Tag: decline and fall

Lee Kuan Yew Warned You

A US Congresswoman who purports to represent Minnesota explains that she does not represent Minnesotans or even her fellow US citizens, but rather Somalians first, Muslims second.

We are an organized society, brothers and sisters, people of the same blood. People who know they are Somalians first, Muslims second, who protect one another come to each other’s aid and to the aid of other Muslims too. Couple of days ago, we heard some people who call themselves Somalis or claim to be Somalis have signed an MoU [Memorandum of Agreement] with Ethiopia on access to the sea.

Many Somalians have personally called me to encourage me to speak to the U.S. government and help Somalia. They wanted to know what the U.S. government could do for Somalia to ensure the MoU never turns into a full bilateral agreement. My answer to Somalians was that the U.S. government will only do what Somalians in the U.S. tell them to do. They will do what we want and nothing else. They must follow our orders and that is how we will safeguard the interest of Somalia. We Somalians must have that confidence in ourselves that we call for the shots in the U.S.

We live in the U.S., pay taxes in the U.S., and have a real voice. The U.S. is a country where one of your daughters is in Congress to represent your interests.

For as long as I am in the U.S. Congress, Somalia will never be in danger, its waters will not be stolen by Ethiopia or others. The U.S. would not dare to support anyone against Somalia to steal our land or oceans. Sleep in comfort, knowing I am here to protect the interests of Somalia from inside the U.S. system. The woman you sent to Congress is working day and night to protect your interests. She knows your plight and that of Somalia. I am as concerned about Somalia as you guys are. Together we will protect the interests of Somalia.

And it’s not just the Somalis (US Paper edition) that put their own people first. The same is true of every single wave of hyphenated-American immigrants. The same is true of every single wave of human migration everywhere throughout the course of history, all of whom have histories and beliefs and objectives and traditions that are distinctly different than the American posterity whose rights the Constitution was written to protect.

The only reason the USA is on the verge of war with Iran, is funding a losing proxy war with Russia, and is even banning college protests is because of Jewish immigrants who live in the US, pay taxes in the US, and have a real voice. They have a voice and that’s what they’re choosing to do with it, the American national interest be damned. This is tragic, but should never have been a surprise to anyone; it certainly would not have surprised the greatest political mind of the 20th Century, Lee Kuan Yew.

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Retreat From Syria

The US military is showing definite signs of imperial overstretch. Its proxies are overwhelmed in Ukraine, the IDF appears to be bogged down in Gaza, the Navy can’t keep the Red Sea clear for cargo transports, and Iran’s proxies have hit US military bases 118 times without much in the way of resistance.

Since Hamas’s brutal attack against Israel on Oct. 7 and the resulting Israeli military campaign in the Gaza Strip, tensions and hostilities across the Middle East have reached fever pitch. And with such a complex regional crisis playing out, it should not come as a surprise that the Biden administration is reconsidering its military priorities in the region.

It should be cause for significant concern, however, that this could involve a full withdrawal of U.S. troops from Syria. While no definitive decision has been made to leave, four sources within the Defense and State departments said the White House is no longer invested in sustaining a mission that it perceives as unnecessary. Active internal discussions are now underway to determine how and when a withdrawal may take place.

The US should withdraw from Syria. It should withdraw from the entire Middle East, and Europe too. But it’s one thing to be vaguely aware that one might have limitations, it’s another thing entirely to be smart enough to actually respect them and reduce one’s imperial ambitions.

Simplicius offers a succinct explanation: My take is this: in short, the US is being run out of town by Iran. Their bluff was called and US knows their puny strikes can do nothing to truly degrade Iran’s highly decentralized hybrid warfare systems and groups. Iran has risen to become a hegemon verging on a Great Power of the region. The US has a few obsolete fleets which cannot keep up blow for blow with Iran in exchanged rounds of ammo. Iran can saturate them forever with drones and cheap rockets which the US is spending millions per every fired shot to intercept.

He’s not wrong. The problem is that there are two powerful forces resisting the acknowledgement of the inevitable: American exceptionalism and the will of the foreign ruling elite. It will probably be necessary for the former to be shattered before it is possible for the latter to be successfully resisted.

This may explain why the IDF has withdrawn a number of brigades from Gaza even as its anti-Iranian rhetoric has recently heated up. It should be obvious to the Israeli strategists that time is not on their side, and that no matter what the actual odds might be, their best chance for defeating Iran is right now, while the US military is still present in the region.

The point of no return has been reached for the Imperial USA. And the choice is between WWIII and probable defeat or a face-saving acceptance of imperial decline which will fool absolutely no one.

