The Export of Misery

So...Russia has finally decided to go through with their invasion of Ukraine.  This is Russia's punishment of Ukraine for being Ukraine and not Russia - the revenge wrought by Russia for the intolerable narcissistic injury suffered by the Russians in their encounter with a people that has chosen its own separate identity.  Isn't that the way it always is with narcissists?  Their declaration is always, "You must die because you refuse to be an extension of me!"

God damn Putin's Russia.  And God damn Vladimir Putin, Alexandr Dugin, and the whole apparatus of which they are part.  God damn the Russian leadership's division of the world into zones of conquest arrogantly and presumptuously crisscrossed by Russian "red lines."

There is one silver lining in this present cloud - namely, that it has become blindingly obvious what sort of nation Russia has become and what sort of leadership it now has.  The advantage of stealth possessed by wolves successfully camouflaged in sheep's clothing disappears once the sheep costumes have been abandoned.  But there is also a danger - namely the danger that the depredation of the wolf will both continue and expand by means of a lack of moral courage of the sheep, particularly of the bellwethers, the rams of the flock.  This is what almost happened in the late 1930's when Adolf Hitler chose to play a game remarkably similar to the game now being played by Vladimir Putin.  In this re-run of that earlier game, Fox News talking head Tucker Carlson's voice becomes merely a more rabid repeat of the sympathies expressed by Charles Lindbergh toward the Nazi party.  And as for the bellwethers - will the hard necessity of resistance be obfuscated by them as it was by Neville Chamberlain?  That is, will the West lull itself back to sleep with half-measures rather than facing the hard necessities - both moral and intellectual - of successful resistance, of successful defense of a separate identity that one can call one's own, of successful removal of a tyrannical threat?  In the days to come, it won't be good enough merely to say, "I tried."

A further note: many, many ordinary rank-and-file Russians have now begun to make their voices heard by standing against Putin and his narcissistic little war.  They themselves have stated boldly that they want to craft a separate identity of decency and morality for themselves.  They are rejecting the identity of "Putin's Russia."  Pray for them - many of them are now being arrested by Putin's apparatus of goons.  Speaking as I have of wolves in an earlier paragraph, I say now that Putin is expertly acting the part of a son of a dog.

The Jewel And The Dragon

I need to keep my promises, and one of those promises is to finish writing a concluding series of posts on Gene Sharp's book From Dictatorship to Democracy, a book which deals with the subject of strategic nonviolent resistance.  But this past week I began to try to build new habits around time management, and the long-range goals I am trying to accomplish with my new time-management scheme include being in bed by 10 PM every night and getting really good on the guitar.  I have about an hour and a half of practice time scheduled for tonight...

Next week, God willing, I will have another post ready.  One thing I do want to mention in the meantime is that I have recently commented several times on this blog about how well the nations of the East (and I mean the Asian nations, not Russia!) have done in navigating global crises which have shown the weaknesses and fault lines of the nations of the West, including the United States.  One particular crisis which the Asian nations have navigated particularly well is the COVID-19 pandemic.

But now it seems that agents of the Global Far Right have infiltrated Asian societies in an attempt to sow division and discord.  This is especially true of the proponents of anti-vaxx (that is, anti-vaccine) propaganda who have made their voices heard in realspace and in cyberspace over the last few months.  One doofus who comes to mind is Brad Bowyer, who was born a British citizen but who managed to insinuate himself into a leadership role in a political party in Singapore - until he made a remark comparing Singapore's efforts to ensure vaccination compliance to the efforts of Hitler to round up Jews for extermination.  That remark has recently cost him his political position.  Let's see if he manages to bounce back.  And let's see if he is successful in his attempted cultural poisoning of Singapore.  Lee Kuan Yew would never have tolerated him.

Mr. Bowyer himself.  Image taken from the Straits Times

Singapore is not the only Asian nation suffering from the attack of the lunatic fringe, as seen in the following articles: "Anti-Vaxxer Propaganda Spreads in Asia, Endangering Millions," "Coronavirus vaccine: anti-vax movement threatens Asian recovery," and "The Inherent Racism of Anti-Vaxx Movements."  Note that last article, and note the murderously genocidal motives of the promoters of anti-vaxx propaganda.  Note also that one of the chief sources of this propaganda is Russia.  Perhaps the common people of Russia are distressed by the fact that Putin can't seem to organize a successful effort to put out the wildfires which are destroying their homeland.  They can take comfort in the fact that their taxes are being used instead to try to destabilize the rest of the world.

