Monday 1st of July 2024
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going fascist by choice or by neglect.....

2024 is going to be an inflection point for humanity. But it is also going to be a major test not just of liberal democracy as a political system, but for human civilisation as a whole.

Over 80 countries – more than half the world's population – are holding elections this year that could be pivotal for the future of democracy.

Confronting Fascism in the Final Stage of the Life-Cycle of Industrial Civilisation    BY Nafeez M Ahmed

 

No clearer evidence of the hardening of polarised political lines can be found than in the United States, the world’s most powerful democracy. Here the electorate faces a choice between an incumbent president whose government continues to arm a far-right Israeli government engaged in a genocidal war, and the first criminally-convicted former US president whose far-right Republican backers envisage ruling America as a racist and sexist autocracy.

Project 2025, the comprehensive blueprint for Donald Trump’s first days in office prepared by former senior Trump administration officials at the Heritage Foundation, represents a lurch to the extreme-right and the risk of a new form of American theocratic fascism. Not only does it aim to reshape the American government and military into an unchallengeable arm of Trump, eliminating democratic checks and balances; it threatens ethnic, religious, sexual and gender minorities; and squarely aspires to turbocharge fossil fuel production while dismantling environmental protections.

Across the pond, the agenda of disparate far-right political parties has coalesced around a similar agenda. Nigel Farage’s Reform UK illustrates the continued radicalisation of the right. A politician with a long history of cavorting with far-right and neo-Nazi figures for political gain, Farage has specialised in whipping up bigotry toward migrants and Muslims to pursue an agenda of expanding fossil fuels and removing rules for corporate finance in the name of fortress Britain.

The twin advances of the Trump and Farage campaigns are no coincidence. Farage is a longtime friend of Trump’s former chief strategist Steve Bannon, who had played an instrumental role in orchestrating Trump’s ascension into the White House. As I explain in my forthcoming book Alt Reich, from inception, Bannon envisaged his plot to tear down the American state as part of a trans-national movement that would cut across the UK and Europe.

Bannon played a key role in helping to channel funding from the billionaires Robert and Rebekah Mercer to organisations in the UK that would foster both Boris Johnson and Nigel Farage as mouthpieces for a new transatlantic Trumpocracy. This new populist movement fantasises about the nationalist break-up of Europe, the advancement of Russia and the white supremacist militarisation of the American homeland.

Yet behind the accelerating far-right radicalisation lies not just a confluence of different political actors, but a fundamental systemic reordering that has created a space for these actors to align around. However, the very same systemic reordering is creating new spaces by which to challenge these actors.

Planetary phase shift

To understand this moment, we need to take a step back in the context of what I’ve called the ‘global phase shift’, but perhaps should more accurately be characterised as a planetary phase shift.

A ‘phase-transition’ occurs when a system undergoes a fundamental change of state, due to a “sharp transition” in the degree of organisation within the system as a result of changing external conditions or pressures. The ‘phase’ of a system essentially describes its level and type of organisation. Which is why a ‘phase-transition’ entails a deep restructuring of order across that system.

As I showed in my last post, there is abundant empirical evidence that we are experiencing phase-transitions across almost all the core systems that define human civilisation and its relationship to the entire planet.

Like all living and ecological systems, human societies and civilisations evolve through a life-cycle that can be broadly understood as going through four key stages derived from the pioneering work of systems ecologist Crawford Holling.

This ‘adaptive cycle’ – which we see at all scales from cells, to forests, to economies – begins with rapid if not exponential ‘growth’ as the contours of the new system burst on the scene and take form. It then begins to stabilise in the second stage of ‘conservation’, which is when the structure and shape of the system becomes well-established. At this point, the system appears to be both strong and ubiquitous. But this simultaneously conceals its brittleness, as it is not necessarily adaptive to changing conditions. The third stage is when the system begins to weaken, lose control and break down, visible in an accelerating ‘release’ of energy and materials. This opens up a new space of chaotic uncertainty which, however, also creates new opportunities for radically new and different directions and therefore the potential for a new structure. That therefore gives way to the fourth and final stage of ‘reorganisation’ in which the basis of a new system, a new order, begins to appear.

