An inhabited planet where some of the people have finally figured out the inherently limited nature of their world. Global warming, pollution, soil erosion, loss of biological diversity, dwindling and unevenly distributed natural resources…
Two hot wars. And a huge trilateral economic contest involving a third of the population which leaves the other two thirds in relative misery.
Most of the conflict – hot and cold alike – can be pinned down to old people doing their best (worst, more likely) to conserve their status. Wealth, power, influence…
As things happen, currently there is one collective agent which yields enough power to decisively influence the outcome of the two hot wars. And to negotiate the economic contest. The attention of the people constituting that particular collective agent has been hijacked by an insurrectionist ex-president attempting to regain that position. The ex-president has curried the favor of significant political party by making it possible for the party-activists to succeed in their attempt to limit women’s access to abortion. The ex-president and soon to be presidential candidate is currently involved in a penal process. The trial attempts to determine whether the hush money he had used to silence a porn actress regarding a ‘close encounter of the third kind’ had been spent legally.
My previous post was about the parallel fate endured by those who had experienced nazism/fascism and/or communism.
My point being that nazism/fascism had been powered by the feelings of those attempting to regain their previous, higher, status while communism had been powered by the feelings of those not allowed to ‘move forward’ by the social constraints paralyzing their societies.
Currently, people are ‘confused’. Some say communism had been better than nazism – for various reasons. Others find various excuses for the way both regimes had treated the general population and, mainly, the ‘dissidents’. Or, specially for the nazi, the ‘differents’. There is, though, a convergence point. Nominally, at least. All sides declaratively abhor the violence employed by both regimes.
To add to the confusion, after the 2007 financial meltdown, more and more ‘concerned individuals’ have fingered capitalism as the main culprit for all the tragedies experienced by humankind in the last century and a half.
For me, this is the straw which will break the camel’s back.
So. Nazism/fascism – which is nothing but a ‘condensed’ form of corporatism, is bad. Communism – a similarly centralized manner of social decision making, only differently sold to differently feeling masses, is also bad. Capitalism – a decentralized manner of resource allocation, is considered to be more or less equivalent to both nazism/fascism and communism. All three of them have been declared equally criminal…
Then what? What are we to do next? Hang ourselves in despair? Reheat either fascism or communism?
Or look forward than our own noses?
Both those who had followed Hitler and Lenin/Stalin were feeling desperate. Desperation drives you to do stupid things. And there are plenty of unscrupulous people willing to profit from this kind of situations.
Do we really want to prevent ‘unpleasant’ experiences? Then we need to go beyond blaming the likes of Hitler and Lenin/Stalin. They should be dealt what’s rightfully theirs, no doubt about that. But we also need to make sure that the ‘run of the mill’, the ordinary people who make things work in this world, no longer feel desperate.
How to do that? Taking into account that contemporary capitalism seems to be faltering?
What was the common thing between nazism/fascism and communism? The fact that decision making was concentrated in a very small number of hands? Which had led to both regimes ending up in abysmal failure?
What is the apparently unstoppable trend in our contemporary societies? The apparently unstoppable wealth polarization?
Then let’s tax ourselves out … America worked fine during the ’50s and ’60, when the highest marginal tax was 91%… Yeah, only those years had been followed by stagflation. And let me remind you that communism can also be interpreted as ‘100% tax followed by a comprehensive redistribution’. And it also failed.
Then how about ‘libertarianism’? No taxes, no government…
But how about less extremism? Of any kind?
How about remembering that liberal capitalism has made possible all that we have today? Liberal as in free-market capitalism, of course.
Free market as in competition working both ways. Entrepreneurs competing among themselves for clients AND resources. The workforce being, of course, a resource. The ‘compensated’ workforce representing the bulk of the clients…
What we seem to have forgotten today is that the circle must be round. If we want the ‘show to go on’, of course.
If some of us concentrate too much control over the rest of us – either way, the circle becomes lopsided. And everybody has everything to loose.
No matter whether this happens as a consequence of nazism/fascism, communism or even capitalism.
At least, capitalism has proved to be manageable. Let’s make it work, again.
My son was two years old at that time and doesn’t have any personal recollections of that moment yet has a rather clear understanding of what happened. Some wackos somehow crashed three airplanes into three of the most important buildings in America and, by doing so, simply changed the world.