Солнечный свет

Sunshine go away today

I don't feel much like dancin'

Some man's gone, he's tried to run my life

He don't know what he's askin'

When he tells me I better get in line

I can't hear what he's sayin'

When I grow up I'm gonna make it mine

These ain't dues I been payin'...

- from Sunshine by Jonathan Edwards (a 1971 blast from the past!)

I am still busy with the kind of work that pays bills, so I will have to postpone the continuation of my posts on the book From Dictatorship to Democracy (shortened in these posts to From D to D) by Gene Sharp.  But I want to comment today on something I came across while researching the material for my most recent post in the From D to D series.  

That post drew from a book by Basil Henry Liddell-Hart titled, The Strategy of Indirect Approach.  That book was inspired by Liddell-Hart's experiences in World War 1, both as a combatant and and an observer.  And because this book was written in the 1940's, Liddell-Hart reserved the last chapter for a commentary on the opening events of World War 2.  That chapter is appropriately titled, "Hitler's Strategy."  Liddell-Hart holds up Adolf Hitler as an outstanding example of the power of the indirect approach to warfare, saying that "The peaceful Powers have suffered a lot from 'missing the bus' through their slowness to gauge what he [that is, Hitler] would attempt next."

Liddell-Hart comments that this "missing of the bus" is a strange thing given the fact that before his ascent to power, Hitler spelled out exactly both the general strategy and the specific methods by which he would attempt world domination.  Through his autobiographical Mein Kampf and his public speeches, Hitler laid all his cards on the table.  Of particular note is the fact that Hitler sought to disarm and disintegrate his opponents as much as possible through means that did not involve actual war, so that when the time for arms actually came, a military victory could be achieved with the least possible cost.  To quote Hitler, "People have killed only when they could not achieve their aim in other ways ... There is a broadened strategy with intellectual weapons ... Our strategy is to destroy the enemy from within, to conquer him through himself."

A key method of destroying enemies from within consists of understanding and playing on the weaknesses of the great men of the nation one seeks to conquer.  Liddell-Hart therefore described how Hitler used this method to destroy the Weimar Republic in order to install himself as the supreme leader of Germany and the Nazi Party as the sole political instrument of Germany.  But what is more disturbing is how Hitler then used the same methods to undermine the other nations of Europe.  Among the things done to implement this strategy are the following:

• Support of the emerging fascist government of Italy
• Support of General Franco's successful overthrow of the Spanish government
• A series of relatively bloodless military victories against militarily inferior neighbors.  These military moves were made under the pretext of answering the call for help made by supposedly oppressed German minorities and sympathetic partisans in these countries.
• From page 306 of Liddell-Hart: "To prepare the way for his offensive, he [Hitler] sought to find influential adherents in the other country who would undermine its resistance, make trouble in his interest, and be ready to form a new government compliant to his aims.  Bribery was unnecessary - he counted on self-seeking ambition, authoritarian inclination, and party-spirit to provide him with willing and unwitting agents among the ruling classes." (Emphasis added.)

It is this last point which I want to emphasize.  When the members of a polity are decent, moral people, this moral and ethical purity is a source of strength even if the polity may be militarily weak.  But when there are members of the polity who seek to make themselves great by trashing their fellow human beings, they expose themselves to the possibility of being trashed in turn by a power greater and more skillful than themselves.  That power is itself a power of darkness, and it finds an open door of assault when the darkness within it calls out to the darkness of the great men of the polity - and finds a ready answer.  (This, for instance, is how Hitler almost destroyed Josef Stalin.)

So it is that the darkness within Vladimir Putin and Aleksandr Dugin has called out to many of the great men of the West and has found a ready answer.  For the strategy and the strategic moves of Putin's Russia have been in many ways an almost exact mirror of the opening moves made by Adolf Hitler over 80 years ago.  I would like to suggest that among Putin's most "willing and unwitting agents" are many members of the Republican Party, the white American Evangelical/Protestant church (see this also), and the media empire of Rupert Murdoch.