These final stages, however, are radically uncertain. The fourth stage of reorganisation can either culminate in the system failing to reorganise appropriately and therefore collapsing, or successfully adapting to the conditions in which it finds itself leading to the birth of a new life-cycle.

This framework can be used quite powerfully to make sense of the dawn of global industrial civilisation several hundred years ago, its rapid growth and evolution culminating in the ‘golden age’ of neoliberal capitalism whose peak was around the 1980s to the early 2000s, but which since has entered a period of prolonged decline and breakdown.

I’ve argued that we are now experiencing the release stage of our civilisational life-cycle. The deeper we move into this stage, the more we can recognise its seemingly paradoxical symptoms.

On the one hand, chaos and destabilisation are accelerating as the old order loses control and coherence. On the other, emerging shoots of exponential change are driving new technological disruptions and cultural paradigms in often unexpected ways.

The rise of the far-right, in this context, appears as a systemic symptom of civilisational decline as we move into the final stages of the industrial life-cycle. But by the same token, it also represents its last laugh before unavoidable collapse as we stand before the stark choice between going down with a declining system or embracing a bold new life-cycle with counterintuitive dynamics and properties we can barely fathom when looking through the lens of the old paradigm.

To frame this analysis, then, we need to fully grasp how civilisations are not fundamentally different to life, but merely the most complex social-ecological extensions of life on a large-scale: today, on a planetary scale.

As renowned physicist Paul Davies has famously argued, life can be defined as a profound combination of ‘hardware’ and ‘software’: the biological structure of matter as well as the complex information which, encoded via DNA, codifies how that biological structure is organised and behaves.

In the same way, civilisations are comprised of two intertwined dimensions of being – material-technological and cultural-organisational. The material-technological infrastructure of civilisation encompasses how we produce the core things that enable civilisation to function; its cultural-organisational structure includes the ideas, governance, values, norms and rules that regulate social behaviour across civilisation.

While these will be to some extent regionally and locally differentiated, there are a common set of overarching structures across both dimensions of being which underpin and define today’s global civilisation as a whole.

So when we are looking at the life-cycle of a civilisation, these two intertwined dimensions are both moving through that life-cycle, growing and stabilising, before releasing and reorganising.

Using this framework, we are able to situate the rise of the far right in its proper systemic context. Rather than happening out of the blue, it represents a cultural-organisational phase-transition, which is intimately related to corresponding material-technological phase-transitions.

https://ageoftransformation.org/confronting-fascism-at-the-end-life-cycle-of-industrial-civilisation/

 

THE MAIN PROBLEM IS THAT THE DEMOCRATS IN AMERICA ARE ACTUALLY MORE FASCIST THAT THE LOONY TRUMPIANS.... THE DEMOCRATS PURSUE THE NEO-CON POLICIES OF THE WOLFOWITZ DOCTRINE WITH PASSION.... SOMETHING WILL SNAP, EVEN IF JOE BIDEN — A NON-CONVICTED FELON (CROOKED CORRUPT FELON 100 TIMES MORE THAT TRUMP) — WINS THE "ELECTIONS"...

 

proxy terrorism......

9/11 Russian style"? 

You remember 9/11 don’t you? A bunch of Saudi guys with box cutters hijacked American aircraft and a lot of Americans died. So the US attacked and invaded Afghanistan and Iraq who had nothing to do with it — without a declaration of war, mind you. Probably a million innocent people died.

Why? Because it was an attack on American soil. And we didn’t like the Afghans and the Iraqis (but the Saudis were BFFs). Something to remember.

Now Russia has been attacked—Sevastapol and Dagestan. Unlike the Afghans and Iraqis, the US was directly involved.

So what should Russia do? If it were the US, it would go to war, kill a lot of innocent people. 

What’s stopping them? 

Well, the Afghans and Iraqis didn’t have nukes. The US does.

So revenge will be served cold — very cold

Terrorism American-style 

The US is increasingly desperate. It is trying to provoke Russia to do something— anything. One reason is simply a growing sense of powerlessness. The American Eagle is old. It can barely fly or hunt — and lives on carrion, like a vulture

This sense of powerlessness motivates the US to double down on its storyline that Russia is the Big Bad. It has been doing this not just since the dissolution of the USSR-- but since 1945 . If Russia is BAAAADDD!— then anything goes.  Everything is on the table — lotsa box-cutters.