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An Elegy for SI

Peter King, the longtime Sports Illustrated football writer, pens a tribute to the once-beloved magazine:

Nothing describes how the sports media business has changed better than the precipitous decline of Sports Illustrated. More than a bit of melancholy washed over me Friday, processing the news of the battered place. Because even if SI survives 2024, it will do so as a skeleton of what it was.

I have only good memories of my 29 years with the franchise. In the midst of the sadness and bitterness over SI’s demise, I want to share a few of the reasons why I will always consider myself the luckiest man on the face of the earth because I got to work for the greatest sports journalism franchise for the guts of my career.

I remember the phone call—absolutely, totally out of the blue—from managing editor Mark Mulvoy in spring 1989. I was 31, covering the Giants for Newsday. Mulvoy asked if I was interested in interviewing for a job at the magazine. It’s still one of those things to this day that I can’t quite believe happened. I went into the mag’s Rockefeller Center offices, across from Radio City, and Mulvoy got to the point pretty fast. He wanted me to write the “Inside the NFL” column and, in fact, there wasn’t much of an interview. He asked me if I wanted the job.

Outer voice: “That’s fantastic. I’ll talk to my wife today and get back to you tomorrow. That okay?”

Inner voice: Are you bleeping kidding me? WHERE DO I SIGN BEFORE YOU CHANGE YOUR MIND?

Much excitement when I got home. My wife, Ann, asked me: “What will they pay you?” I told her I had no idea. I never asked.

FMAI Divisional, Peter King, 22 January 2024

SI was the victim of changing technology as much as it was of its own convergence and corporate financialization. But it remains the great historical record of American sports, covering the period from 1954 to 2024, which in those 70 years included Peak America. It was also evidence of how excellence leads to success, as it brought together talented and truly-dedicated writers with first-rate photographers.

Unfortunately, it also serves as a cautionary example of what lies ahead for America.

Speaking of favorite Sports Illustrated covers, this one from November 10, 1975 was definitely mine.

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The Retardery of Clown World

No wonder all the nations of the world are contemptuously rejecting the post-Western Enlightenment ideals such as “democracy” and “the rule of law”. Even the Swedes are finally beginning to realize that their post-Christian humanitarian superpower society is not merely dysfunctional, but dyscivilizational. At this point, anything looks better than rule by Clown World’s retardery:

In a shocking twist, five police officers are being forced to pay a fine to a Syrian migrant who was convicted for severely injuring one of them during riots related to a Quran burning during Easter of 2022. The officers will have to pay out a total of 12,650 Swedish crowns (€1,122) from their own pockets to the 45-year-old convicted Syrian who has been sentenced to two years and seven months for his role in the riots.

The officers have reacted with near disbelief over the outcome of the case.

“It feels like something has gone terribly wrong in the legal system here. We are there and doing our job, yet individual police officers must be forced to pay out of their own pockets to people who really wanted us dead,” says Aleksandar Jeremic, who is a group leader in a civil suit involving the Botkyrka local police area and is now one of the five police officers ordered to pay court costs to the foreign national, according to Danish newspaper Dagens Nyheter.

The case stems from the Quran riots, which began in Örebro’s city park over Easter weekend in 2022. They were preceded by far-right activist Rasmus Paluden burning a Quran in Sweden, leading to the violent riots that lasted several days.

However, the judge in the case is defending the decision to fine the police officers, saying he is sticking to the letter of the law.

“I understand if it appears offensive from the police’s point of view. But there is no mistake that has been made, the rules are as they are. The issue of damages was separated into a civil case, and the police withdrew their claims, so they are considered the losing party and must pay,” said Johan Nordgren, councilor at Örebro district court and the judge who made the decision.

Something has gone terribly wrong. Something is terribly wrong. What we’re seeing everywhere across the West from America to New Zealand isn’t Christendom. It isn’t Western civilization. |
It isn’t even civilization. This is pure Clown World chaos, the inevitable result of rule by satanic globalists who are religiously opposed to order, who reject the Good, the Beautiful, and the True.

The rivers of blood that are going to flow around the world, as predicted by St. Enoch in 1968, are not the fault of the nationalist leaders upon whom the burden of restoring civilization will fall, anymore than the bloodshed in Ukraine is the fault of Vladimir Putin, who spent eight years seeking a non-violent means of freeing the Russian people in the Donbass from the madness of the Clown World regime in Kiev.

The blame for WWIII falls squarely upon the clowns of Clown World, the neoliberals of the neoliberal world order, who falsely claimed that nations were an evil historical anachronism rather than the integral building block of civilization.

