Global Guerrillas: Bailouts are “The Decline of the West”

WN 2.0 must take a forward looking view, such as that offered by John Robb.  The nation-state is being hollowed out, and only those who have social cohesion will be able to maintain any public good.  John Robb’s analysis is nothing new; Ibn Khaldun wrote about exactly the same thing with the concept of Asabiyah.

`Asabiyya or asabiyah (Arabic: ?????, ?a?ab?ya) refers to social solidarity with an emphasis on unity, group consciousness, and social cohesion,[1] originally in a context of “tribalism” and “clanism”, but sometimes used for modern nationalism as well, resembling also communitarism. It was a familiar term in the pre-Islamic era, but became popularized in Ibn Khaldun’s Muqaddimah where it is described as the fundamental bond of human society and the basic motive force of history. `Asabiyya is neither necessarily nomadic nor based on blood relations rather it resembles philosophy of classical republicanism. In the modern period, the term is generally analogous to solidarity. However, the term is often negatively associated because it can sometimes suggest loyalty to one’s group regardless of circumstances, or partisanship.[2]

Compare to John Robb’s modern analysis:

THE DECLINE OF THE WEST

Most analysts (at least the ones that are worth reading) contend that the sovereign default crisis (Greece, Portugal, Spain, etc.) in the EU is about the collapse of a system that created monetary union without a political union. It isn’t. That’s actually a narrow, parochial view. Instead, the current sovereign debt crisis about something much more interesting: it’s another battle in a war for dominance between “our” integrated, impersonal global economic system and traditional nation-states. At issue is weather a nation-state serves the interests of the governed or it serves the interests of a global economic system.

Who’s winning? The global economic system, of course. The 2008 financial crisis, the first real battle of this war (as opposed to the early losses in skirmishes in Russia, Argentina, the Balkans, etc.), generated a very decisive outcome. It was a resounding defeat for nation-states.* The current crisis in the EU will almost certainly end with the same results.

When this war ends, and it won’t be long, the global economic and financial system will be the victor. Once that occurs, the nation-states of the West will join those of the global south as hollow states: mere shells of states that serve only to enforce the interests of the global economic system. These new states, more market-states than nation-states, will offer citizens a mere vestige of the public goods they offered historically. Incomes will fall to developing world levels (made easy to due highly portable productivity), and wealth will stratify. Regulatory protections will be weak. Civil service pensions will be erased and corruption will reign. The once dominant militaries of the West will be reduced to a small fraction of their current size, and their focus will be on the maintenance of internal control rather than on external threats. The clear and unambiguous message to every citizen of the West will be:

You are on your own. You are in direct competition with everyone else in the world, and your success or failure is something you alone control.

For those that think that this will bring about a surge of peaceful economic vigor, you will be wrong. It will fragment society and lead to perpetual stagnation/depression, endemic violence/corruption, and squaller. For absent any moral basis (a social compact), stability, or (widely shared) prosperity: new sources of order will emerge to fill the gap left by the demise of the nation-state. These new sources of order will be first seen in the rise of the criminal entrepreneur, whether they be the besuited corporate gangster or the gang tattooed thug. For in the world of hollow states (without a morality that limits behavior) and limitless connectivity to the global economic system, these criminal entrepreneurs quickly become dominant, violently coercing or corrupting everyone in the path to their enrichment.

However, you have a choice.

You can stand alone and do nothing. Thereby suffering the predations of this new criminal class (these global guerrillas).

You can join them and prey on your former compatriots, enriching yourself in the process.

Or finally, you can build something new. A resilient community based on freedom, prosperity, and a new moral compact.

* An ambush that yielded: excessive debt, endless deficits, state guarantees (against financial system failure), and moral ambiguity/corruption.

15 Comments

  1. So it’s us versus the “global guerillas.” The global guerillas happen to largely consist of bald Jewish billionaires, but there’s plenty of non-jewish psychopaths among them.

    They steal a lot of the wealth through taxation — bailouts, ag subsidies, defense contracting with 600 dollar screwdrivers.

