He throws in some political correctness (like claiming that the Adventists are racially mixed, which I question the extent of), but the biggest conclusion is: You live long by having a connectedness with your fellow humans, as well as a sense of both daily and ultimate purpose. More than drink, drugs and fried foods, it’s isolation and nihilism that kill. Never mind the Stairmaster — get some friends.

How is “tribe life” best achieved? Well, racial homogeniety is an unstated but obvious factor. Neither Sardinia nor Okinawa are even remotely multiracial or multicultural.

On the basis of studies, demographic movements, and a thousand personal anecdotes, I surmise that the most corrosive environments for humans are multiracial societies where everyone’s got their guard up about everyone else — including members of their own race. Rather than cooperate and blend, they scrap and fight. In effect, life in a multiracial society — especially for Whites denied any sense of an explicit White community — is de facto isolation. We know that human racial groups are programmed by evolution to trust in-group members more than outsiders — not because they’re “racist” or morally deficient, but because from primitive to modern times, the outsiders were rightly seen as competitors for resources and power.

It’s not much of a stretch, then, to imagine that a lot of stress reduction comes from living in a racially homogeneous setting. Who knew that we “scary racists” were really just health gurus underneath it all?

The Occidental Observer Blog, February 7, 2010

There’s a great article in Time magazine by Amanda Ripley (I wrote a review of her great book, The Unthinkable in the City Journal) on one of the most under covered security lessons of 9/11:  that an aware citizenry can defend itself.  It ends with this telling para which depicts the government reasserting its authority to prop up its legitimacy:

After the passengers [heroes] of Flight 253 deplaned in Detroit, they were held in the baggage area for more than five hours until FBI agents interviewed them. They were not allowed to call their loved ones. They were given no food. When one of the pilots tried to use the bathroom before a bomb-sniffing dog had finished checking all the carry-on bags, an officer ordered him to sit down, according to passenger Alain Ghonda, who thought it odd. “He was the pilot. If he wanted to do anything, he could’ve crashed the plane.” It was a metaphor for the rest of the country: Thank you for saving the day. Now go sit down.

The same spirit of being in control, regardless of government inaction/incompetence, should be true for other aspects of our lives under a similar assault by a global system run amok.What am I talking about?  Our economic and societal future.  If it’s not clear to you already after seeing a global economic meltdown caused by the gluttony of financial parasites, it should be.  But it’s worse than that.  The entire system has failed to produce anything resembling improvement in our lives for years:

• Median male incomes today are the same as they were in 1974 in the US (and likely all over the western world).  No progress has been made despite a doubling of productivity and massive top line GDP growth. Worse, given that female incomes aren’t on par with male incomes yet, the typical American family makes much less per hour worked than in 1974.
• All of the requirements for entry into the middle class are now private expenses.  From health care to a college education, if you can’t afford the minimum (let alone high quality versions), you aren’t allowed entry.  Worse, those expenses are spiraling out of control at rates many times the rate of inflation.  Nothing is being done to address this.
• The system is geared to make us fail.  Not only has outsourcing/off-shoring just started (everything that can be moved offshore to take advantage of the arbitrage opportunity in wage disparities between western and workers in developing countries will be) we are being laden with un-repayable debt. To wit: there’s been NO job growth in the last decade (despite tens of millions in population growth) and total debt from all sources is still near ALL time historical highs.

To add insult to injury, efforts to correct any of the above through governmental or regulatory reform have failed miserably (the government and both parties have been captured by transnational business interests):   from endless bailouts to industries actually writing the legislation that covers them to guarantee rich profit growth while solving nothing meaningful (as we saw with both the recent health care and finance bills).  We are at a dead end.So, take control.

NOTE:  My solution is to form a tribal layer.  Resilient communities that are connected by a network platform (a darknet).  A decentralized and democratic system that can provide you a better interface with the dominant global economic system than anything else I can think of.  Not only would this tribe protect you from shocks and predation by this impersonal global system, it would provide you with the tools and community support necessary to radically improve how you and your family does across all measures of consequence.  Of course, this may not be the right solution for you, but if it is…

NOTE2:  Seems like the term darknet is confusing people.  Going to need to rethink the branding and terminology.

From Global Guerrillas, January 3, 2010

Wouldn't it be nice if THEY would seceede from us?

For any movement or system of thought to remain relevant or dynamic, it must possess the internal capability of periodically reassessing its present course and shifting its focus and direction. Thus far, political anarchism has experienced two distinct stages. The first of these was the era of “classical” anarchism. Roughly defined, this was the period between the Marx/Bakunin split in the 1870s and the defeat of the Spanish anarchists in the 1930s. The second stage began during the 1960s with the emergence of a brand of anarchism that internalized the ideological framework of the New Left, and it is this framework that still prevails at the present time.

The classical anarchist movement was primarily oriented towards proletarian revolution and the historic labor movement. This was appropriate as the “labor question” was the principal political struggle of the time. The New Left-influenced anarchist movement (“neo-anarchism”) oriented itself towards the movements that emerged during its own era. These included “anti-racism” (for instance, the movement against American and South African racial apartheid systems), “anti-colonialism” (opposition to the Vietnam War and other manifestations of imperialist aggression), “the womens’ movement” (second wave feminism), “gay liberation” (homosexuals were previously regarded as criminals, deviants or mentally ill by the wider society), the ecology movement, a variety of tendencies collectively known as “counterculturalism”  and other comparable but lesser known movements, all of which had the purpose of challenging traditional institutions, systems of authority, social practices, cultural norms and so forth. The overwhelming majority of contemporary anarchists continue to function within this particular paradigm.