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Disintegration

One of the reasons I selected Martyanov’s book on military supremacy for the Library series is that he’s considerably more perceptive than the average geopolitical observer. I’ve been reading his book on the ongoing breakup of the United States, and it was intriguing to see that he’s one of the few observers who understands that the USA is not, and has never been, a genuine nation.

Some quotes from his book Disintegration:

  • America’s collapse has been in the progress for some time now, and has been predicted by a number of observers—but in actuality the utter, historically unprecedented degeneration of America’s so-called elites, which have exhibited a level of malfeasance, incompetence, cowardice and betrayal of their own people on such a scale that it beggars belief. 
  • For the United States to survive as a unified country, a completely new narrative, grounded in reality, is required and the current American policy elites, be they purportedly left radicals and those forces which support them or the nominally conservative, no less grossly indoctrinated forces on the right, are utterly incapable of formulating the real American national interests, or of creating a new narrative, because the United States is in the process of the fragmentation of what used to be an American proto-nation, but ultimately never fully turned into the real thing. Political creeds, or abstract, often utterly wrong ideas are simply not enough to inspire and, most importantly, to sustain the growth of a nation. The modern American elites and their European followers have proved that beyond a shadow of a doubt.
  • Today neither France nor the United States are nations in a full meaning of this word, with France descending into the chaos of globalist multicultural orthodoxy, while the United States is completely subverted by ethno-religious and corporate interests.
  • Today, the United States is not a nation, certainly not in the traditional sense of having a dominant ethnic nationality, while the foundational American meme and myth of a “Melting Pot” has turned out to be exactly that—a myth. America’s many ethnicities have not been assimilated to form a single nation, but rather are more aptly regarded as a salad bowl comprised of descendants of the majority “white” European settlers and the “colored” (Native American, African American, and Latin and Asian immigrant) minorities, all maintaining to varying degrees their original cultural identities. But even the salad bowl analogy is too weak to reflect the multicultural disaster the United States has become.

Martyanov clearly sees what generations of Americans, blinded by relentless civnattery and immigrant propaganda, and generations of immigrants, averting their eyes from the historical facts that make them feel uncomfortable or left out, cannot. It is this ability to be ruthlessly objective about the world as it is, rather than the world we are told it is, or the world we wish it would be, that makes his insights and observations valuable.

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The Decline is Observable

It’s rapidly becoming readily apparent to everyone, not just me, Wang Hunin, Simplicius, and Andrei Martyanov, that the decline of the imperial United States is both a) inevitable and b) observable.

The best indicator of real GDP per capita is energy usage per capita, because everything about a comfortable modern lifestyle takes a lot of energy, energy comes into everything people do and consume. This was rising exponentially to 1972, when the rise suddenly halted. It then started fall, slowly. And suddenly it has now started to fall rather more quickly and dramatically. It looks like three trend regimes: Exponential growth starting in the seventeenth century, then stagnation and slow decline starting in 1972, and now it looks like the beginning of dramatic collapse, looks like the beginning of a sharp break in the trend of slow and gentle decline.

This reflects a regime ever more hostile to the men who made it great, to the faith that made it great, the culture that made it great, and race that made it great.

Notice that no matter what metric is used, 1972-1973 keeps appearing as the high water mark for the USA. That’s not an accident. 1972 was, from an economic, industrial, and demographic perspective, the moment of Peak America.

Everything since then has been nothing but decline disguised by the collapse of the Soviet Union.

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The Dying Colossus

Asleep, the great titan of bygone day,
His strength once feared in even far-off lands,
And order imposed at his stern commands.
Now bald and palsied, and his beard gone gray,
He lies in the filth of his own decay.
Unconscious, though somehow he understands
That power has passed from his aged hands,
And all his best-laid plans have gone agley.

“Why shall I not rule forever!” he dreams
Of triumphs past. “Give me more migrants, more wars,
“More broken nations enslaved by my schemes,
Their sons my servants, their daughters my whores,
History’s End in a chorus of screams!”
Slumbering, he smiles. Decrepit, he snores.

Just for kicks, I had BardAI give it a try. It’s a bit on the pedestrian side and lacks some of the darkness of my effort, but it’s better than I expected.

With crumbling form and heavy, weary tread,
I stand, a colossus, on this stormy shore,
Once ruler of the world, my power spread,
My name a beacon in dominion’s core.
The seas once trembled at my mighty hand,
My armies marched in conquest, far and wide,
The world was mine to mold, to break, to brand,
With iron fist and vision undenied.

