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Gerald Celente is a trends forecaster who has predicted an awful lot that has come true over the years. He calls the current slide the ‘greatest depression’. By now those who share his predictions have gone from thousands to perhaps millions.
James Kunstler says this will ‘not be your grandmother’s depression’ because the Western World no longer has the socio-economic resilience to handle a protracted period of negative economic growth – it is now a house of cards system with a long way to fall before it finds a solid base. Track back through some of my earlier posts or search with the terms ‘resilience’ or ‘fragility’ to see my take on the state we are all in. And here is a mild taste of what the UK could be in for in the same vein.
Get to know your community, its strengths, its resources, and get building your family’s and your community’s resilience now. For you Brits – see the www.transitiontowns.org
TEACHER seeks pupil. Must have an earnest desire
to save the world. Apply in person.
See why Ishmael is such a universal book at this time in history: Daniel Quinn’s books (Ishmael, The Story of B, My Ishmael, Providence, and Beyond Civilization) are explored at www.ishmael.org
Staring us in the face is an unpalatable and awesome fact, one which encompasses Al Gore’s Inconvenient Truth and a whole lot more besides. To use an apt metaphor civilisation is like a supertanker heading towards the arctic. Sometime in the near and predictable future the inevitable iceberg will loom out of the darkness. The collapse of our civilisation in its current industrial-military-exploitative form is certain. In many ways it is to be welcomed in order to stop the killing and suffering that civilisation consciously inflicts. See Stan Goff’s Civilization War Rant.
The US concentration camps fill me with a sense of foreboding. Why would an influx of Mexican immigrants need rounding up and imprisoning, are they all expected to have rabies or something? What possible civil emergency requires the detention of millions of people behind barbed wire under watchtowers? The key strength that any nation has in times of emergency is the self-organising power of its people, and not the central organising power of governments which only gets in the way. So I struggle to understand why a US government thinks that detention centres for millions of people are a valid part of FEMA’s work. That’s why I find this offical explanation hard to believe.
Terrorism? The potential for locking up millions of suspects, and possibly dissenters too, after the next terrorist attack on the US? This too is difficult to understand. Locking the door after the horse has bolted makes no sense. Nor does internment of mostly innocent people prevent anything, it is a form of collective punishment which creates martyrs and further serves terrorist recruitment. If you eventually let them go a significant number will become bombers in revenge for their treatment, further fuelling terrorism. What do you with all those people whom you do not want, aliens, non-people? Keep them incarcerated for life, or worse? Who will know they are there, will they be disappeared? I shudder to think.
Only dictator-led states round people up these days with no recourse to open courts, not states that are built on foundations of freedom, democracy and free speech. The ominous term ‘rapid development of new programs’ says it all, as if the concentration camps are not already way beyond the pale. History shows that it starts this way, the programs are normal, they are necessary for the good of all: be reasonable, be quiet, do not dissent (no, seriously be a compliant citizen or we’ll lock you up too). The Patriot Act, the Military Commissions Act, the UK’s Civil Contingencies Bill and Anti-Terror legislation are all contributing to what Gramsci called the cultural hegemony. This makes creeping state power over a population difficult to perceive. We won’t notice the reality of the function creep until its too late to take any action, then democracy will be truly gone. Fully effective democracy may already be slipping away.
An emergency can be declared in the US, as the following article points out, with the stroke of a presidential pen rather than by a majority vote in congress. From that point on, no one can challenge what’s happening without a significant risk of being locked up themselves. You think its not possible? The history of the twentieth century rings some very loud warning bells. I won’t be visiting the US again, no thanks. Read more…
The Middle-East situation is slipping from bad to worse, towards the unthinkable. The United States seems pathologically attracted to armageddon, oil or bust.
This attitude is understandable but impossible to comprehend from a human point of view, but then capitalism has no human values. The simple but immoral reason is that the US in its current condition is more than addicted to oil. Its over-powerful status as a world dominating empire is wholly dependent upon oil. Furthermore, its implicit assumption that might is right extends to its own population. They call it freedom but in reality it is freedom and pursuit of happiness for a very few, for the rest it is unhappiness and disease of the soul. The increasing wealth gap between rich and poor in the US is one small piece of evidence that illustrates the situation.
The necessary adjustment to life without oil will require a complete reversal of internal US power relationships: renewable energy cannot be filtered through the hands of a few, it is a form of grass-roots empowerment. The centralised economic system made possible by the oil reserve will be gone. A non-centralised economic system would also be owned directly by the people. It will arise from localised economic and social processes. It cannot be centrally controlled in the information age when we all have access to global knowledge in the same way that it was one-hundred years ago. Post-oil means empowerment of the masses. The industrial and social elites who control the US will resist that empowerment so long as it doesn’t risk their lives, even if it means having to kill millions of people in the Middle-East. This explains why the current US administration is prepared to take extreme action for the oil.
