessly thirsty public money sponge.
No matter how much money it soaks up, it will never solve the fundamental problem of being incapable to go to war against any adequately armed opponent without suffering unacceptable levels of damage.
Around the world, the US is still loathed, but it is feared less and less: a fatal trend for an empire.
But America has done quite well in militarizing its local police departments, so that when the time comes it will be ready to go to war… against itself.
…
This analysis may read like a historical survey detached from practical, everyday considerations. But I believe that it has practical merit.
If the citizens of the USSR were informed, prior to the events of 1990, of what was about to happen to them, they would have behaved quite differently, and quite a lot of personal tragedy might have been avoided.
A very useful distinction
A very useful distinction can be made between collapse avoidance (which is futile; all empires collapse)…
… and worst-case scenario avoidance…
… which will become, as collapse picks up speed, your most important concern.
Your approach may involve fleeing to safer ground, or preparing to survive it where you are.
You may choose your own collapse markers and make your own predictions about their timing instead of relying on mine.
But, having witnessed one collapse, and now witnessing another, the one approach I would definitely not recommend is doing nothing and hoping for the best.
Humanity
No matter what happens, or what crazy shit is going down in the United States, never forget your humanity. It’s not what happens that matter. It’s how you deal with them that does.
Others might not understand
Do not try to convince others to understand why you are doing what you do. It’s not their business; it’s not their reality. You are doign what feels best to you, for the good or the bad. And sure, they might think you crazy, strange or a little bit “off your rocker”, but so what.
It’s your life.
Do what you want and live your life as you see fit and let the rest of the world howl.
Everything follows cycles
Empires come and go, and during the sunset period it is a time of harvesting what you can and then move on to the New Beginning. But some hate change, and they have made a nice cushy life for themself and they don’t want the change, and they fight it “tooth and nail”. But MM readers realize that when you see things go cyclic, you hop on the train and ride it out of town.
Cycles are natural.
What about war?
Well, there is a lot of provocations being made by the United States on the international front. The aggression is spellbinding in breadth and with as well as intensity. And no one can predict the future, but maybe we can take a look at what happened with the former Soviet Union for some guidance.
From HERE. It's titled "Russian Missile Tech has Made America's Trillion Dollar Navy Obsolete". With a sub-heading of "Times have changed and America can no longer project its military power like it did in Iraq. Those days are over.". All credit to the author and note it was formatted to fit this venue.
For the past 500 years European nations—Portugal, the Netherlands, Spain, Britain, France and, briefly, Germany—were able to plunder much of the planet by projecting their naval power overseas.
Since much of the world’s population lives along the coasts, and much of it trades over water, armed ships that arrived suddenly out of nowhere were able to put local populations at their mercy.
The armadas could plunder, impose tribute, punish the disobedient, and then use that plunder and tribute to build more ships, enlarging the scope of their naval empires.
This allowed a small region with few natural resources and few native advantages beyond extreme orneriness and a wealth of communicable diseases to dominate the globe for half a millennium.
The ultimate inheritor of this naval imperial project is the United States, which, with the new addition of air power, and with its large aircraft carrier fleet and huge network of military bases throughout the planet, is supposedly able to impose Pax Americana on the entire world.
Or, rather, was able to do so—during the brief period between the collapse of the USSR and the emergence of Russia and China as new global powers and their development of new anti-ship and antiaircraft technologies. But now this imperial project is at an end.
Prior to the Soviet collapse, the US military generally did not dare to directly threaten those countries to which the USSR had extended its protection.
Nevertheless, by using its naval power to dominate the sea lanes that carried crude oil, and by insisting that oil be traded in US dollars, it was able to live beyond its means by issuing dollar-denominated debt instruments and forcing countries around the world to invest in them.
It imported whatever it wanted using borrowed money while exporting inflation, expropriating the savings of people across the world. In the process, the US has accumulated absolutely stunning levels of national debt—beyond anything seen before in either absolute or relative terms.
When this debt bomb finally explodes, it will spread economic devastation far beyond US borders. And it will explode, once the petrodollar wealth pump, imposed on the world through American naval and air superiority, stops working.