In mentioning Putin's close relationship with many of the leaders of the white American evangelical/Protestant church, I want to be clear that I do not believe for a moment that Putin is actually a Christian.  Nor do I believe he has any noble spiritual motives.  But I do believe that Putin, like Hitler before him, is an embodiment of the kind of global hegemon which the world will see in the perhaps not-too-distant future, a ruler described thus: 

And in his place a despicable person will arise, on whom the honor of kingship has not been conferred, but he will come in a time of tranquility and seize the kingdom by intrigue...And after an alliance is made with him he will practice deception, and he will go up and gain power with a small people... (Daniel 11:21, 23; see also Daniel 8:23-25)

Could Putin then be "da man"?  может быть; кто знаете?

P.S. If you want to read more of my posts on Russia, the following are a good place to start:

• The Revanchism of the Third Rome (Part 1)
• The Revanchism of the Third Rome (Part 2): The Role of Russian Orthodoxy
• The Revanchism of the Third Rome: Symphony's Chords
• The Revanchism Of The Third Rome, Part 4: Caesar's 21st Century
• The Black Hole At The Imperial Center
• No Strangers to Самовлюбленность
• The Tearing of the Fig Leaf Dress

The Black Hole At The Imperial Center

Warning: This will be a blatantly spiritual post, so you can decide whether you are interested enough in that subject to keep reading.  I will begin with an analogy from astronomy.  Observations of stellar motion near galactic cores explain much about what holds galaxies together.  Scientists who have observed such cores have gleaned a great deal of information about a thing that can be observed only indirectly, namely, the super-massive black hole that lies at the heart of a typical galaxy.  Those observations have enabled them to estimate the probable mass of many black holes at galactic centers and the radius of their event horizons.

Here's a question: can observations of empire tell what lies at the center of earthly empires?

A clue came to me recently.  For the last several months I've been listening to audio recordings of the Bible that I downloaded from the LibriVox website.  For some reason, I found myself obsessively listening to various readings of the Book of Daniel for several days last month, and that led me to an effort to try to figure the book out.  I am not going to give you some grand exposition today, but I will comment on a couple of things that I noticed.

First, the main theme of Daniel seems to be summarized in Daniel 4:17 - that God Most High rules in the kingdom of men, and gives it to whomever He will, and sets up over it the lowest of men - and that one day, all earthly kingdoms and their kings will be superseded by a King from Heaven whose reign will be over all, and will never end.

But before that everlasting Kingdom comes, there will be one last earthly empire.  That empire will rule the earth for a time, and will be evil.  One interesting observation is the power and motivation behind that last empire, whose ruler will "do that which his fathers have not done, nor his fathers' fathers."  (Daniel 11:24)  In other words, he will be an exceptional conqueror having an extraordinary degree of cunning.  What will be the secret of his success?  This: "He will not regard the gods of his fathers, or the desire of women, or regard any god, for he will magnify himself above all.  But in his place he will honor a god of fortresses, a god whom his fathers did not know; with gold, silver and with precious stones and pleasant things.  He will deal with the strongest fortresses by the help of a a foreign god; he will give great honor to those who acknowledge him and will cause them to rule over the many, and will parcel out land for a price."  (Daniel 11:37-39, various translations)

To put it plainly, behind the empire of the final earthly king will be the worship of a "god of fortresses..."  In other words, the power and foundation of this empire will be from an occult source.  This is also indicated in Daniel 8:23-24, "And in the latter period of their kingdom, when the transgressors have finished, a king will arise strong of face and skilled in ambiguous speech (or intrigue, or enigmas).  And his power will be mighty, but not by his power (emphasis added), and he will destroy (or corrupt) to an extraordinary degree and prosper and perform his will; he will destroy (or corrupt) mighty men and the people of the saints.  And through his shrewdness he will cause deceit to succeed by his influence..."

Thinking of these passages led me to formulate a hypothetical question: what if the power and foundation of every earthly empire throughout history has come from an occult source?  This seems especially likely if the empire was an extraordinarily violent and successful conqueror, and/or a severe and cruel oppressor.  What if, moreover, every conspiracy to create an earthly empire has an occult inspiration?  Where would one look for evidence to confirm or contradict such a hypothesis?  Over the last few weeks, I have been looking at the last five hundred years of the history of the Global North (Europe, the Five Eyes, and Russia), and I came up with some very interesting findings.  I will divide those findings into "historical imperial examples" and "present-day conspiratorial examples."