But time has worn my glory to the dust,
My reign has crumbled, like a fading dream,
The world has turned its back, my power crushed,
My name a whisper in the realm of gloom.
In dreams I see the world I once controlled,
A vision of my power, long since cold.

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Remigration in Germany

The AfD party is rapidly rising in Germany, in part due to its promise to remigrate millions of people who have invaded and degraded Germany.

Germany’s left-liberal establishment media has been promoting a “secret’ deportation plan formulated by the Alternative for Germany (AfD); however, AfD politician René Springer says the plan is no secret and vowed to deport millions should the AfD come to power.

“We will return foreigners to their homeland. By the millions. This is not a secret plan. This is a promise. For more security. For more justice. To preserve our identity. For Germany.”

Springer’s message on deportation comes at a time when the AfD just hit a record high of 24 percent in a new national poll from YouGov, a poll result once thought unthinkable by most just a year ago.

AfD politician vows mass deportations as his party reaches record polling high, REMIX, 11 January 2024

There are precisely four options for Germany and every Western country, including the United States:

  1. Remigrate the invaders and return them safely to their native lands.
  2. Fight a war with the invaders, culminating in a historical Immicaust.
  3. Decline into violent post-civilized, post-European anarchy.
  4. Be invaded and occupied by the Russian Army.

The option that the AfD is proposing is by far the most civilized and humane option. It’s also one of the two options that will permit Germany to remain both a) German and b) sovereign. It is therefore an absolute moral imperative.

The Boomers and their Enlightenment delusions are finished. There is no longer any need to avoid openly discussing the necessity of what is obviously necessary if the various nations of the West are to survive. After all, what is the alternative? To continue to sink deeper into the mire of denationalization and decivilization?

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There is No Catching Up

Andrei Martyanov explains why it’s not just the loss of US industrial capacity that has hamstrung its once-superlative military infrastructure and rendered the US military incapable of defeating Russia, China, or quite possibly, even Yemen.

In theory the US may build, in the next 10+ years, some facilities to increase production of 155-mm shells or drones. But it will not be able to match industrial capacity of Russia in this respect, even with theoretical addition of future, if any, European capacity. The issue here is not just quantity–the target impossible to reach due to utter destruction of US manufacturing base and an extremely complex supply chains for military production. This all is just the tip of the iceberg. The main body of the iceberg is a complete catastrophe that the US military doctrine, and, as a result, procurement development is.
I spoke about it for years–some gaps, such as in air defense or missilery the US will not be able to close, because as I type this, this gap continues to grow. It is measured not in years but in generations. This is, as an example, the result of misguided and illiterate approach to air defense based on… air power. You have to literally undo the whole thing, and this requires not just building some facilities, but a complete rethinking of America’s defense or, rather, “offense” philosophy which doesn’t work. It never did. This is impossible in the present state of the American geopolitical thought without rethinking the United States as it perceived itself in the last hundred years. The US has no courage, intellect and will to do so because it leads to a destruction of America’s mythology.

So, the US is stuck. So, it is good that John Mearsheimer understands parts of it, but he doesn’t understand the heart of the matter. After the US strategically and operationally “planned” VSU’s “counteroffensive”, the question of the competence of the US military establishment arose and was answered–it is incompetent! It will take a generation or two to even teach those who are currently in the plebe years in US service academies to think properly and within the framework of America’s REAL military and industrial capability. This REAL capability has nothing in common with the US halcyon years of WW II and after and it is not coming back. Russia will not allow the US to unleash the war in Europe while thinking that the US can sit this one out again behind the ocean. Doesn’t work like this anymore, especially with the construction tempo of Russia Navy’s subs such as 3M22 Zircon carriers Yasen-class subs and frigates which already have Zircons deployed. These are technologies the US simply doesn’t have and are nowhere near of getting them. China can rely on them, and much more from Russia in case of the US deciding to commit suicide, the US cannot.

It is grim picture of corruption, financial and, most importantly, intellectual within the US military and foreign policy establishment, and what John Mearsheimer fails to understand–these are not just some pieces of hardware whose utility the US suddenly recognized. Nope, the REAL experience of SMO is way more than technological, it is above all operational and strategic, which made Russia’s General Staff a well-oiled machine which merely uses 404 as a trap and a junkyard for NATO’s military capacity, because Russia fights not Ukraine, she fights NATO.

Having read two of Martyanov’s excellent books on US military and imperial decline, both of which were written and published well before the beginning of the Russian special military operation in Ukraine, it’s clear that he’s identified something that goes well beyond the common level of military analysis in the Western think tanks.