A nuclear attack on Iran and the potential for events that will dwarf any holocaust in human history is now a strong possibility. The US is emboldened by its recent impunity and will use tactical nuclear weapons to achieve its aims. Iran will either surrender its power and hence control over the oil or the US will unleash apocalypse. A powerful state like Iran is unlikely to capitulated to save its own people. The future for the people of the Middle-East is either bleak or black. Read more…
By failure I mean collapse, and by system I mean Western industrialised society for which the future is predicated on technological solutions and capitalism, and which is now on the globalisation warpath. All systems fail eventually. The concept of linear growth towards some future point at which an equilibrium is reached is a fallacy. Systems come and systems go again. As most of us already know but few are prepared to discuss – the beginning of the end is already occurring for the current dominant civilisation. War, famine, and the deaths of billions are on the cards if we do not reduce our addiction to energy and resource consumption. Diamond is only one of many thinkers and writers who are attempting to alert us but they are fully aware that those who have the power to change the course of Western civilisation are ignorant, blind, or plain stupid. That’s civilisations; self-congratulatory concerning the marvels of technology and society and yet they plunge headlong over the cliff anyway.
One potential solution is an abrupt change in the way people in Western society live. Not in five or ten years but this year. This could involve switching every remaining spare resource (from making consumer goods and other unnecessary products and services) to building wave, wind and solar energy systems and making every essential service highly energy efficient. Alongside this a return to labour intensive agricultural systems is also the only option. Show me a politician who has the guts to publicly accept that such a solution is imperative. Funnily enough we have the political will to do this in wartime, but faced with the prospect of the coming horrors it won’t happen despite the potential for world wars on an unprecedented scale. It won’t happen because the powerful believe they will benefit from the social and environmental collapse as well as from the warfare – from which they have historically always come out richer.
When I said that civilisations are stupid I was not referring to those at the helm. They and their masters know only too well what is going to happen. George Bush is intent on pursuing the War on Terror to the point of full information war (claiming explicitly that the US population needs controlling through the media and through the way it uses the internet). This is a clue as to how those in power see the world. Controlling the way the US communicates with itself is the way in which the powerful will profit from the coming upheavals. The US administration has also built 600 new prison camps in order to house around 12 million people. They claim that this is to prepare for an invasion of Mexican migrants but their mere existence is a worrying fact. The camps (usually called concentration camps but termed ‘Civilian Inmate Labour Program’ camps) would also be equally useful for a totalitarian state to control its own population. Something sinister is afoot either way – a Western government is preparing to house 12 million immigrants in forced labour conditions rather than turn them back (the US has a powerful army with which to do so). That the US administration is considering putting anyone in labour camps is worrying, but it is to be expected. The US government has known for a long time that their empire is on the road to collapse and the powerful oligarchy that supports US policies is doing what it can to ensure that they will retain power during and after the turmoil.
I am their enemy, and so are you if you are reading and recognising potential truth in this page and the thousands of others on similar themes. Bin Laden is merely a distraction from the real game – in the information war to come you and I are the real enemy as the US and other governments try to suppress knowledge of environmental and social collapse so that the powerful can retain what they have amassed. The US government has plans to take over the internet in order to control its own people. Messages like this post will ensure that I am on their wanted list, after they have wiped the data away. If you believe that 9/11 was an inside job, then consider the possibility that the continuing propaganda over the threat of terrorism is yet another a gambit aimed at gaining greater control over the US people and its friends around the world. The next terrorist attack (or false flag attack if they need it) will be used to show that total information control is essential in the ‘War on Terr’. The hawks are already preparing the ground for these tactics with their information gathering processes and with explicit demands that the internet be controlled in order to silence ‘those who tell lies against us in the war on terror’. The internet is the great leveller and fount of truth. A forum in which the truth can be found can only be harmful to those who do not want the truth to be known.
Conspiracy theory? Other right-wing governments have done far worse in the 20th century when they had the power to get away with it. Bush calls it the War on Terror, and now the Long War, but it is really to be a complete world war between the 20 percent with the greatest power (80 percent of it) and the 80 percent with the least power (20 percent of it); a race to grab what’s left of the world’s resources for the few at the expense of the majority. That’s what the political right stands for: power and self and if you are weak and die then that’s tough. It is a game to be played out under the cover of social and environmental collapse. But I really do hope I am wrong.