Under the heading of "historical imperial examples" were some obvious cases, such as Nazi Germany under the reign of Hitler.  (See this, this, this, and this for instance.  However, the author of the last source cited seems to hint that occult fascinations merely colored, and did not cause, certain aspects of National Socialism.)  There is also the case of Italy under Benito Mussolini, whose reign was influenced to some degree by occultist Julius Evola, who was also virulently racist,  According to one source, his writings have had a major impact on the development of the global far right.  But I am getting ahead of myself.

There is also at least one questionable example, namely that of Napoleon Bonaparte of France.  The limited investigation I have done has turned up no hard link to the occult in Napoleon's empire.  However, he is an ambiguous character who proclaimed his allegiance to several religions in order to facilitate his rule over the diverse peoples he conquered.

But there is also an unexpected example, namely that of Elizabethan England, where the Queen had a court astrologer and advisor named John Dee who was also the inspiration and architect of the formation of the British Empire.  Throughout his adult life he had a strong and increasing fascination with the occult (which is one thing actually that led to his eventual ruin).  There is also the example of Cecil Rhodes, who, according to Carroll Quigley, was the mastermind behind attempts by certain wealthy British interests to reconquer some of the possessions lost by the British Empire.  According to Quigley, one of the institutions arising from the activities of Mr. Rhodes is the Society for Psychical Research (The Anglo-American Establishment, p. 32).

There is also the example of the United States, if one cares to take the time to find reputable and scholarly articles concerning the faith of the Founding Fathers.  (Hint: most of them were not fundamentalist Christians.  See this also.)  Note also the significant role played by secret societies in American history. (See this and this for instance.)  Lastly, consider the hidden agenda and esotericism of certain examples of American-made religion, such as Mormonism and Dominionism.  And there is the example of Federal funding for research into the use of psychic phenomena for military purposes!

Under the heading of "present-day conspiratorial examples", the biggest and most obvious case I found was Russia and its involvement with the burgeoning far-right, white supremacist movements now at work in the Global North.  Those who are intimately familiar with Russian culture know of the prominent role of the occult in pre-revolutionary Russia, as well as the Soviet research in attempts to use psychic phenomena for Soviet governmental objectives.  (See this, for instance.)  But what is even more interesting is the place of the occult in the resurgence of post-collapse Russian society and of post-collapse Russian geopolitical strategy.  Consider, for instance, Aleksandr Dugin, the chief architect of modern Russian geopolitical strategy.  Consider the occult roots of his political philosophy, and of Dugin's fascism.  (See this and this also.)  Dugin, it seems, wants to build a global empire centered on and run by Russia.  Indeed, he believes that Russia without empire would cease to exist.

And part of his strategy (a strategy we have seen implemented quite effectively over the last two years) involves the financing and political support of far-right groups in Europe and the United States.  (For an example of involvement in Europe, see this.)

I would also say that the widespread evidence of occult involvement in the global far-right groups today transcends any individual country.  It is truly an international phenomenon.  (See this, this and this for instance.)  There is evidence, moreover, that these far-right groups are actively creating a white supremacist youth culture.  (See this, this and this also.)

So then, based on my initial findings, I think I can state that the answer to my initial hypothetical question is most likely "Yes, the foundation of earthly empires and imperialist conspiracies is occult."  Therefore I submit that thus we who are members of those people groups who have been oppressed and exploited by the Global North for the last five centuries or so can begin to understand the power and motives behind the cruelty dealt to us by our oppressors.  And we can begin to estimate the future trajectory of our oppressors, as well as understanding how we should respond to the oppression dealt to us.

As a Christian, I boldly state that our response must not be to attempt to wield the same power now wielded against us by our oppressors!  For those who wield that kind of power run the risk of losing their souls "on singularly unfavorable terms" (to quote C.S. Lewis), regardless of the earthly results they achieve.  Rather, for the Christian, it is much more relevant that, "...for us there is one God, the Father, from whom are all things, and we for Him, and one Lord, Jesus Christ, by whom are all things, and we through Him."  (1 Corinthians 8:6)  And, "A glorious throne on high from the beginning is the place of our sanctuary.  O LORD, the hope of Israel, all who forsake Thee will be put to shame..." (Jeremiah 17:12-13). 