What he’s talking about here is neither the loss of US industry nor the inability of the US to design, build, and procure hypersonic missiles, inexpensive missile platforms, and squad-level drone swarms. It’s not even the demographic changes, and the fact that the USA is now an empire with a foreign elite ruling over a melange of peoples who have no connection to the heritage Americans or even first-wave immigrants who fought its previous wars. What’s he’s talking about is the fundamental failure of the US military strategists to understand the realities of military power and the way that a sea-based naval power accustomed to relatively small expeditionary conflicts well away from home simply doesn’t possess the operational and strategic capability to defeat a massive land-based power that is on a reasonably similar technological level.

Britain couldn’t defeat France. The USA couldn’t defeat Germany. And Athens lost to Sparta in the end.

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Everyone Watched… and Learned

Thomas Friedman was correct about the battle in Ukraine being massively significant with regards to the future direction of the world, but he had it precisely backwards with regards to what the inevitable conclusions of the various third parties watching the conflict would be.

While the battle on the ground that triggered World War Wired is ostensibly over who should control Ukraine, do not be fooled. This has quickly turned into “the big battle” between the two most dominant political systems in the world today: free-market, “rule-of-law democracy versus authoritarian kleptocracy,” the Swedish expert on the Russian economy Anders Aslund remarked to me.

Though this war is far from over, and Vladimir Putin may still find a way to prevail and come out stronger, if he doesn’t, it could be a watershed in the conflict between democratic and undemocratic systems. It is worth recalling that World War II put an end to fascism, and that the Cold War put an end to orthodox communism, eventually even in China. So, what happens on the streets of Kyiv, Mariupol and the Donbas region could influence political systems far beyond Ukraine and far into the future.

Indeed, other autocratic leaders, like China’s, are watching Russia carefully. They see its economy being weakened by Western sanctions, thousands of its young technologists fleeing to escape a government denying them access to the internet and credible news and its inept army seemingly unable to gather, share and funnel accurate information to the top. Those leaders have to be asking themselves: “Holy cow — am I that vulnerable? Am I presiding over a similar house of cards?”

Everyone is watching.

Putin Had No Clue How Many of Us Would Be Watching, THE NEW YORK TIMES, 4 August 2022

Directly counter to the Clown World narrative, it is the self-styled “democratic” systems championed by credentialed neoclowns like Friedman that have been exposed as ineffective and fragile frauds. In fact, in his 2018 book entitled Losing Military Supremacy, Andrei Martyanov described as “the strategic folly of the 21st century” something that has already come to pass.

In what can only be described as the strategic folly of the 21st century—the United States missed a historic opportunity to ally with Russia based on equal and mutually beneficial relations. This opportunity today is gone. Pushing Russia, through condescension, blackmail, humiliation and ignorance, away from itself in the 1990s, the United States committed the cardinal sin of Anglo-Saxon and now neo-conservative geopolitical calculus—they pushed Russia and China together, while simultaneously providing China with all the necessary tools, from investment to access to markets, thus making her the largest economy in the world. Today, the United States faces two nuclear and industrial superpowers, one of which fields a world-class armed forces. If the military-political, as opposed to merely economic, alliance between Russia and China, is ever formalized—this will spell the final doom for the United States as a global power. 

Andrei Martyanov LOSING MILITARY SUPREMACY, 2018

That military-politico-economic alliance has already been formalized in the form of BRICS, and exceeds the scope of which Martyanov expected would be necessary to “spell the final doom of the United States as a global power”. WWIII is already as over as WWII was the moment Japan attacked Pearl Harbor; given the combined demographic and industrial power that BRICS can bring to bear, the eventual outcome is not even remotely in doubt. While there are still a lot of questions of what the post-WWIII, post-Clown World world, post-liberal world will look like, and who will be the foremost power, there can be absolutely no doubt about which side is going to win it. And it’s not going to be NATO, the USA, the liberal world order, or Clown World.

History is a reliable guide in this context. All the geostrategic analysis, however excellent, isn’t even necessary. The oldest society and its decadent empire ruled by foreigners, with its massive amount of debt and an aging currency, never wins. It is always eventually challenged, then superseded, by nations with newer and less-corrupted societal organizations.

Clown World and its liberal Enlightenment philosophy has had a successful, though not particularly long historical run. But its fundamental philosophies have proven themselves to be both false, as well as an insufficient foundation for national, or even societal, survival. Its fate is certain and its collapse has begun, although it obviously hasn’t been completed yet.

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