Sleep Walking into the Abyss
Atlanta, GA
October 15, 2022
“There must be something about Russia; like a chorus girl on the make for a rich, old man, she seems to attract degenerate empires.”
– Bill Bonner
We’re teetering on the cusp of the Fourth Turning. And the incorrigible idiots who’ve put us on the precipice seem bound and determined to give us a push.
Like a lumberjack in the Sahara, every crisis we now confront is completely unnecessary. Inflation, energy shortages, supply disruptions, food scarcity, the catastrophic “pandemic” response, and an unremitting escalation toward nuclear war are policies of deliberate deprivation devised by diabolical governments.
We don’t even have the option to pick our poison. They’re all being slipped in our drinks and forced down our throats. As Doug Casey put it, it’s as if world “leaders” decided to simultaneously unleash the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse, so we’re now beset with a stampede of pestilence, war, famine, and conquest.
The “climate” hysterics would kill us slowly by gradually starving us of food and fuel. The warmongers would wipe us out all at once. The Covid swindle was the first test, a trial run of fomenting fear to assert control. And it worked. Masses of midwits lost their minds, yielded their liberty, and offered blind obedience to insidious overlords. They cowered and crumbled, and turned on anyone wise enough to resist.
With regard to “climate” idiocy and Ukraine insanity, the same quislings are doing it again. They bite the bait of transparent propaganda, and ostracize those who shun the hook.
Richard Feynman said he’d rather have questions that can’t be answered than answers that can’t be questioned. But we live in an age of pre-determined dogmas on which dissent is disallowed. In considering whether people can assess personal risk, manage their own health, acknowledge only two sexes, honor their ancestors, preserve purchasing power, drive combustion-engine cars, heat their homes, eat what they want, or steer clear of ruinous wars, common sense is suppressed as indoctrination runs the show.
This is no longer about misguided do-gooders causing inconvenience by raising gas taxes or reducing our water pressure. We’re dealing with catastrophic maniacs who will tolerate nuclear power if it destroys civilization, but not when harnessed to provide it with power. These sanctimonious busybodies would risk lethal deprivation and total annihilation to pretend they control the weather, or if it hands their Slavic satrap Russian regions on the edge of the Ukraine.
These masochists despise humanity. Their apparent indifference to mass starvation and nuclear war stems from a sincere belief that their deified planet supports too many people. They personify PJ O’Rourke’s summation of how these human-haters think: “there’s just enough of me, but way too much of you.”
To them, a devastating war is less a horrifying calamity than a righteous cleansing mechanism. Depopulation is desirable, so long as the right people go. For all their green slogans and environmental advocacy, the carbon they really want to reduce is us.
And they resurrect tired clichés to buttress their belligerence. Like shifty ambulance chasers after minor fender benders, analogies to the Second World War shadow every skirmish on the promontory of Eurasia. In the mind of the meddler, it’s always 1938.
“We” must fight aggression, avoid “another Munich”, and not appease the “next Hitler.” After American coups toppled Ukrainian governments and NATO moved relentlessly east, we’re warned that…as with the Nazis in the Sudeten… if Putin takes the Ukraine, Poland is next, and France won’t be far behind. Before you know it, he’ll turn his tanks east, and evoke Napoleon by invading Russia.
It’s absurd.
Most lazy World War II analogies are asinine. But some are apt, particularly the disconcerting rise of self-destructive sanctions, trade barriers, and “lend-lease” weapons deals by which the US nurtures its suckling pig in the Ukrainian sty. Yet economic warfare weren’t uniquely a prequel to World War II. They’ve presaged conflict as long as men have fought. As Bastiat ostensibly said a century before, if goods and services don’t cross borders, soldiers will.
It’s not the “lesson of Munich” we need to recall; it’s that of Sarajevo. If the run-up to the Second World War is rarely a valid comparison to our contemporary conflicts, the prelude to the First one almost always is. The way the world stumbled and (as Barbara Tuchman put it) “slept walked” into the Great War is eerily similar to what’s happening today. Each party keeps pushing his adversary into a corner, not expecting the other side to “over-react” or do something stupid.
But the other side doesn’t need to, because your side is doing it first. You repeatedly poke a hornets’ nest and can’t imagine getting stung. Before you know it, you’re in a trench, inhaling mustard gas, and digging graves on the banks of the Somme.
No one gets up in the morning and decides it’s a nice day for a nuclear war. As in the months preceding the guns of August, all seems superficially “normal” as “mistakes” pile up like wood on a pyre. Birds chirp, flowers bloom, wine flows, and cafés flourish as anointed rulers amble aimlessly toward the abyss.
Then, in the course of escalating brinkmanship from which neither side can credibly retreat, the wrong domino falls, a bad circuit is tripped…and suddenly the flames rise and the lights go out. In retrospect, we’ll all think the idiocy was obvious…assuming we’re all still here.
As with the Iraq War or the Covid hysteria, when the damage is done and the carnage incontrovertible, the gaslighting begins. Everyone becomes head trader at Hindsight Capital. But people only profit if they learn the right lesson. Too often, they simply allow the perpetrators to walk away, free to double-down on the same failed bets.
British Foreign Secretary Edward Grey said on the eve of the Great War that “the lamps are going out all over Europe. We shall not see them lit in our time.” Now, as winter approaches, fuel is forbidden, and sabers rattle, they’re flickering again.
Literally.
It was reckless intervention, not craven “appeasement”, that triggered the First World War, the opening salvo of a thirty year travesty that precipitated the slow suicide of the civilized West. The Four Horsemen were on the scene.
A hundred years later, they’re again in the saddle, and we hear hoofbeats approach.
JD
