Reaping the whirlwind at the end of history

View 724 Monday, May 14, 2012

Reaping the Whirlwind

As you sow, so shall you reap. They sow the wind, and they reap the whirlwind. I’ve been saying this for years, and now it’s happening. It can be a depressing experience, particularly if you live in California, where the coming train wreck is absolutely predictable, nearly everyone sees it coming, and no one seems able to stop it – indeed, the frantic activity by the governor and legislature is to make it worse. Now the President is sending advocates to induce California to spend even more money on a rail system that everyone knows cannot be completed because there just isn’t the money.

California has the highest paid teachers in the country but hardly the best or even adequate schools; so the proposal is to continue giving them more money. What is called ‘drastic cuts’ is in fact lowering the projected raises; it’s still spending more money than was done last year. Everyone knows this; but that’s called austerity.

And it goes on. We have high income taxes and high sales taxes. The streets are not properly paved, much of the water system is ancient, and within a few years the pension costs will be larger than the income even with new taxes. It can’t go on and we all know it; but on it goes. We continue to sow the wind even as we reap the whirlwind.

And it’s discouraging.

I am sure I’ll be over this fit of depression shortly. At some point everyone must be aware that it can’t go on. What happens after that? Will we then burn down the cities? I’ve been heavily under the weather lately. I think I am recovering. thanks to all those who have asked.

One subscriber writes:

This is horrible; I no longer trust cops.  Maybe good ones exist; I don’t care.  It’s not worth looking for them.  These creep wear black uniforms, lie, and are always on the news hurting people.  You’re at more risk for police brutality than you are a terrorist attack.  I’m teaching every kid I know that enough police are sadistic creeps that you should not trust any of them, ever.  It’s just not worth it.

http://www.infowars.com/police-hunt-man-for-sport/

The video shows a particularly disgusting incident in Fullerton, California, about fifty miles east of here, where the Fullerton police for reasons still unclear set out to terrorize a homeless schizophrenic and ended by beating him to death. It is difficult to discern a motive here. Feeding frenzy is more likely than sport. I suspect that most of the Fullerton police involved in this incident would be horrified at the notion that they hunted down and killed this man for sport. Two of them have been charged, one with second degree murder, and the wheels of justice grind on, slowly, because even with the evidence from the video (and the audio is in some ways even more disturbing) have been unable to overcome the general faith of the community in the police.

It used to be a stock movie situation: a town so corrupt that it must hire mercenaries to come in and clean it up. The townsfolk, unable to govern themselves, hire a hard man to come in and impose order. They hope to be able to control the forces they have unleashed, and in the US Western version they can, because the hero turns out not to be interested in wielding the power he has been given. In the real world the townsfolk find they have sown the wind.

Self government requires that some of the good guys do some of the governing. Democracies fall when the middle class no longer rules, but hires others to rule for it. The result is a Nomenklatura, what Djilas called “the New Class.” And over time the Iron Law prevails.

Of course blackguarding the police is not usually a way to recover control of one’s destiny. In this world – at least in the world around here – there are tigers. Today’s news tells us of headless bodies distributed at random in Mexico, and areas of Arizona which have in essence been abandoned by the forces of law and order.

Having for a short time been involved in the politics of controlling the police by allocating police resources, I can tell you that the difficulties are immense, particularly in today’s climate of political correctness. We no longer want self government. We now want politically correct police willing to endure the contempt of those they protect, but still willing to stay on the job. It is another way to sow the wind.

In my judgment, victory in Afghanistan means that it will no longer be a safe haven for the enemies of the United States; it will not be a place of refuge in which terrorists may plot and from which they may operate and launch attacks. That, surely, will be enough.

That is likely to be achievable. It does not require the submission of the provinces of Afghanistan to Kabul. It does not require that the US build up a large Afghan national army capable of suppressing the tribesmen. It does require that the tribesmen be able to call for, if not effective assistance against attack from the Taliban, then at the very least swift and more importantly certain vengeance. Attack our friends and Delta Force will find you and kill you. Depend upon it.

I don’t know if that is achievable in practical terms, but it doesn’t seem impossible.

http://www.jerrypournelle.com/view/2010/Q2/view629.html

I said this several years ago, and again in 2010. At the time it seemed obvious. Now, it seems less certain. We set out to compel the submission of the provinces to the Mayor of Kabul, presumably with the end in view of having Kabul submit to us and become a puppet state with an American resident issuing instructions to an Afghan caudillo. That was never going to work. From Alexander the Great on conquerors have vainly sought to unite Afghanistan, only to find that the only unity that could be imposed was a united opposition to the invader who sought to make a puppet of the Khan in Kabul. Why we thought it would be different when we tried it is a bit hard to discern – I have read the enthusiasts without finding their arguments worth repeating. We continue to sow the wind in Afghanistan and periodically we reap a whirlwind.

And having said all that, it is not too late. The United States has a long history of recovering from its soft periods. We won the Cold War, the Seventy Years War that threatened to turn the entire Earth into a Hydraulic society. As Wittfogel noted in his Oriental Despotism, societies organized around the state ownership of everything can be eternal. He reached this conclusion from Marxist theory: there is no further development. As Trotsky put it, when the state owns all the means of production, opposition to the state means starvation. Such cultures fall, sometimes to the merest push – but it is a push, from outside. They rarely fall to internal opposition. The Nomenklatura in the USSR were never seriously challenged until the system collapsed. Prague Spring happened. The Hungarian uprising died stillborn. It took the United States to bring down the USSR, and it did so without the wild death throes we all feared.

In the euphoria following the end of the Cold War some neo-conservatives thought that we had reached the end of history – that liberal democracy would sweep the world, and there would be no more great developments. That nonsense – unlike Marxism this was quite literally nonsense – did not survive long. History has not ended.

There are still free people, and it is still true that free people can do anything they have a will to do.