Terrorism, American-style.

Small problem, we all know that terrorism is a weapon of weakness… and also …um…BAAAADDD!

So, the US modus operandi is what you might call "proxy terrorism", providing funding and guidance for any and all groups with a grievance against Russia—Nazis, ISIS, rabid dogs. Our hands are clean. And we use breath mints.

Wasn’t us! (except maybe the guy on the left…)

How it all started 

Many analysts will say say that this policy of mayhem started with CIA instigated Chechen terrorism —and the two Chechen wars.

But in fact, it has been US policy since the end of WWII when the US intelligence services began to cozy up Ukrainian ultranationalist groups such as the OUN. Which had been responsible for genocides of Jews and Poles in the Ukraine during the war. Not unsurprising, of course, since at the end of the war under the Truman administration the US began recruiting Nazi intelligence officers or its own services .

After World War II, American counterintelligence recruited former Gestapo officers, SS veterans and Nazi collaborators to an even greater extent than had been previously disclosed and helped many of them avoid prosecution or looked the other way when they escaped, according to thousands of newly declassified documents.  The New York Times 

It wasn’t until 1959, when which is when Stepan Bandera was finally assassinated in 1959 after multiple attempts which began in 1954, the Soviets were able to suppress Ukrainian Nazis．It helped that the First Secretary of the Communist Party in the USSR at the time was born in Kursk o the border of Ukraine—Nikita Khrushchev— who illegally gave Crimea to Ukraine. 

After that, Ukraine enjoyed a period of relative peace and development.

Not that the US didn't try to cause trouble—mounting propaganda campaigns, inventing the myth of the whole of the "Holodomor-"- or rather reinventing the story — since it'd already been used by the Galician neo-Nazis during World War II and prior to it. The American version was just as awful-- but better crafted.

There was in fact no "Holodomor"—not as described by neo-Nazi Ukrainian refugees at the end of World War II and popularized in the media.

  1. Natural drought played a role in creating the situation

  2. Ex-landowning kulaks and Ukrainian nationalists did in fact refuse to work, murder collective workers, slaughter their own cattle, and otherwise actively sabotage the sowing and harvesting campaigns

  3. Importing industrial machinery was the reason for exporting amounts of food in order to increase production as fast as possible

  4. The cycle of famines which had existed for centuries prior and inherited by the Soviet authorities ended after the industrialization and collectivization policies had been fully implemented and the nazi invasion had ended

  5. Under Stalin, the Ukrainization policy went into effect for over a decade before being changed due to rabid bourgeois Ukrainian nationalist elements exploiting it for treasonous activities

  6. Stalin did not harbor any unique hostility to the Ukrainian nationalists anymore than he did the Russian nationalists who he fought in the civil war or even the Georgian nationalists who he fought in the August uprising

  7. The Ukrainian nationalist movement in question was heavily tied to anti-semitism & fascistic beliefs before the 1930’s and exposed themselves in their true goals by aligning with nazi Germany in their hopes to create an ethno-state

  8. Central Soviet Authorities sent hundreds of thousands of tonnes of food to the Ukrainians from other regions and Stalin himself personally intervened to scold a regional Russian official objecting to sending aid and made him send food

  9. The situation of hunger encompassed the entire union to varying degrees, including impacting ethnic Russians

  10. The situation in Ukraine during 1932–1933 was not intentional or man-made by Joseph Stalin or the Central Soviet Authorities

  11. The overwhelming and vast majority of countries on this planet do not recognize this situation as being a “genocide”

The idea of “Holodomor” as an intentional or man-made genocide which specifically targeted Ukrainians and was used to crush Ukrainian nationalists fails on multiple fronts.

The myth of the Holodomor as the Ukrainian "Holocaust" would be used over and over –and of course by the neo-Nazis in 2014 to justify their program of expunging Russianness-- that is ,the Russian language, Russian culture—and Russian people in Ukraine . 