However, the question needs to be asked as to whether this paradigm is really appropriate in the early 21st century. If it were found to be inappropriate, what might the alternative be? In more recent times, an number of tendencies have emerged within the anarchist milieu that have challenged the dominant New Left-derived paradigm. These include primitivists, eco-anarchists, anarcho-capitalists, anarcho-monarchists, national-anarchists, tribal anarchists, anarcho-pluralists, a variety of ideologies that might be collectively labeled “free-market anti-capitalists”, post-left anarchists, Christian anarchists, and a number of other perspectives. While there are significant differences between these tendencies, and each of these rejects the dominant New Left paradigm with varying degrees of consistency or fervor, collectively they compromise a dissident force within anarchism that seeks to move past the current second stage in the history of anarchism and into a new era.

The two most serious weaknesses of contemporary anarchism are illustrated by the opening paragraph of the Wikipedia entry on anarchism:

Anarchism is a political philosophy encompassing theories and attitudes which consider the state, as compulsory government, to be unnecessary, harmful, and/or undesirable, and favors the absence of the state (anarchy.)Specific anarchists may have additional criteria for what constitutes anarchism, and they often disagree with each other on what these criteria are. According to The Oxford Companion to Philosophy “there is no single defining position that all anarchists hold, and those considered anarchists at best share a certain family resemblance.”

Among many contemporary anarchists, there is an observable tendency to ignore the struggle against the state, or the treat the battle against the state as only one matter on a laundry list of preferred causes, usually those of a conventionally leftist or countercultural nature. This is the first weakness. The other is the matter of sectarianism, i.e., setting an amount of “additional criteria for what constitutes anarchism” that is so large that it becomes self-defeating when it comes to the matter of building an actual movement that can wield political influence.

There needs to be a revolution within the anarchist movement itself. This should be a revolution that re-orients the anarchist movement towards the primary anarchist objective of state abolitionism. Second, there needs to be a shift in contemporary anarchist thought and action that involves a retreat from the current tunnel-visioned focus on ultra-leftism and counterculturalism. A new focus that is broader and that speaks to a wider variety of issues and population groups is necessary. Third, there needs to be an evaluation of tactics, and the adoption of new tactics that are relevant to current political realities.

An interesting list of historic anarchist communities can be viewed here. One thing that is immediately noticeable about these anarchist polities from the past is how different many of them were from one another. Consequently, it is probable that in a civilization where anarchist communities became widespread there would be wide variation in the specific ideological, cultural or structural content of these communities. This automatically means that the sectarian differences between competing strands within anarchism are irrelevant. Different kinds of anarchists will form different kinds of communities in those geographical regions where their own tendencies are prevalent. For instance, anarcho-communists and anarcho-capitalists, leftist anti-racist anarchists and national-anarchists, anarcho-futurists and primitivists, gay anarchists and Christian anarchists, anarcha-feminists and anarcho-monarchists, may not even consider one another to be “true” anarchists, but these battles simply do not matter if different kinds of anarchists are simply “doing their own thing” within the context of their own communities, institutions and organizations.

How, in a nation-state like the United States, could an anarchist movement become large enough, or influential or powerful enough, to actually carry out a revolution rivaling that of, for instance, the Spanish anarchists of the 1930s? Clearly the anarchist movement in North America could never do such a thing, given its small size and narrow focus. But what about a much larger popular movement, in which anarchists assume leadership roles, and with a much broader focus than what is found in the anarchist milieu at present?

Read this essay by the military historian Martin Van Creveld on the present decline of the state as an institution. Now, read this series of articles on the possible scenarios that will bring about the downfall of the American regime itself. Then read this review of a book that describes how Americans are in the process of sorting themselves out into communities specifically oriented towards their own political, cultural or lifestyle interests. Now, take a look at this opinion poll showing the amount of support for secessionist movements in the U.S., and the surprising nature of these numbers. Then take a look at two books (here and here) which offer us an alternative economic paradigm beyond the standard “big business vs big government” false dichotomy.

My friends, these works contain the ideas and information necessary to develop a popular revolutionary movement in North America. This essay is an attempt to synthesize these ideas and develop a comprehensive strategy for their application. No single reader is likely to agree with every argument or position taken in that essay, but its purpose is to “get the ball rolling” concerning the debate as to how anarchist revolution in North America will actually be carried out. And this essay is a discussion of considerations concerning time frames.

The single idea of state abolitionism will never be popular enough to become a mass movement. Most people simply are not that averse to political authority. However, the idea of secession has its roots in American history, culture and tradition. Therefore, anarchists should simply work to develop their own independent enclaves reflecting the value systems of their particular sect of anarchism, encourage other secession movements, and work to popularize the idea of secession. An effort should be made to appeal to those demographic groups most under attack by the state, those with single issues that put them in conflict with the state, and those who have the least to lose and most to gain by rejecting the state.

Further, anarchists should position themselves as the upholders of the economic interests of ordinary people. This opinion poll indicates that the issues of most concern to the public at large at present are unemployment, government spending and healthcare. What, if anything, do anarchists plan to do about these matters? How many individual anarchists have even given any thought to such topics? There are some ideas on these here, here, and here. If you do not like these, then come up with something of your own.

