Topic: Democracy
The Age of World Wars, Part One No one can say today whether any of these powers will still be in existence in their present form by the middle of the 21st century. United States, a region more than a State, a fashion in outlook more than an example of perseverance, England's outlook shaped by the 1933 Oxford Student Union "proclamation" and limited to her island, France nearly a Communistic dictatorship of a clique under a facade of democratic pageantry, Germany a country of dreamers unable to escape the petty consequences of its provincial outlook going back to the breakup of the Medieval Reich.. but this dilapidated situation marking a lack of fitness for tasks of Statehood has its origins in a crisis which has steadily been evolving for the past 250 years - and its final peripeteia (complication) is yet to explode on the World scene.by Seneca
(Conservative Libertarian)
Saturday, August 23, 2008
"BREVISSIMA AD DIVITIAS PER CONTEMPTUM DIVITIARUM VIA EST" /The shortest road to riches is the one that goes through the contempt for riches/ (M.E. Seneca, Epistolae morales ad Lucilium, 62, 2)
The Crisis Backdrop: World Wars
A World War One-type event in fact could have happened on any number of instances between 1878 and 1914. It was purely accidental that it did in 1914 for the mighty discharge of bent-up forces was waiting in the wings, loaded with all the human imponderables of a destined necessity that lurks behind the surface of political happening the world over.
By 1878, the age the West was ripe enough for a world war. The Russians stood before Constantinople, England wanted to intervene, France and Austria too; the war would have at once spread to Asia and Africa, and perhaps America; for the threat to India from Turkestan, the question of a protectorate for Egypt and the Suez Canal, and Chinese problems all emerged, and behind everything the rivalry between London and New York lurked. It was Bismarck, the last great statesman of the now largely bygone Europe (a cultural-political concept that worked as long as Russia was European on the surface), who was standing as the center of gravity of stability and international balance-of-power. The supremacy of his personal statesmanship alone shifted (postponed) decisions of the great-power problems, FOR WHICH THERE WAS NO PEACEFUL SOLUTION, into the future BUT AT A COST. The Loss of Western Statesmanship
And so the pattern was set a pattern that could break-out into war at any time especially after Bismarck's fall from power a loss for Germany (and Europe) for which there was not to be any worthy or suitable replacement. In place of real wars (back then as today) there was competitive arming for potential wars. This meant a new form of war, in which the parties vied with each other in the number of soldiers, of guns, of inventions, of the available sums of gold, i.e. MATERIEL (all of which increased the tension almost to a breaking point). For thanks to immense technological inventions of the 19th century industrial economy itself became the most powerful weapon of war (demonstrated so effectively by the Northern side in the American Civil War where for the first time a side could many battles and still win the war). In the background of all that - there lurked the rising tide of internal sabotage produced by the Enlightenment Age Rationalism which sprouted democratic idealism, and its "evil twin", Marxian Economic Socialism. The materialistic dogma of Free Trade, which arose from the same circle, including Adam Smith, misunderstood economics as an activity measured by the tangible results instead of as an unquantifiable exercise in personal qualities and efficient energy from which certain goals are spun-off. This ensured continuing internal erosion in the spiritual home of Bolshevism - New England/Western Europe (which makes it all the more comical and ironic when one hears about how the West opposed Russia, that bastion of crude capitalism whose essence never changes with the facade, over its alleged domestic "Communism").
The Concert of Powers (a European set of state-relations designed to keep revolutions at bay and wars between states from overreaching), which is a kind of role that would serve NATO better today, was in deep decay by the year 1900 (unbeknownst to most contemporaries), for, in the outer reaches, Japan began a massive, truly Asiatic style national aggrandizement, a development started by Matsushita in 1869 designed to rapidly industrialize Japan into a power of the European type complete with army and navy, mobile tactics and armament-industry (economic backbone for military power); and the USA drew the logical conclusion from its Civil War in which the settler and planter element succumbed to the coal, industry, bank and stock exchange and the almighty DOLLAR commenced to play a significant part in the world. From then on it was a matter of materiel and who has more of it that determined the winners of the coming world wars.
A Message From "The Messenger of Yore" (History's Analogy)
The situation of the world shaped by the Western Civilization at its culminating point in time (1870-1914) resembles TO THIS DAY (and for some time still) quite clearly that of our nearest historic example the "Orbis Terrarum" (as it was called by the Classicals) of the Classical (improperly designated as 'Graeco-Roman') Civilization.
In those days (2000 to 2200 years ago) the old Greek city states, including Rome and Carthage, lay at the center and all around them the "circle of regions," which furnished the armies and the money for their decisions. Macedonia, Syria and Egypt rose to the status of a materiel-source from the heritage of Alexander the Great; Africa and Spain from that of the Punic Wars (i.e. from Carthage); in addition, Rome had conquered North and South Italy, and Caesar added to these Gaul. The struggle as to who should control the coming IMPERIUM or unipolar realm (the same issue as the one over which our Western world wars were fought) was fought, from Hannibal and Scipio down to Antony and Cleopatra, on MATERIEL supplied by the great conquered border areas.
Circa 1900, a great power of the West-European/American Civilization was a State which kept some hundreds of thousands of men under arms on European soil and possessed gold and materials enough to be able, when needed, to multiply them tenfold in a calculable time; and most importantly behind these it had control over extensive border areas in other continents, which with their naval bases, colonial troops, and population of raw-material producers (as well as production-absorbers i.e. MARKETS) formed the basis for the wealth and consequently THE MILITARY STRIKING-FORCE OF THE HOMELAND!
