Who is America's Yeltsin?
The excellent John Michael Greer writes
...it's the European age that’s ending, not the American age. The American age hasn’t begun yet. The United States these days is a Third World country catapulted by a chapter of historical accidents into a temporary position as global hegemon. Its Europeanized elites, in the usual Third World fashion, are a small minority maintaining a tenuous temporary mastery over restless masses that don’t share its ideals and its interests, and are beginning to sense their potential power. America is still young, and pregnant with the future; centuries from now, long after the European veneer has been thrown off, she will give birth to something else wholly new, and it will inevitably be even more unacceptable—and indeed wholly incomprehensible—to the conventional wisdom of Europe-as-it-is.
You owe it to yourself to read this article. However, John Michael is an American writing for Americans with an American point of view.
No, it's not the European Age that's ending. That epoch ended in 1945, when the US took over.
Many countries in Europe flourished under social democracy for a time, but that brief renaissance was extinguished first by American predatory capitalism -- and then by Biden's War, the US’s proxy war in the Ukraine, which one battle of a world war that began years ago targeting ALL America’s rivals -- not just China and Russia but Europe too. The lights of the beautiful Europe that emerged from the ashes is now threatened will go off for lack of fuel.
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The world must burn
The world must burn so Americans can toast marshmallows.
For America to stand tall, it must starve the rest of the world to stunt their growth.
The country can no longer blame its sins on the exuberance of youth. Like Joe Biden, it has a good facelift but it old in the final stages of national dementia, not that it really a ‘nation” but rather an imperial construct. Maybe “America’ never really was young.
The history that Americans are fed is mostly myths, that massage their egos. Even the American “revolution” is a myth since it was never as much a revolution as it was a civil war, presaging the much nastier one to come later.
Civilizations are not build to last
No civilization lasts much longer than 400 years, as I argue in my book, Ageing Young .
Historically, all civilizations reach a peak after just a century or so -- and then it's downhill-- as a result of growth of in equality . Rome, for example, reached its political and social peak before the Caesars.
Growth as Nemesis
Rome’s expansion was its nemesis.
For the US, it was the same.
The US of A was an evolution of British society and values and “America”, like Britain, change was driven by ethnic diversity and social adaptation. but in a similar trajectory. Yes, Britain evolved on the basis of social memes; the US evolved also on the basis of other memes -- but the memes of both empires— even if different and even if subject to different mutations—came from the same social "body" just as genes do in human beings. The AngloSaxon world is memetically one family, a five-eyed monster.
Now that more than two centuries have elapsed, conditions have changed. And the Anglo world is no longer adaptive.
Biden’s War
Biden's War has accidentally accelerated the worldwide trend of de-dollarization, which prompted the US invasion of Iraq, its destruction of Libya, its attempted destruction of Syria and its economic war on Iran and Venezuela. Sanctions on Russia have allowed the Russians to default on their remaining international debt and have buoyed up the Ruble as an alternative currency for all transactions with Russia, which no country can easily shrug off. At the same time, sanctions against not only Russia but other countries have undermined the efficacy of US-dominated international institutions such as SWIFT, the WTO and IMF -- even the UN.
The war hysteria in the US is a paroxysm of denial. Goodbye American bye.
The "Union" that is the US of A will collapse, just as the Soviet Union did but with greater suffering, not having institutions in place to protect ordinary people.
The US is already an oligarchy and a kleptocracy.
So, who will be America's Yeltsin?
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