Particularly problematic is the question of people and groups with polar opposite views on many issues participating in the same movement. For instance, the conflicts between the various anarchist sects (Anarchist People of Color and Crimethinc come immediately to mind), or the conflict between secessionists holding opposing cultural or ideological perspectives. No doubt, there are some people who will not enter into a movement that includes others with whom they strongly disagree on certain questions no matter what. These individuals will simply have to fall by the wayside. The proper response to such questions is the “good riddance” argument.  In a decentralized political system, with voluntary association and community autonomy, leftist anti-racist anarchists and national-anarchists need not have any association with one another, nor anarcho-capitalists and anarcho-communists, nor gays and religious conservatives, nor racists and racial minorities, nor snobby rich people and slummy poor people, nor druggies and straight edges, nor feminists and male chauvinist pigs. Nor Crimethinc and Anarchist People of Color. Everyone wins but the state, the ruling class, and the empire.

From Attack the System, August 11, 2009]]> http://www.toqonline.com/blog/the-revolution-within-anarchism/feed/ 0 http://www.toqonline.com/blog/collapse/ http://www.toqonline.com/blog/collapse/#comments Sat, 18 Jul 2009 04:01:45 +0000 Hunter Wallace http://www.toqonline.com/?p=3391 Editor’s Note: The following discussion by Prozium of Michael O’Meara’s recent review of Dimitry Orlov’s Reinventing Collapse is from the Occidental Dissent blog. Be sure to scroll down and read the sharp comments by Tanstaafl of the Age of Treason as well.

Michael O’Meara has a long review of Dimitry Orlov’s Reinventing Collapse: The Soviet Example and American Prospects. As the title suggests, the book (which I haven’t read) explores the likely future trajectory of the United States in the wake of a Soviet Union style collapse of the global economy. The culprit of this doomsday scenario is Peak Oil.

Although O’Meara fails to mention him by name, the Mad Max Dark Age described in his review owes much to the vivid imagination of James Howard Kunstler, whom longtime readers of this blog are undoubtedly familar with. Kunstler uses the term Long Emergency to describe this future period of national breakdown. In World Made By Hand (2008), he provided a fictional portrait of everyday life in upstate New York under these conditions.

A year ago, I spent a lot of time writing about these issues. In retrospect, the stock market did collapse as predicted; the NYSE lost over half its value. Bear Sterns, Lehman Brothers, and Wachovia went under. The other major big banks and brokerages survived (so far) as a result of taxpayer welfare and massive government intervention in the private sector. GM finally went bankrupt. Chrysler was bought out by Fiat. The official unemployment rate now hovers around 10%. The consensus is that we are in the worst recession since the Great Depression.

In the Spring of 2008, it looked like we were headed towards revolutionary conditions. The price of a barrel of oil (artificially driven up by speculators) was approaching $150. The airlines were going bankrupt, cutting flights, raising prices. Truckers were going on strike in protest of high fuel prices. The economy was clearly tanking as consumers reigned in their discretionary spending. In the Third World, there was famine and food riots. Haitians were eating dirt and overthrowing their government.

If the price of oil had risen, say, another $100 to $150 … what would have happened? It is easy to imagine a massive die off in the Third World; refugees flooding into the West; the just-in-time system breaking down; all kinds of shortages; massive political unrest.

Ultimately, the U.S. economy couldn’t handle $150 per barrel oil and cracked last summer. The price of oil collapsed to around $30 per barrel as the speculators flooded out of the commodites market. The conditions associated with high oil prices were ameliorated, but it was only a temporary reprieve. The rate of oil depletion ensures that it is a problem we will have to face again someday.

In the wake of our economic collapse, Kunstler and his associates have often made an important point: weaning America off its oil addiction isn’t going to be as easy as some have suggested. The havoc in the capital markets and the collapse of oil prices has cut the knees out of alternative energy and future oil development projects.

T. Boone Pickens was on television last fall touting the massive wind farms he planned to build to wean America off foreign oil. His efforts have since come to naught. The volatility of the market continues to stiffle any sort of long term planning for our energy needs. This flaw could one day prove fatal for the capitalist system.

If anything is true, the 2007-2009 recession has proved that the government’s cures for our economic ailments are often worse than the disease. Alan Greenspan’s meddling with interest rates following the collapse of the New Economy/Dot.Com bubble only created a new and even bigger bubble in the housing market. I won’t hazard to predict the consequences of the massive expansion of the money supply under Bush/Obama in response to this latest economic crisis.

The possibility of collapse gives us hope that one day the awful system we live under will one day meet its demise. If Barack Obama’s America is indicitive of our future, that is a fantasy worth clinging to.

Note: Before anyone points out the obvious, I stopped linking to Kunstler months ago over his Zionism and warnings of “cornpone Nazism.”

7 Responses to “Collapse”

1. on 16 Jul 2009 at 11:22 pm1notuswind

   What the hell is “cornpone Nazism”?

2. on 16 Jul 2009 at 11:34 pm2Tanstaafl

   Before anyone points out the obvious, I stopped linking to Kunstler months ago over his Zionism and warnings of “cornpone Nazism.”

   I don’t follow Kunstler, so it wasn’t obvious to me, though it hardly comes as a surprise to hear it.

   From the bits you cited last year it seemed clear enough that his cornpone jewish distaste for suburbia springs largely from a distaste for Whites. Kuntsler puts too much effort into ridiculing and finding fault with ordinary people trying to make the best of a situation they had no part in creating, and not enough effort into identifying and criticizing the rich and powerful machers at the top.