New missile technology has made a naval empire cheap to defeat. Previously, to fight a naval battle, one had to have ships that outmatched those of the enemy in their speed and artillery power. The Spanish Armada was sunk by the British armada.
More recently, this meant that only those countries whose industrial might matched that of the United States could ever dream of opposing it militarily. But this has now changed: Russia’s new missiles can be launched from thousands of kilometers away, are unstoppable, and it takes just one to sink a destroyer and just two to sink an aircraft carrier.
The American armada can now be sunk without having an armada of one’s own. The relative sizes of American and Russian economies or defense budgets are irrelevant: the Russians can build more hypersonic missiles much more quickly and cheaply than the Americans would be able to build more aircraft carriers.
Equally significant is the development of new Russian air defense capabilities: the S-300 and S-400 systems, which can essentially seal off a country’s airspace. Wherever these systems are deployed, such as in Syria, US forces are now forced to stay out of their range.
With its naval and air superiority rapidly evaporating, all that the US can fall back on militarily is the use of large expeditionary forces—an option that is politically unpalatable and has proven to be ineffective in Iraq and Afghanistan. There is also the nuclear option, and while its nuclear arsenal is not likely to be neutralized any time soon, nuclear weapons are only useful as deterrents.
Their special value is in preventing wars from escalating beyond a certain point, but that point lies beyond the elimination of their global naval and air dominance.
Nuclear weapons are much worse than useless in augmenting one’s aggressive behavior against a nuclear-armed opponent; invariably, it would be a suicidal move. What the US now faces is essentially a financial problem of unrepayable debt and a failing wealth pump, and it should be a stunningly obvious point that setting off nuclear explosions anywhere in the world would not fix the problems of an empire that is going broke.
Events that signal vast, epochal changes in the world often appear minor when viewed in isolation.
Julius Caesar’s crossing of the Rubicon was just one river crossing; Soviet and American troops meeting and fraternizing at the Elbe was, relatively speaking, a minor event—nowhere near the scale of the siege of Leningrad, the battle of Stalingrad or the fall of Berlin.
Yet they signaled a tectonic shift in the historical landscape. And perhaps we have just witnessed something similar with the recent pathetically tiny Battle of East Gouta in Syria, where the US used a make-believe chemical weapons incident as a pretense to launch an equally make-believe attack on some airfields and buildings in Syria.
The US foreign policy establishment wanted to show that it still matters and has a role to play, but what really happened was that US naval and air power were demonstrated to be almost entirely beside the point.
Of course, all of this is terrible news to the US military and foreign policy establishments, as well as to the many US Congressmen in whose districts military contractors operate or military bases are situated.
Obviously, this is also bad news for the defense contractors, for personnel at the military bases, and for many others as well. It is also simply awful news economically, since defense spending is about the only effective means of economic stimulus of which the US government is politically capable.
Obama’s “shovel-ready jobs,” if you recall, did nothing to forestall the dramatic slide in the labor participation rate, which is a euphemism for the inverse of the real unemployment rate.
There is also the wonderful plan to throw lots of money at Elon Musk’s SpaceX (while continuing to buy vitally important rocket engines from the Russians—who are currently discussing blocking their export to the US in retaliation for more US sanctions). In short, take away the defense stimulus, and the US economy will make a loud popping sound followed by a gradually diminishing hissing noise.
Needless to say, all those involved will do their best to deny or hide for as long as possible the fact that the US foreign policy and defense establishments have now been neutralized.
My prediction is that America’s naval and air empire will not fail because it will be defeated militarily, nor will it be dismantled once the news sinks in that it is useless; instead, it will be forced to curtail its operations due to lack of funds.
There may still be a few loud bangs before it gives up, but mostly what we will hear is a whole lot of whimpering. That’s how the USSR went; that’s how the USA will go too.
Mr. Wilder Comments
From HERE.
Our economy has been goosed in the last decade (and even more so recently) by:
- Artificially, and permanently low, interest rates.
- Rampant money printing.
