The West has broken down into a gangster-land of sorts, with the realms of centralized governments and money-center banking collapsing into moral chaos. I’ve written often about this. But…
If the West is so disordered, morally and politically and so on—`morally’ actually covers all human social possibilities, why don’t the gangsters just take over in an open way?
Which gangsters?
The so-called Mafia is a cutthroat grouping of gangs and its history is full of wars between, say, the Genovesee crime family and the Lucchese crime family. The same seems true of the various political and banking and national security gangs. The Bushes and the Clintons, the bankers at Goldman Sachs and at JP Morgan, the professional killers in the CIA (supposedly called the “jackals”) and the corrupted field-agents of the DEA, cooperate but also compete. They know that they can’t trust each other. They’re all ruthless and have little in the way of integrity or honor. (Remember that the vast majority of human beings in those governmental and banking institutions are honest and hardworking, but remember also that the whole system forms a screen and even fortified wall behind which can operate corrupt politicians and bankers and bureaucrats and also true outright gangsters.)
So, I suspect they have created—for how long?—a gangster ecosystem of sorts in which they keep each other under control.
I also suspect it’s unstable partly because of internal forces and partly because it all stands on that money laundering scheme which is the US government’s debt selling operations (bonds, bills and so on) and that scheme, maintained in various ways by the US military and other government instruments of power has overgrown its criminal capacities—the world can’t take more US government debt and the American taxpayers are getting suspicious (finally!) that their needs and the needs of the country as a whole aren’t a high priority in Washington.
We’ll step back about seven centuries to see how bad things became during a period which followed a period of great prosperity. The end of that first period (the “High Middle Ages”) was showing huge wealth inequalities and the inevitable turn to methods of wealth acquisition and wealth maintenance which killed economic growth and failed to provide jobs for a growing population in Western Christian Europe circa 1300. One of the most dynamic of pre-modern economies, that of the High Middle Ages, had become a rentier economy which was failing to produce jobs, failing to increase wealth.
The gangster systems which were the aristocracies of Western, Christian Europe became increasingly unstable over the 14th century—see Barbara Tuchman’s A Distant Mirror. (The aristocrat-gangsters were tightly constrained until the per capita wealth began decreasing, the constraints were provided by various systems of aristocratic honor, of Christian morality, of competition between ecclesiastical and proto-nationalist power, and so on. They, including bishops and abbots, broke the moral order in a desperate attempt to maintain their high position in the European scheme of things.)
Let me repeat from a slightly different angle, some facts and claims I’ve raised and discussed before. The issue is very important and we may not have much time to prepare for the collapse of the West. Few knowledgeable and honorable analysts seem to think that collapse is more than—at the very most—two decades away. It might happen any month because the modern governmental and banking gangsters are rolling the dice to gain control over all human wealth before Russia, China, India, Iran, and other countries form, as a matter of course, a multi-polar world.
I repeat: by the end of the 13th century, which was the end of the High Middle Ages, the living conditions in Western, Christian Europe were deteriorating rapidly—wealth had been concentrated in the hands of a small fraction of the population and they had settled in as landlords, rentiers. No proper economic risks were being taken, no wealth was being created, no jobs were being created. Few alms were available for the increasing mobs of beggars. (See Michael Hudson’s essay, Rentier Capitalism—Veblen in the 21st century, for an explanation of our own modern rentier economy and then use Tuchman’s book A Distant Mirror as a good historical narrative giving concrete details of a similar period.)
Over the course of that 14th century, the population of Western, Christian Europe dropped by as much as half. By the middle of the century, the labor shortage was helping the “common folk” to regain a decent standard of living, (almost certainly) a better life-expectancy, and some measure of political power or at least consideration for their needs. Also, by the middle of the 14th century an army of Swiss peasants and bourgeois and even rich men of the local and productive variety had defeated an army of aristocratic knights—in full armor and on horseback—and various sorts of mercenary soldiers; the knights were Austrians and French and maybe others; the Swiss army was centered on pike-men carrying true combat versions of the decorative weapons carried by the Pope’s Swiss guard—nasty weapons which could behead a fully-armored knight or his horse as they charged a line of Swiss soldiers. In that same time-frame, a Portuguese army had also beaten an army of Spanish knights and their mercenaries. Note that Switzerland became independent of Austria and remains so; Portugal became independent of Spain and remains so.
By the end of the 14th century, the powerful and the wealthy had turned on each other to gain thrones ( War of the Roses circa 1455 to 1487) or simply a greater share of a shrinking amount of wealth available to the aristocrats and other rentiers. (Not all aristocrats in history have been rentiers but even many families originally productive aristocrats decayed into such when they lost the will to earn their way by, for example helping their farmers to achieve higher productivity through the building of mills and other waterworks or by other investments of money or management time or…)
The West’s current stability is questionable to say the least. It will likely collapse soon into a chaotic state complete with poverty and internal violence. Our desperate power-holders and wealth-holders are at their end as extorters of cash flows—that is, the Western governments, including their militaries and schools and medical systems, as well as Western banks private and public and quasi-public, will not be able to live off government debt instruments which no one believes could ever be paid off. Those bonds, especially those of the US government, have sold well because they were safe-havens for organized crime and tax-scofflaws and were the only game in town for those countries and banks and industries which need large amounts of American dollars to buy oil or to just move goods across borders. One of the marketing campaigns of the American government for their debt instruments was: buy our bonds and use our dollars or we’ll destroy your countries, kill many of you including your children, and leave you with a miserable future.
Maybe we’ll just be getting what we deserve for supporting these American powerholders and wealthholders with the “mentality of gangsters.” (See A Plea From Syrian Christians—Will Any Western Christians Respond? and Not a Deep-State But a Chaotic Battleground Where Barbarians Fight for Power and Wealth.)
When that collapse comes, we in the West and many others might find out what Hell is like. We might find out what, at least to an extent, our leaders did to the peoples of Vietnam, North Korea (and South Korea to some extent), Iraq, Pakistan (probably to make the border with Afghanistan safe for the heroin factories of CIA allies), Libya, Egypt, Chile, El Salvador, Nicaragua, Brazil, etc. We should remember that the US military has occupied a number of small bases in Africa and no one is telling the American peoples what that is about. If it doesn’t work, then keep on doing it.
But, as I said, they are keeping each other under control for now. We can only pray we won’t see a Napoleon or Genghis Khan or Lenin before the US begins to dissolve into more coherent entities which can defend their local interests against centralized power.