   It’s no wonder why.

3. on 16 Jul 2009 at 11:35 pm3Tanstaafl

   cornpone = countrified

4. on 16 Jul 2009 at 11:42 pm4Prozium

   He believes White Southerners are a heartbeat away from Nazism. They will call for an authoritarian dictatorship in the wake of Peak Oil.

5. on 17 Jul 2009 at 12:11 am5Tanstaafl

   I believe rootless cosmopolitan anti-anti-semites are a heartbeat away from recreating the NKVD and their gulags. They will call for an authoritarian dictatorship in the wake of any upheaval they can.

   I think my belief is more grounded in reality. The bolshevist “hate” legislation passing through congress right now is not supported by even one Nazi senator.

John Robb

Via John Robb on Tribalism at The Occidental Quarterly I followed a link to Robb’s blog Global Guerrillas where he focuses on:

Networked tribes, systems disruption, and the emerging bazaar of violence. Resilient Communities, decentralized platforms, and self-organizing futures.

Here’s his About page.

I’m not sure what to make of Robb, but here’s what I think so far. His analysis of globalism is broad, incisive, and critical, and comes from a technologically informed point of view outside the false dichotomy of partisan politics. He provides interesting opinions and links, though his writing is larded with jargon. Only cryptically, by reading between the lines, can he be understood to recognize the tribal jewish influence that so dominates the West’s politics, finance, and media. He seems a typical deracinated White, for whom even a keen interest in tribalism and communities and opposition to globalism appears not at all motivated by an overt awareness of or sympathy for his own tribe.

His essay Containing Chaos (unfortunately no longer freely visible in it’s entirety) begins:

We are now engaged in a conflict that will dictate whether we succeed or fail in the 21st century. Our adversary in this conflict is, in short, the threat posed by globalization.

and concludes (my emphasis):

Disruptions that result in societal and economic chaos occur most readily in societies where the health and vigor of a society has decayed. In other words, the social and economic system that the nation-state administers must be seen as fair and just, and it must deliver tangible results to the greatest number of people possible. Anything less than this and societal breakdown becomes extremely likely should disruption occur, since the allure of participation in oppositional groups, from black-market crime to guerrilla/terrorist groups, will outweigh outcomes available through participation in the status quo. In short, the nation-state will lose its legitimacy with large subsets of its population.

Here’s an example of not delivering results: The incomes of the bottom four-fifths of Americans have fallen 10 percent, adjusted for inflation, over the last three decades, despite massive improvements in worker productivity. For an example of not being just and fair, we need not go far: Self-dealing financial elites defrauded markets and the government of trillions of dollars realized during the 2008 financial panic, and not one of them went to jail.

In order to retain legitimacy at a level that allows some freedom of action, the government must endeavor to deliver real economic progress to its constituents. That means that every policy should be slaved to increasing incomes in line with increases in worker productivity, and improving the long-term financial wealth of the greatest number. (The best way to measure the success of government efforts in this regard are increases in the median incomes of individuals.) One method of achieving this, already mentioned above, is to remove barriers to community resilience. Community resilience has the potential to substantially improve the incomes and quality of life for the greatest number by reducing end-user costs, creating jobs, and spurring massive leaps in innovation.

The greatest threat to achieving this outcome lies in the potential for parasitic interests to gain control of government function, since one of the quickest routes to illegitimacy is through the appearance of corruption. This unfortunate outcome was evident in the 2008 financial meltdown, as special interests proved capable of snaring trillions in subsidies from the public treasure for no apparent improvement in the lives of most citizens.

Robb’s analysis is clouded by his conflation of both pro-globalist “self-dealing financial elite” tribalists and anti-globalist al-qaeda-like tribalists (mentioned earlier in his essay) as “parasitic interests”. While Robb sees the jihadi threat clearly enough he seems unwilling or unable to confront the implications of his own analysis regarding the “parasitic interests” who control finance and drive globalism. That their fraud going unpunished implies not the potential to gain control of government function, but that they have already gained it. That this control goes unheralded and uncriticized in the mainstream media implies that the “parasitic interests” also effectively control media function.

The “parasitic interests” who illegitimately control the Eurosphere’s government, finance, and media have made it clear that their most feared and detested enemies are White tribalists. For us repression and punishment are considered normal and deserved, especially in response to opposition to the “parasitic interests” whose genocidal immigration policies are swamping our homelands with hostile non-White tribalists.

UPDATE 16 July 2009: A bit more of Robb’s essay Containing Chaos is available at The Occidental Quarterly Online, including this paragraph:

News in the age of the global supernetwork is often startling. It features an endless procession of crushing financial panics, unexpected food shortages, sharp commodity price spikes, brazen terrorist attacks that have shut down major cities from New York to Sao Paulo to Mumbai, and much more. These extreme events form a pattern of behavior that should serve as an alarm. They are an indication that the system we have come to rely upon, the global supernetwork that connects us to each other and all manner of goods and services is entering a period of extreme turbulence, where we careen from crisis to crisis at an increasing rate and incremental severity. At worst, it may even be an indication of a looming catastrophic failure of indeterminable duration.