My assessment also agrees with the words of Soong-Chan Rah in his book Prophetic Lament: A Call for Justice In Troubled Times, where he says, "American Christians operate under the delusion that success and power provide the answer to the world's problems.  In Scripture, we see that powers and principalities are not necessarily a positive expression.  Moses stands against the powers and principalities of his time.  The prophets boldly speak against the powers, including their own king.  Jesus rejects the temptation of secular power.  Ephesians 6 portrays powers and principalities as demonic forces.  Should we seek the same type of power that the world seeks?"

Some readers may be curious as to the results which can be expected from the seeking of occult power by the far-right supremacist groups I have cited.  Some may also be curious as to the timing of the final end of the trajectory of these supremacists.  I will not comment on such matters today.  (I think I have spent quite enough time behind a keyboard this weekend!  And some of you who read today may be thinking, "He's really climbed far out onto the skinny branches with this post!")  However, I will end with a sociological question.

The quest for empire is essentially a quest for power, and the bigger the imperial dream, the greater is the underlying thirst for power.  The empires of the 19th and 20th centuries enjoyed exponentially greater power than any empires that preceded them, thanks to the Industrial Revolution and the resources - particularly, energy resources - that supplied that revolution.  Now those resources are coming to an end, and their end signals a mortal threat to the narcissistic quest for imperial power by those who have long enjoyed the fruits of that power.  Could it be that the surging interest in the occult in the Global North - especially among the supremacist elements - signifies a desperate search for another kind of (blatantly evil) power?  And will the quest for that power intensify in the months ahead?

When The Ferris Wheel Flies Apart

“Decompensation” is what happens when a narcissistic individual or entity is no longer able to maintain the grandiose self which is its chosen identity. The Anglo-American identity which the United States has constructed for itself is just such a “grandiose self”: a “chosen nation,” a “city on a hill,” “the greatest nation on earth” because it consists of a race “predestined” to supreme greatness by “Providence.” In the name of that “Providence” it has conquered the North American continent, nearly exterminating the original inhabitants in the process, and it has managed to subjugate most of the rest of the world. In that process, moreover, the privileged among the citizens of the United States have come to believe that they deserve the special privileges they enjoy, having been predestined to these privileges; and that the nations and peoples who have been subjugated “deserve” the treatment which this country has inflicted on them, being “predestined” to that treatment. Throughout its history, there have been spokesmen for this country who have boasted that the United States is a “Christian” nation, “one nation under God.” Yet U.S. treatment of other nations – especially non-European nations – has been anything but a model of the Golden Rule, embodying instead the slogan, “Do unto others before they do unto you.” Hence the need to invoke a Calvinist predestination to justify this country's treatment of other nations and peoples.

The identity which the U.S. has constructed is inherently unsustainable. It is now being threatened by forces beyond the control of this country and its privileged members. Some of those forces were identified in last week's post. The United States has become used to economic, political and military arrangements which allow four percent of the world's population to control almost all of the economic flows on this planet, and to enjoy over 40 percent of the world's resources. The rest of the world has for a long time regarded this a rather distasteful and burdensome arrangement, and has in the last few years begun to do something about it. Weekly – sometimes daily – new challenges to U.S. hegemony are now arising as nations seek to reassert control over their own affairs. The most recent contender is Greece, where the Syriza party, described as “far-left” by Western media, holds a lead over the ruling party days before the Greek general elections on the 25th of this month.  If the Syriza party gains a decisive number of seats in the Greek parliament, a Greek exit from the Eurozone would certainly be a possibility, as Syriza have made it clear that they want a drastic revision of economic austerity conditions imposed on them by the EU and the IMF. The beginning of a breakup of the EU would have serious implications for U.S. economic hegemony. Also, a number of European nations have been making noises within the last two weeks about breaking with the U.S. over the issue of sanctions against Russia.