It was in fact used in a similar way to the way the Israelis use the Holocaust to justify genocide of the Palestinian people. Stepan Bandera was resurrected as the Messiah of the "new" Ukraine.

Big lies made bigger 

The US strategy since 1945 and therefore has been to use its control of the media to shape world opinion -- first against the Soviets – then against the Russians.

They took the Nazis concept of the “Big Lie” which the Nazis mostly used to control their own people, to not only indoctrinate and control American people— but all others. The world was America's Reich—it’s “realm”….

be. Militarily and economically and socially it is second rate— or lower.

Nor can information be controlled as it used to be.

So the US is losing in every area – which prompts it to extreme actions— hoping he can get his way as it used to .

The attack on Sevastopol — using banned cluster munitions on civilian targets—was a war crime— one of many perpetrated by the Ukrainians with American assistance so far.

The casualties on the beach may have been accidental since they were the result of intercepted missile which went off course and exploded. That doesn't matter—-because international law bans such attacks in civilian areas.

The role of American drones over the Black Sea is debatable. To what degree, if any, did they assist targeting and course correction? Nobody knows. The Americans have radar aircraft and satellites as well. And certainly only they have the expertise to program the ATACMS missiles .

However, what exactly is the rationale for American surveillance drones in a war zone—-international airspace were not?

The Russians would be justified in extending their exclusionary zone over the entire Black Sea—and shooting down any drones or surveillance aircraft found there.

I doubt they will do that. Ukrainians would still fire ATACMS missiles, with or without drones, relying on satellite information. You have to kill the satellites too. 

Rather, the Russians will just keep on doing what they're doing in the Ukraine, and respond asymmetrically elsewhere as they have done with North Korea and Iran, supplying them with more advanced weapons systems. Shortly after this attack the Russians announced they were strengthening very mutual defense agreement with Iran— which also serves as their proxy in strengthening the military capabilities of both the Houthis and Hezbollah.

At the same time the Americans engineered their proxy attack on Crimea, they organized a terrorist attack in Dagestan on churches and synagogues which led to the deaths of 15 policemen. Muslims in Russia see this for what it is – and will be even more supportive of the Chechen initiative in the Ukraine, which is the matter of pride for the Muslim community.

All in all these attacks, while horrible merely serve to strengthen Russian resolve. Expect to see a remarkable jump in the number of Russians volunteering to serve.

Russia will not be distracted.

 

Everybody needs a friend

Ichi needs a friend. 

I'm working on that. It takes time and some money— but it's worth it! 

Loneliness kills. As bad as smoking 15 cigarettes a day. Everybody needs a friend. The problem is finding friends to whom you can relate, with whom you can share.

I have found a lot of friends here on Substack, writing these articles. And I'm truly grateful for the feelings they share with me— for touching my life. 

With animals everything is about touch. With human beings too— but it is more than physical. 

On the coffee buyers site, I try to to write a thank you note for every coffee and reply to comments and messages. Sorry I am behind on that. 

No cut and paste! I just riff! And I have gotten wonderful responses. The financial support is appreciated of course. More so, the emotional support— a sense of friendship. 

“Touch” 

Thank you all for that! 


Special article—BRICS changes everything 

Still working on the special article. I need to explain how BRICS works— and why it is an absolute necessity for it to take over the global economic system, as the world shifts to a new paradigm. 

From what I can see, we are shifting from currency based economic relationships manipulating debt to commodity-based relationships, as with the recent Chinese Argentinian transaction where the Argentinians paid in beef! 

Many countries are selling their bond assets— most recently the Japanese— and buying gold, or other assets.

How to explain all this in simple terms? And put things in context ? 

This is a hard article to write—unexplored territory— but I will finish it soon. 

Please buy me a coffee— not just to get on the mailing list— but to encourage me so I feel it's worthwhile emotionally. Sometimes I feel down — and wonder if I'm smart enough to do this kind of original work. But I want to try anyway and each coffee makes me feel I am making progress.

 

https://julianmacfarlane.substack.com/p/russias-911?publication_id=837411&post_id=145943097&isFreemail=true&r=1uie2p&triedRedirect=true

 

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SEE ALSO: https://yourdemocracy.net/drupal/node/43171