John Robb

In 1946, George Kennan keyed the famous “Long Telegram,” which identified the Soviet Union as an enemy of the United States. In 1947, the original telegram was reworked and published in Foreign Policy magazine as “The Sources of Soviet Conduct.” Together, these documents formed the codex for the U.S. Cold War strategy of containment, and thereby the basis of the eventual U.S. victory in that conflict. Here’s what a “Kennan” might have written for the 21st century.

The Nature of the Threat Posed by Globalization

We are now engaged in a conflict that will dictate whether we succeed or fail in the 21st century. Our adversary in this conflict is, in short, the threat posed by globalization.

This threat is completely alien to our mode of thought. It is unlike previous threats we have faced since there isn’t a single source of ideological opposition: no collective mind or body of thought to contest with, no single enemy that can be named with clarity across all venues. It is, instead, a systemic threat, one posed by the very function of a system we have created for our mutual benefit: a morally neutral, global supernetwork that spans all salient features of modern life, from communications to economics.

The threat posed by the emergence of this global supernetwork comes in three forms. Let’s examine them in detail.

Extreme and Chaotic Behavior

News in the age of the global supernetwork is often startling. It features an endless procession of crushing financial panics, unexpected food shortages, sharp commodity price spikes, brazen terrorist attacks that have shut down major cities from New York to Sao Paulo to Mumbai, and much more. These extreme events form a pattern of behavior that should serve as an alarm. They are an indication that the system we have come to rely upon, the global supernetwork that connects us to each other and all manner of goods and services is entering a period of extreme turbulence, where we careen from crisis to crisis at an increasing rate and incremental severity. At worst, it may even be an indication of a looming catastrophic failure of indeterminable duration.

From the standpoint of systemic analysis, our global supernetwork is what is called a dynamically unstable system, or one so responsive and interconnected (i.e., tightly coupled), that it is prone to operating in an uncontrolled manner. That, unfortunately, is the way we made it. Through an organic growth process that emphasized business needs and economic efficiency, we have built a complex web of instantaneous communications, just-in-time computer systems, daily multi-trillion-dollar financial flows, and much more. Even more, we have geared up the system with extreme levels of debt and energy-use to reach the limits of potential performance.

All of this amped-up connectivity provides our global system with an ability to rapidly shift from task to task as the conditions warrant. However, it also makes the system prone to over-reaction and self-reinforcing feedback loops, such that even small changes in the right conditions can cause the system to careen to extreme behavior. Typically, we build systems like this only when we are sure we can control them. For example, high-performance aircraft are dynamically unstable systems. They are designed to want to maneuver, rather than fly straight and level. However, if they aren’t precisely managed — down to the millisecond — by computerized control systems, they will quickly careen into uncontrolled maneuvers that generate forces exceeding the structural capacity of their airframe. In short, one of these planes will wind up a smoking crater if the computer system fails to control its operation for even a couple of seconds. . . . Read the whole article.

Reinventing Collapse:
The Soviet Example and American Prospects
by Dimitry Orlov
Gabriola Island, Canada: New Society Publications, 2008

“A time of crisis is a great opportunity.”
–Barack Hussein Obama

Despairing of my people’s passivity, I have often thought that the collapse of the United States might be the one thing to turn them against the system that seeks their destruction.

This “catastrophist” perspective is, admittedly, a strategy of desperation.  For collapse (what Joseph Tainter calls a “recurrent feature of human societies”) (The Collapse of Complex Societies [Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988], 5) may delegitimize the existing system and make whites more receptive to their racial/national interests, but, in a worst-case scenario, it could pose problems even more threatening than those of the last sixty years.

The literature of collapse is consequently of the utmost relevance, especially now that the “American Century” seems to be nearing its inglorious end.

Of the numerous works on fallen civilizations, perhaps the most pertinent are those related to the Soviet collapse of 1991.  Hence the propitiousness of Orlov’s recently published work.

A computer engineer by training, Orlov and his Russian Jewish family moved to the US in the 1970s.  He has since maintained ties with the land of his birth, having returned during those periods leading up to, traversing, and following the Soviet collapse.  Writing from a radical ecological perspective critical of industrial civilization, Orlov relates what collapse entailed in the SU and why the US is no less a candidate for collapse.

His book, though, is not a work of scholarship.

“I am not,” he writes, “an expert or a scholar or an activist.  I am more of an eyewitness.  I watched the Soviet Union collapse and this has given me the necessary insight to describe what the American collapse will look like” (p. vii).

Accordingly, he spends little time sketching the big picture — the structural forces driving the collapse — and, instead, concentrates on its “micro-scale” processes and experiences.  This makes his book a “personal” work, without claim to scientific authority, but nevertheless one that is very readable, full of wit and humor, and informed by the all-important “human” dimension of collapse.

Despite their different methods and styles, Orlov sees the two twentieth-century superpowers as “antipodes” of the same technoeconomic civilization committed to social management, economic growth, material accumulation, world domination, and the realization of the Enlightenment vision of a totally rationalized world.

As such, Orlov argues that the US and the SU both sought a better life through science, approaching every human problem in terms of a technical fix.  They both were militaristic, imperialistic powers who, through direct or proxy wars, made a mess of the international arena and, though Orlov doesn’t mention it, introduced reforms in the Third World that has caused it to grow out of control; they both devoted endless fanfare to celebrating their democratic, egalitarian institutions, however fraudulent; both assaulted popular beliefs and values in the name of a higher rationality, discouraged traditional social relationships, created meaningless, uncreative forms of work, exalted materialist values over others, repressed dissent, recruited corrupt, venal elites — and, most seriously, cared little or nothing about the white, or European, race.  It might be added that the US and the SU both were social experiments that favored Jews, making them, and their values, dominant.