But there is a more compelling reason than geopolitics for the unsustainability of the current American identity. This country has exhausted its base of many natural resources, just as the industrialized world has exhausted a critical mass of its natural resource base. The current and deepening depression in the price of oil, metals, and other commodities is a symptom of an anemic economy falling down after a period of overexertion. This fainting is a sign that the exertion was itself unsustainable. The German Energy Watch Group, which published supply outlook reports for oil, coal and uranium in 2007 and 2008, also published a comprehensive update to its forecasts in 2013. That update, titled, Fossil and Nuclear Fuels - The Supply Outlook, maintains that global production of conventional crude oil peaked in 2008, and that global extraction of all non-renewable energy sources will peak right around now. Concentrated energy sources are the lifeblood of an industrial economy, so the peak and decline in extraction means the inevitable decline of the global industrial economy. This means that a lot of people who were winners will now become losers; a lot of people who were used to being in control of things will lose control.

The various nations are being affected unevenly by this contraction, depending on whether they are producer nations who still have valuable concentrations of resources or importer nations who have largely used up their resources. The U.S. is an importer nation. A loss of hegemony by the U.S. at a time of energy and resource contraction means that U.S. consumers will increasingly find themselves cut off from access to remaining stocks of raw materials which exist in distant nations and are controlled by those nations. Those nations may be temporarily hurt by the current drop in demand for their materials, yet the fact that they can still produce things of value will enhance their long-term survival prospects compared to nations which import most of their resources and finished products. Thus the long-term standard of material wealth in a nation like the United States will inevitably and irreversibly decline.

What does this mean in plain language? This nation has built its identity as a “special and chosen people” on a foundation of having lots of stuff and being able to tell lots of people what to do. That identity is about to take a huge hit. When that happens, many of us will get to watch decompensation in action.

Of this decompensation, it has been written that “The stress of aging or illness and the attendant loss of beauty, strength, or cognitive function can undermine narcissistic fantasies of invulnerability and limitless power. It may lead to an empty, depleted collapse on the one hand or a frantic search for compensatory thrill-seeking on the other, both of which are described in the classic “midlife crisis”. Later-life crises, such as one experienced on the eve of retirement, also may reflect narcissistic pathology.” (See this and this.) In other words, the loss of ability to maintain a grandiose self provokes a crisis. What does that crisis look like? I am not a psychologist, and I don't usually make predictions, but I'd like to suggest a few possibilities.

I propose that there may be two phases to decompensation. Both phases are characterized by scapegoating and projection, but the nature of that scapegoating changes from the first phase to the next. In the first phase, scapegoating takes the form of “enemy creation” in order to justify not only the exploitation of groups or individuals targeted for exploitation, but also to distract from the dysfunctional dynamics experienced by those who are in long-term association with the narcissist. The scapegoating is an ever-present feature of the narcissist's interactions, but when his grandiosity is endangered, the scapegoating may kick into overdrive as the narcissist seeks a defense from the threat he perceives. This may well explain the evolution of the U.S. “War on Terror” from the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina to the present day. The takeaway message of the “War on Terror” is that because the United States is a “special” nation, there are enemies out there who “hate our freedom” and want to attack us. This then becomes the primary focus of our attention, and we are trained to ignore our own dysfunctional treatment not only of others, but of the marginalized members of our own society. This also plays into two of the symptoms of narcissism described in the DSM-IV: “...believes that he or she is 'special' and unique...,” and “...believes that others are envious of him or her...”

In this first stage of decompensation, scapegoating then consists of “enemy creation” the purpose of which is to promote the cohesion of the dysfunctional group led by the narcissist, to mask the pain of the dysfunction experienced in the narcissist's pathological space, and to justify the exploitation of those who have things the narcissist wants to take, or who by their very existence threaten the narcissist's identity as the “fairest one of all.” I think this is what was behind the undeserved publicity surrounding the supposed North Korean hack of the computers of Sony Pictures over its release of “The Interview” – a movie about attempting to assassinate the leader of North Korea, a movie which was so technically and artistically bad that it earned a rating of only 52 percent from Rotten Tomatoes. Other examples include the inaccurate portrayal of people of color as largely criminal in the aftermath of the shootings of unarmed Black people in the U.S. last year, as well as the inaccuracies in media coverage of Libya and Syria prior to U.S. and NATO military action against these countries. And let's not forget the granddaddy of them all, the false case for “weapons of mass destruction” in Iraq just before the 2003 invasion led by the United States.