- A never-ending supply of “stimulus” packages and tax cuts to goose the economy.
- An experiment in Universal Basic Income by paying out of work people more than they were paid working to not work.
- Blatant political cronyism far in excess of the usual – your elected representatives are even trying to bail out Jeff Bezos’ so he can compete with Elon Musk’s SpaceX®. This is actually happening (LINK).
One hundred miles per hour sounded like it was really fast to me when I was driving a pickup truck that wouldn’t go that fast downhill on a mountain pass (topped out at 95). But the economy is so goosed now that we see $100 plywood sheets tumbling in the breeze as we cruise down the highway. The stresses from the velocity as we shamble and skitter between the lines are evident.
What’s next, a $50 ribeye?
When they film a post-apocalypse movie in Detroit, they have to use CGI to repair buildings.
I didn’t use Texas, because I like Texas and Texans, so I picked Minneapolis because I think it’s on its way to becoming a quaint “Detroit on the Mississippi” where the primary source of amusement is Thunderdome Friday nights. Large Marge, a frequent commenter, called me on this quip (edits only in formatting):
A) Military recruits from prison
I am a former Corrections Officer.
I worked at three penitentiaries . . . including a max.
Some of the most intelligent individuals are prisoners. The most intelligent of them are organized and exceptionally efficient in the use of violence and intimidation.
Although better people than me might question their primary loyalties — gang/club? or Constitution? — I would expect them to continue to hone their adaptive skills in a military setting.
In fact, I would anticipate them quickly establishing a hierarchy and running the joint in no time… while eliminating slackers. Anybody they cannot eliminate, they recruit. No middle ground, no spectators.
Two of my ‘adopted’ sons are also Corrections Officers. Both are Marines, one was a SEAL. Intelligent, competitive, dedicated, observant.
Ask around, you may discover your assumptions to be the opposite of reality.
And assumptions can get somebody hurt.
B) Military recruits from inner-city slums
Happens daily. Pigment is no guarantee of inbred stupidity or ineffectiveness, however, it is a guarantee of tribal acceptance.
Anybody not in the tribe is prey:
If you are alone, they are five.
If you are five, they are a faceless two hundred in a spontaneous leaderless non-thinking swarm . . . they act, then disperse into nothingness.
Similar to recruits from prison, these folks are effective at violence and intimidation.
Just do not expect complex thought processes resulting in traditional long-term ‘White Collar’ crimes.
Complex planning is not required for crimes of opportunity.
C) These A and B elements are not exclusive.
Expect cross-overs.
Flyers can ruin your afternoon.
Large Marge is, of course, right in every respect.
The first point is that the general attitude is that all of the Left is represented by the soy-boy weakness we see from the Left’s poster children.
It is not.
A final thought
If any alarm bells were ringing earlier, it should be considered to be foreplay.
Right now, the Civil Defense sirens are blaring, and everyone should be running for their underground bunkers.
There might be world War III any day now, or not.
There might be riots in the streets, or maybe not.
There might be a complete collapse of the US Dollar, or maybe not.
Do not be lulled into complacency. There was a nice Memorial Day holiday. I hope that you enjoyed yourself, and worked on prudent measures to adapt to a changing environment. To quote from the above article…
If the citizens of the USSR were informed, prior to the events of 1990, of what was about to happen to them, they would have behaved quite differently, and quite a lot of personal tragedy might have been avoided.
And this one…
But, having witnessed one collapse, and now witnessing another, the one approach I would definitely not recommend is doing nothing and hoping for the best.
Of course, my opinion is well understood.
From the movie “Aliens”…
And my Video
I am not in America. I am in China.
It is my “lifeboat” while the USS Titanic American sinks under the waves.
And for me, sitting in my lifeboat, I am watching the rats scurry all over the deck. A few are starting to jump into the cold, cold ocean. But most are still on the deck and starting to fight against each other.
Yeah.
That is the way it is, and to end up this article, let me provide a final glimpse of what my lifeboat looks like.
Here is an end of article video for your enjoyment. It shows a little about what China is like where I live. HERE. 127MB.
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