The list of similarities is extendable.  But the basic point — that the US and the SU were technoeconomic civilizations devoted to roughly analogous world views at odds with nature and the nature of ourselves — seems rather indisputable.  As such, one civilizational model collapsed and the other, for roughly similar reasons, now faces the prospect of collapse.

Orlov gives no credence to the Reaganesque bombast that the United States defeated the Soviet Union in the Cold War.  He argues that its collapse had little to do with ideology and even less with American influence.  Instead, he attributes it to the SU’s “chronic underperforming economy, coupled with record levels of military expenditure, trade deficit and foreign debt” (p. 8).  These economic problems made it increasingly difficult for “average Russians” to get by.

When Soviet reformers under Mikhail Gorbachev at last attempted to fix the centrally-planned stagnation, they couldn’t.  This failure, combined with military humiliation in Afghanistan and the nuclear disaster at Chernobyl, so discredited the Soviet state that it imploded.

Given that Orlov’s book appeared before the meltdown of September 2008, he looks mainly at those structural weaknesses in the US economy that resemble those of the former SU — rather than at that institutionalized system of fraud responsible for pulling off one of the great financial swindles in history.

Stressing the inherent flaws in the US economy and noting that it has taken a couple of decades for the US to catch up to the SU, he suggests that the US may soon face a similar fate.

Like many ecologists, he rejects the facile conviction that modern society is exempt from the rise and fall cycles characteristic of pre-industrial societies or that present rates of economic and population growth can continue indefinitely.  The United States, he sees, is especially vulnerable to collapse, due to the petroleum basis of its economy. (The foundational work for this view is the ecological classic: Donella H. Meadows et al., The Limits of Growth [New York: Universe Books, 1972].) He points out that the US, with its “energy-intensive model of empire,” is more dependent on cheap oil than any other industrial economy, that its crude oil production “peaked” in 1970, and that three-quarters of its energy is now imported.

Any rise in oil prices will consequently be paid for in declining economic growth and higher food prices (agriculture being petroleum-intensive).  Once the era of cheap energy comes to an end, world economies will then be forced to undergo changes as significant as those that accompanied the onset of industrialization.  This will lead to further decline and ultimately to collapse — which Orlov, citing the archdruid John Michael Greer, defines as that condition whereby “production fails to meet maintenance requirements for existing capital” (p.2). That is, when the declining economic system starts “consuming” its infrastructure (feeding off itself, in effect) to compensate for declining incomes, it will simply hasten the inevitability of its demise.

But however central, energy is only one of the problems that Orlov considers.

Because the US has outsourced most of it manufacture overseas, no longer produces the high tech on which it depends, and relies on imports for most of its basic needs, it has incurred an enormous trade imbalance, sustained by massive borrowing in foreign money markets.  (For different reasons the SU also acquired massive trade imbalances and debt in the 1980s.)

The problems created by America’s increased energy costs and the financialization of its economy have been compounded by a runaway military budget, a debt pyramid that grows at an exponential rate, and the decline of its overseas empire and “tribute economy.”  Combined with imperial disasters in Iraq and Afghanistan, a growing international reputation for incompetence and corruption, violent changes in weather patterns (which produce killer hurricanes, like Katrina, that have a system-disrupting potential), and the impending breakdown of neglected infrastructure (bridges, levies, poisoned water tables, etc.), these factors suggest that the US is about to follow the SU into the dustbin of history.

The federal government and “the self-enriching political elites” that feed off it have, moreover, a vested interest in “perpetual growth” and imperial overreach, which means they can’t be expected to do anything constructive to stave off the impending collapse.  But as the economy begins to disintegrate, tax revenues will decline and public debt will grow.  The only solution the elites have come up with thus far to address the state’s impending fiscal crisis is to crank up the printing presses and introduce more worthless paper into the market, adding inflation to their other worries.

Orlov’s explanation of the Soviet failure and his prediction of an impending American collapse, given the impressionistic nature of his work, should, of course, be taken as merely suggestive, though economic contraction, declining energy availability, and increased political turmoil are already looming on the horizon.

His work, moreover, is short on the specifics of collapse, he neglects any consideration of collapse as “a political process,” and he ignores important questions as to how and in what manner collapse occurred (in the SU) and will occur (in the US).  It’s also not evident if an American economic collapse will mirror the suddenness of the Soviet collapse (which was historically unprecedented) or if, like more traditional cases, it will be stretched out over decades.

Qualitatively more persuasive is Orlov’s claim that the Soviet Union was better situated than the United States to endure and recover from a political-economic breakdown.

In his view, Americans see their “spendthrift debtor nation” as a “land of free ice cream and perpetual sunshine” (p. 16).  Never having experienced invasion, world war, famine, or bloody dictatorship, it’s hard for them to imagine a future unlike their past.  More than Russians, Americans have been severed from their past and redesigned as gratification-oriented consumers whose defining character is materialist rather than ethnic, historical, or cultural.  They also lack the psychology of resilience “bred” into the long-suffering Russians.  Finally, they are more ideologically deluded by the system’s pretenses, just as they are more integrated into its increasingly dysfunctional institutions.