Empires Old and New in Collision: World War One
This was the actual form of England's empire, French West Africa, Russian Asia (which was that bulwark of materiel that overwhelmed Nazi Germany) and a vast America of the Monroe Doctrine (which, not satisfied with its own spacious hinterland with Latin America as its backyard, also scavenged parts of the defunct European empires like Spain's). Germany's fate in the coming struggle was sealed by the fact that Bismarck's impetus for a colonization policy was resisted by the government ministers and parties whose narrow outlook stunted German world-ambitions. The German colonization of Africa thus became a case of too little too late' and so Germany found itself at the center of the storm of both world wars without the essential material means of sustenance in its bid for a world power status. (Had Germany even just had a great colonial empire in central Africa alone it would have been enough in wartime to prevent a complete sea-blockade of Germany). Germany's enemies won the war precisely because they had a completely developed large backup power supply network organized in the colonial/border regions of the Western nations (which is how Macedon or Rome or Carthage achieved their supremacies).
However, the very fact that all the candidate countries in a bid for world-rule were vying to divide up the remaining areas of the world had as a result the gravest friction between Russia and England in Persia, and in the Gulf of Chi-li China, between England and France at Fashoda, between England and Germany in Morocco (the 1908 crisis) and between all the powers in China. Japan understood all too well this trend of the age and committed herself with singular determination of the fanatical Asiatic kind to the acquisition of as many border areas' of the world as possible to secure the materiel for its own great world power status it was building right up into 1942.
At each crisis-point the world war threatened to break out with a strange variety in the distribution of warring parties until at last it broke out in a meaningless and jejune form in 1914 as a bloody siege of Germany using the combined resources of the whole world controlled by its enemies. It is of course obvious why nobody could truly win World War One (or even WWII) for no serious issue, no great distant problem lurking in the shadow of the crisis and at the root of it, could have been solved by the war and the victory of any side because the unnatural alliances formed for the sake of it either externally, as between natural enemies like England and Russia, Japan and America (witness the infamous "Plan of San Diego" under which the Mexican and the Japanese were to unite in a planned invasion of the USA) or internally, as between Labor and Capital, White and Black, nationalist and (internationalist) Jew, were therefore all foredoomed to failure and further crises. The rapid formation of the Cold War following WWII was an example stemming from this fact a symptom of a deeper disease in inter-national as well as intra-national relations. The Other Side of A World At War: Whither Democracy?
But, the World Wars allowed another kind of war the one that was there all along just subdued and lurking in shadows prior to the Great War (WWI) but all the more brazenly ambitious and open about itself AFTERWARD the war against the State (and strict society) waged by the Western Labor's Proletariat (the manual work class) which sought the destruction of Germany (given its superior economic growth and planning) then of Russia (which, under the Czars, offered a promise of rapid future economic growth) and finally of all the Western states of anyone, in fact, who stood for competitiveness in the workplace. England was paralyzed by a series of massive strikes in the 1920's, America in the 1930's, Germany was run into the ground by the Weimar Labour leaders and everywhere inflation, debt was burgeoning and threatening to expropriate the bourgeois and aristocratic wealth, the result of a proud series of achievers.
A paradox developed in addition to demanding constant pampering from the rest of society, the White worker was becoming a man of luxury and short work day (so keen was he to live under middle-class conditions he envied) while in the big world out there, the non-White (Colored') was becoming a slave of the workplace working even more and for less (and, at times, by his own wish for in some places it was realized that this would be one way in which the West could be overtaken and the pompous White Western man overthrown).
The Western governments were either unable to stop the dictatorship of the White proletariat or were in its hands meanwhile the world economic crisis was in full swing and the age of radical demagogues promising national salvation through emergency measures was at hand.and another damaging discharge of materiel (living and non-living) that solves nothing was at hand (WWII).
The cry for "FREEDOM!" that is still being echoed around the Media-waves of the West (especially in America which never tires of catchphrases), just like the cry for uninspiring constitutional rights and liberties, is a function of the plea for the speculative capitalists' right to hoard wealth through subsidies, even to throttle down industrial production (achieved efficiently by the wholesalers who prefer the non-White labor) to exploit the general stagnation. The essence of the wrangling struggles in Washington is the scavenger fight for subsidies by PACs/special interest groups. The rights of losers do not fare at all unless they get subsidies.
The welfare system was another subsidy - introduce to placate the apparent losers of the democratic system. The continuing erosion of authority under the pressure of a maturing Democracy - leads inevitably to its violent end - possibly in another world war. Those elites in seeming control of democracies today (who are themselves a very far cry from the stable [and genuine] aristocracies that managed, and kept in check, the 19th century Democracy) are incapable of managing the inevitable destiny that is relentlessly pressing-on by the increasingly unintelligent and incompetent direction of public affairs in over-ripened democracies - where the vulgar view from below pretends to rule - which it can't - because to truly rule one has to be predestined to rule by virtue of an ingrained World-outlook that is noble - and thus - soaring from above (a view of life from an eagle's perspective - and not from a frog's).
As a corollary to that - the purpose of political discussion in America (in the West), as in any good advertising copy, is not to stimulate critical thought but to create a desired state of mind or emotions, desired attitudes, habits, choices, decisions and actions. The maturity of Democracy also foreshadows its end. So it has been the case with every form of Democracy in History (the essence of a democracy has never been "one man-one vote" the way the intellectually primitive American leadership class teaches).
Rome's political genius, G.I. Caesar, understood something his rivals did not (except for Brutus and Cassius) - that on a soil of an over-ripened democracy constitutional rights mean everything with money and nothing without it.
The Western world is drawing to a close - the only question is - will it go down in shame or will it yet stand on guard by its grand historical duty (like that long-forgotten Roman sentry in Pompeii who was never relieved of his post in the tumult of tragic events) - until the end ?
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