The trouble with this kind of enemy creation is that over time, it stops working. Instead, an increasing number of people come to believe that each new “terror incident” or “threat incident” in the news is nothing more than a “false flag” attack designed to advance the ulterior interests of the nation which is supposedly warning us of the “threat.” (For instance, a surprising number of people believe that the recent Charlie Hebdo attack was a false flag operation designed to advance the “War on Terror” and the political prospects of far-right European nationalist political parties, as well as to dissuade member nations from leaving the EU. See this.) Think of the boy who cried “Wolf.” Nevertheless, it would not surprise me to find an increasing number of “enemies” being created by Anglo-American leaders and media in the years to come.

As the decline of our formerly grandiose nation continues, and we begin to enter the second stage of decompensation, we will begin obviously to lose the ability to affect events on the world stage. This will lead to a further decline in our material standard of wealth. At this stage I expect the scapegoating to turn to asking whom we can blame for our loss of prestige. This may take the form of infighting between powerful leaders of economic/political factions, with a little (or maybe a lot) of the old enemy creation added in the form of targeting foreign-born people and people of color within this country's borders. The point will be that someone, somewhere has to answer for the failure of this country's grandiose self, and the people who caused that failure will prove to be too brittle to take responsibility. Therefore they will project that responsibility on the most convenient target they can find. I think of a scene out of the Great Divorce where Napoleon Bonaparte is in Hell, in a well-lit mansion which can't keep out the rain, and he is endlessly pacing up and down, muttering, “It was Soult's fault. It was Ney's fault. It was Josephine's fault. It was the fault of the Russians. It was the fault of the English...” The second stage of decompensation may also take a suicidal turn, as the remaining leaders of the old order enact policies which they know to be self-destructive, as Hitler did during the waning days of the Third Reich, or as Jim Jones did on the day that he and his followers drank poisoned Kool-Aid.

The task, then – for marginalized peoples in this country and for all people of principle who seek to maintain a good conscience – will be to successfully navigate perilous days for a while. For while it may be tempting to run away to another country, the reality is that most of us don't have that option. Also, there are other countries which have been poisoned to the same extent as the United States. (I think particularly of Great Britain, Canada and Australia.) Yet I don't think all areas of the United States will be equally bad. There will be a surprising number of geographical and cultural nooks and crannies where a meaningful and healthy life can be led. Finding and thriving in these niches is part of the task before us.

P.S. Please do read in their entirety the articles on narcissism which I quoted and linked from the Web of Narcissism site.   Pay special attention to the stories of decompensating individuals.  Then take a look at the folks around you.

Military Service, Patriotism, Guns, and The Church From Hell

Yesterday, I went to attend a tutoring group where I've been helping immigrant children with math.  "Did you know," one of them said, "there was a shooting at our high school today?"

I already had some idea of the details of the shooter before this morning, even though I know almost no one at that high school.  I knew that the shooter was a white male whose learned pathological narcissism and monstrous sense of entitlement had been threatened by the presence in this world of other people - people different from and independent from him.  But I did not know until today that the shooter was a devout Mormon from a gun-packing right wing military family who had gotten upset a week before when his fellow students disagreed with him about a speech he had made concerning Adolf Hitler.

The shooter is typical of the sort of young people many right-wing Anglo-American families are producing nowadays - people who feel monstrously threatened by the emergence of a world which they no longer control, which they can no longer dominate, and in which they will have to exercise the sort of politeness that goes with an accurate estimation of their real place in the world.  In response to the loss of their imagined specialness, these people kill and destroy indiscriminately, proving that they are not special, but worthless. 

There's a lot that can be said about malignant Anglo-American narcissism at the tail end of the American empire,  but I don't have time to say it.  I'll just say this: Jared Michael Padgett - an all-American, a patriot, a gun nut, a Mormon! is dead of a self-inflicted wound after indiscriminately killing an innocent young man.  Now Jared knows how wrong he was about life, about his cult church, about his place in the world, about his relations with his fellow human beings.  Try as I might, I can't feel sorry for him right now.