Born of a less happy, but more bona fide nation, Soviet Russians put greater emphasis on individual achievement and recognition rather than on economic success.  Money and materialist designations didn’t play quite the same role in their lives as it does in the US, for their primary needs — work, housing, basic services — were essentially provided by their collectivized economy and the life-style consumption native to the American economy wasn’t an option.  When the political system stopped functioning and the formal economy suffered its knock-out blow, there simply wasn’t the moral and social devastation that is likely to affect Americans.

The SU was also favored in terms of food and shelter.  Most Soviet housing was owned by the state.  Though “drab and soulless,” it was well-built, insulated, and designed to last.  Almost all housing was surrounded by public lands on which people kept kitchen gardens.  Prior to the collapse, nearly 90 percent of the country’s domestic food supply came from these kitchen gardens and other individual plots, for Communism had turned Russian agriculture, once Europe’s bread basket, into a basket case.

The Soviet regime also had a phobia of food riots and virtually every city stored large grain surpluses for emergencies.  This made the Soviet-style food system almost immune to breakdown.  After the collapse, most people were thus able to keep a roof over their head and to provide themselves with food.  All Soviet utilities, such as heat, running water, electricity, and garbage removal, were also public and could be counted on even after the dissolution of the central state.  Above all, Russian housing was overwhelmingly urban, situated near the country’s extensive public transportation network, which continued to operate.

This will not be the case in the US, whether it undergoes a sudden Soviet-style collapse or if it should, as is more likely, experience an extended period of decline.  Most Americans, who don’t own their homes, will in either case face foreclosure, eviction, and homelessness.  They will also have trouble feeding themselves, once the shelves of their suburban supermarkets, stocked by just-in-time deliveries, are emptied.

Because the entire country is built around the auto — housing, shopping, work are virtually inaccessible without it — when the economy bottoms up and energy costs become prohibitive, this car dependency will prove catastrophic.  Even in the oil-rich Soviet Union, there were gasoline shortages and severe rationing.  Without significant domestic supplies of gas and without spare parts for their foreign-built autos, suburban Americans will find themselves stranded.  Orlov suspects there will be a mass exodus from distant suburbs, as people are forced to relocate to centers whose supply and distribution networks remain operative.  If this should occur, the world will shrink to areas that can be covered on foot or bike, long-distance and global trade will be drastically curtailed, and the key principles of globalization will become totally untenable.  More generally, “the world” will become “the local” and self-sufficiency the supreme virtue.

Though the Soviet economy was notorious in its neglect of consumer goods, it nevertheless made things, with some conspicuous exceptions, to last.  American goods, by contrast, are produced with artificial short replacement cycles and often in plastic, which means that once the container ships stop arriving at US ports many of the consumer items that have become essential will disappear, not to be replaced.  The greater prosperity and materialism of American life also means that things most of the world considers luxuries — cars, central heating, refrigeration, flush toilets, cell phones, packaged and processed foods, etc. — have become necessities; their disappearance will be felt more intensely than in the Soviet system of socialized poverty.

An American collapse (or decline) is likely, then, to entail shortages of food, fuel, and countless consumer items, combined with outages of electricity, gas, and water; breakdowns in transportation systems and other infrastructure, including public health; widespread shutdowns and mass layoffs; all accompanied by confusion, despair, and perhaps violence.

Society as a whole will then be forced back to a less complex mode of operation; centralized forms of control will wane; things will suddenly become “smaller, simpler, less stratified, and less socially differentiated”; regions and communities will assume a greater centrality of tasks.  Whether there will ensue a Hobbesian “war of all against all” is anyone’s guess.

Then, as the old economy begins to disintegrate, old forms of capital (cash, stocks, bonds) will progressively lose their value.  Trucking and airplane fleets deprived of fuel will end up as scrap.  Scientific and industrial equipment may be exported as forms of exchange, along with antiques, jewelry, and art objects.  Numerous jobs — cable installers, lawyers, sales representatives, plastic surgeons, store clerks, stock brokers — will become superfluous.  Given both the social and economic dislocation this will set off, law enforcement will probably be overwhelmed, replaced in part by private security and neighborhood defense units.  Many laws will be ignored.  Established authorities, no longer able to ensure the security of its citizens, will almost certainly cease commanding respect and new power structures may arise.  Organized criminals, gangs, former cops, and military contractors will find new employment or self-employment.  (This will be a good time to be in a Private Military Company.)

As the established market breaks down, an informal economy will likely replace it — an economy that largely revolves around the liquidation and recycling of the old economy and is based on “direct access to needed resources or the threat of force, rather than on actual ownership or legal authority” (p. 61).

As in Russia, we’ll probably see old people in open air flea markets selling off their treasured possessions, middle-class people rummaging through trash, the few remaining stores under heavy security.

All this will happen to a people not only psychologically unprepared for social upheaval, but ill-suited to the harsh realities it will bring.  Americans, in fact, have lived so long with a radical disconnect between their “culturally acceptable beliefs” and their personal experiences that they are already afflicted with various mental diseases, evident in the tens of millions of anti-depressant and mood-altering drugs they daily consume.  Collapse will send a great many of them over the edge — into new fantasied stages of denial or, perhaps, into a millennial “end times” revival.

The good news is that whites will also become increasingly unsupportive of a regime that no longer delivers the goods.  Indeed, because the legitimacy of America’s managerial/therapeutic regime is so closely linked to economic well-being, the latter’s breakdown will likely also either bring down the state or “hollow” it out.  But whatever happens, the fall of the American system, based on a highly controlled system of “communications” and programmed consumption (i.e., on packaged goods and packaged lives), is going to lead not to the rapture, but to a very rude awakening.