I still remember vividly having my eyes glued to the TV screen. All those people jumping from the windows. So much desperation. One question still haunts me to this day. What made those wackos do what they did? What made them so ‘desperate’ as to … OK, they must have had some ‘predisposition’ of sorts… not every desperate person does what they did … only in a normal world really desperate people get noticed by their community and are treated accordingly. They get help and/or are rendered harmless to the others.
So our real problem is why hadn’t the wider community noticed that particular kind of ‘desperation’, and its intensity, and why hadn’t something been done about it. Another thing. There is something else that the wider community has failed to notice.
That the closer community, exactly those people who in normal circumstances notice and stop this kind of tragic occurrences, helped the perpetrators instead of blowing the whistle.
And it seems we continue to not understand what had really happened.
A ‘war on terror’ has been declared.
Only there is a small problem here.
Nobody can fight ‘terror’, just as nobody can fight the blue color.
The only thing we can do, as warriors, is fight terrorists. And if we limit ourselves to fighting them we perversely confirm their mantra – ‘we are under attack, we are weak so the only thing we can do is use ‘terror’ as weapon’.
Maybe thirteen years of this is enough.
The reality is that we are far more powerful than they are. This situation offers us a lot more options than they have.
Among these options is that in parallel with defending ourselves we might try to separate the active terrorists from the communities that support them. In order to do this we must recognize that those communities do have grievances. Some make sense, some don’t but if we disconsider all their grievances, wholesale, we do nothing but validate what the extremists are preaching: ‘those “white” people simply don’t care about any of us’. That’s why so many members of the communities among which the terrorist are usually hiding turn their heads when they see a terrorist act being prepared. Most of them wouldn’t participate directly – because of fear or maybe they abhor violence, as any normal human being does – but being convinced that ‘the “white” people don’t care about them’ makes them wonder ‘why should I care if the “white” people ‘gets it’?’
There is no shortage of people crazy enough to do horrible things. Just watch the 5 o’clock news. There is no way to change that. What we can do is give enough positive reasons to the communities to ‘call 911’ instead of turning away their heads. And sometimes gloat.
PS. ‘Positive reasons’ doesn’t mean ‘bribe them’. That might help a little but would not solve the situation. What we need to do is to convince them, and even some of our people too, that being different doesn’t mean being less human. After that things will become way simpler. No normal human being is comfortable seeing how his FELLOW human being is killed or otherwise hurt.
So 27 American Navy personnel were scarred shitless by an extremely powerful experimental device soon to be deployed on ‘all the advanced Russian planes’!
OK, let’s get this straight. I’m no privy to any military secrets, Russian or American. For all I care/know this might have taken place ‘as advertised’. But there is one thing I know for certain, the Russians have actually published this article. So lets see what we can gather from this, undeniable, fact.
Actually yes. It makes some sense.
Judging by the fact that somebody took the trouble to translate and disseminate the article in other languages than Russian and English means that that somebody thinks the effort is worthwhile. People have forwarded it so, at least apparently, the whole thing got some traction. After reading the comments on the original link that impression is beefed up even more.
But what if we dig a little deeper?
To me at least it starts to smell like desperation. Do you remember how much hype Hitler made about his ‘secret weapons’ towards the end of WWII? No I won’t dismiss altogether the Russian military establishment, it still is very capable of throwing a hefty punch. The problems arise, exactly as they did in Hitler’s case, from the extreme concentration of decision power in present day Russia. Dictators tend to become elongated from the real world and to see nothing but enemies everywhere they look around. Enemies that have to be frightened into submission, no matter how, no matter what. In fact it’s more about alleviating one’s own fears (dictator’s own fears) than anything else. Hiding desperation under a blanket of extreme aggression.
One other thing. Romania suffered for some 40 years the rigors of communist rule. During 25 of those years if somebody would have disseminated news about how strong the Americans were and how they had humiliated the Red Army that person would have gotten a hefty prison term for defeatism and propaganda favorable to the enemy. Nowadays bashing America is …. you find the right word… No, the Americans are not whiter than Snow White but piling on their heads things that don’t belong there isn’t helpful for any of us.
nicichiarasa 