This is worrisome to the degree that the most vulnerable to collapse, besides the “couch potatoes” spawned by our “prosthetic society,” are whites.  For they are the most integrated into the existing system, they are the most deluded by the ideology of the American Dream (which holds that if you work hard and play by the rules, you will succeed), they are the most shorn of their former identities, culture, and communities (which assume a primary importance in times of crisis), and they lack any consciousness of being a people, based on a specific stock with a specific culture, and thus lack any consciousness of why they should act cohesively as a people.

Once whites cease being sheltered in the bubbles of their cars or in their cubicle jobs, they will then be forced to deal face-to-face with blacks, Mexicans, turbaned Sikhs, and the other exotic fauna that now cover their land.  At this point, they may discover that a nation is not a “racial rag bag,” but a community based on a “consciousness of kind” — i.e., on a consciousness of being related in blood and spirit to a people with a shared ancestry and a common culture.  The ensuing anarchy might also provoke conflict along ethnoracial lines, exacerbated by high gun ownership on both sides, that could conceivably lead to violent clashes and perhaps forms of ethnic cleansing.

Such conflict will have a far greater role to play here than it did in ethnically homogeneous Russia, where communal relations remained civil, if not amicable (except in respects to Jews and certain non-Russian minorities).

If American whites should remain unconscious of who they are as a people, they will almost certainly be victimized by the higher cohesion and consciousness of nonwhites, whose ethnic identity, family ties, and cultural motivations are both more primitive and more powerful than theirs.  The big question, then, is whether whites will passively succumb to black/brown predators, like sheep before the slaughter, or if, in an awakening, they’ll join with other whites to fight back.  (I’m betting it won’t take long before they realize that it’s a matter of “us or them.”)

Relatedly, successful, middle-aged white men will be especially prone to nervous breakdown and depression — as the career, savings, and property they spent a life time pursuing suddenly go down the drain.  Suicide, emotional paralysis, drink and drugs will strike them at higher rates than other sectors of the population.  Their fragility will be further compounded by the fact that their work experiences leave them totally unqualified for employment in a collapsed economy.  Concentrated more in business, management, communications, law, sales, and information processing, they will find that immigrants with practical skills as carpenters, mechanics, and general laborers will be better situated to take advantage of the remaining job opportunities.

At the same time, as single households and nuclear families prove to be nonviable, whites will find that extended families and friends are their most valuable asset.

The Russian family wasn’t much healthier than the American family, but economic conditions and housing shortages before the collapse helped keep marriages together, with three generations often sharing the same dwelling.  And like most people worldwide, Russians also tended to live in the same locale all their lives.  As a result, they had extended family ties and knew the people among whom they lived, both of which enhanced their survivability.

American whites lack these extended networks, and this is going to affect their adaptability in a broken world.  To survive, they will have to rediscover the meaning of community and revive those organizations and activities that were once a mainstay of American civil society.  In making the transition to a Third World lifestyle, whites then will either have to rediscover their own traditions or else revert to the sort of practices common to nonwhites.

It took Russia only a decade to recover from its collapse and regain pre-collapse economic levels.  This relatively speedy recovery was due to the individual Russian’s ability to adapt to crisis conditions and to the country’s vast oil reserves, which enabled their economy to bounce back relatively quickly, once world gas prices revived.  The US is not so well situated.  It will take longer to recover from whatever collapse brings and it’s likely there will be no “recovery” from the decline of its technoeconomic civilization (given the inevitable rise of energy costs and the infeasibility of a globalized economy based on cheap energy).  There’s also no single figure in the US governing elite capable of emulating Vladimir Putin, who prevented the oligarchs from turning post-collapse Russia into a colony of the world’s financial system.

But all’s not doom and gloom in this scenario.  The crash will help whites shed their liberal illusions, perhaps discover what is most important in life, and, in the best of all possible worlds, prompt them to reestablish the racial-national bonds that once made them a great, enterprising people.

Of course, it would have been better if they hadn’t screwed around for sixty years, leaving it until the very last possible moment to recoup the Aryan qualities that will enable them to overcome the coming dark age, but better at 11:59 PM than never at all.

In this pre-collapse interlude, before the fall, the fact nevertheless remains that nothing can be done to halt the inevitable or mitigate the unmitigable.  We are facing not a solvable problem, but an unavoidable predicament that promises to rip apart the illusions that have animated American life for at least the last two generations — especially the illusion that unlimited growth and limitless consumption are possible in a world of finite resources.  We have, then, absolutely no control over what is about to happen: all our efforts would be like “wiggling our toes at a tsunami.”  The only certainty now is that the process of decline has begun.

Worse, there are no oppositional parties, political formations, or extraparliamentary forces representing white interests to lead us, once the smoke clears.  The impending crisis — this make or break time — comes thus at a relatively inopportune moment.

A civilization rarely collapses all at once, as survivalists fantasize, but rather gradually disintegrates, often over the stretch of decades. Thus, as individuals and, more importantly, as European Americans concerned with our people’s fate, we still have time to turn inward to prepare ourselves mentally for the looming economic breakdown and, as we do, to start also turning outward to develop those “resilient communities” of friends, family, and fellow tribesmen, who, when the moment strikes, might not only help us survive, but — ideally — to prompt us to start thinking about what should succeed the failed United States.