    Ag subsidies are 17.5 billion a year, or 245 billion over 14 years.

    http://blogs.alternet.org/speakeasy/2010/05/08/where-do-farm-subsidies-go-now-we-know/

    The resilient communities will come to understand their interest is to end these taxation-larceny oligarch scams. But to put ourselves in a position to wage this kind of war, we need to become free-range producers and vendors. I am doing organic farming this year and selling at farmers markets and to people I know, and I got a taste of incredible freedom.

    Imagine not going to a cubicle every day, but rather producing stuff that people want and will pay for, and selling is a chance to meet dozens of new people. Imagine having the freedom to get around and be creative and find new economic niches and new connections.

    The members of the resilient communities will be very free-wheeling, rather than locked in offices. We will be innovative, and develop good relationships with the public, because we work for the public good even as go about our businesses. And thus we will be influential, and be able to enlighten the public as to our common interests, and what we need to do to fight back against the global guerillas.

  2. “So it’s us versus the “global guerillas.” The global guerillas happen to largely consist of bald Jewish billionaires, but there’s plenty of non-jewish psychopaths among them.”

    You misread Robb. The GG’s are the people actually applying the principles of his “open source warfare” and “resilient community” building. Billionaires, Jewish or not, and the global financial elite he describes as a “parasitical class” are a destabilizing force of globalization that are leading to the ruin of the middle class (of all races in all countries).

  3. Andrew,

    You know, I thought that too, but there’s this line:

    You can stand alone and do nothing. Thereby suffering the predations of this new criminal class (these global guerrillas).

    It sounds like he’s saying the oligarchs are the “new criminal class” aka “the global guerillas.”

  4. So how do we get off of the financial grid? We are enslaved by debt at a young age and throughout the rest of our lives.

    One thought. Out in California -in the 90s, a small group of folks started using the Barter System and developed their own version of charge cards. If you needed an oil change, you went to a store that used these cards and exchanged their labor for something they wanted that you could provide. A service for a good, etc. This system was attacked by the bankers and their backers as illegal because US currency wasn’t involved and the concept ran counter to the financial system. In other words, the bankers couldn’t control it and make a profit off of it. The primary charge card networks (Visa, Master Card, Amex) followed suit by refusing to allow these Barter Cards to be used on their transaction systems. This left no method to accurately credit and debit the cards. The idea died.

    Perhaps we could revisit this idea. Develop a new WN currency or WN exchange system to get us off of the financial grid of the global economy? Just a thought.

    -Justin

  5. Justin,

    The alternative currency is silver coins. They are 100% legal currency, with an official US mint dollar denomination. Why reinvent the wheel?

  6. Would this currency keep us off of the global financial grid? If we used this as a WN currency, and it would not tied to the FED, I am on board with it. I just wouldn’t want to carry around a heavy bag of coins! Hence the Barter Card idea.
    -Justin

  7. “True revolution is not to be found in the direction of change of any kind; it occurs when a population tears down its civilian status and unbinds the powers inherent to the very definition of ‘population’.”
    (Dr. Hamid Parsani)

  8. I’m an economic dunce so I’m often left behind on these conversations. Robb doesn’t help much, what with his seemingly total hatred of illustrative examples and total love of abstract language; most of the time I don’t have a clue WTF he’s talking about. Isn’t the main problem with an alternate, electronic currency validation, whether of the currency or user? I don’t see how you get around these problems.

    But I do see that software could go a long way toward making currency unnecessary, by making barter much more manageable. That might go a long way to reducing government parasitism. It’s one thing for the government to come along and demand your notes if you have them, it’s another for them to get blood out of a stone. If they don’t want to take payment in furniture, that’s their problem.

  9. Ron Paul on Competing Currencies:

    I rise to speak on the concept of competing currencies. Currency, or money, is what allows civilization to flourish. In the absence of money, barter is the name of the game; if the farmer needs shoes, he must trade his eggs and milk to the cobbler and hope that the cobbler needs eggs and milk. Money makes the transaction process far easier. Rather than having to search for someone with reciprocal wants, the farmer can exchange his milk and eggs for an agreed-upon medium of exchange with which he can then purchase shoes.
    >>The first step consists of eliminating legal tender laws.

    >>Historically, legal tender laws have been used by governments to force their citizens to accept debased and devalued currency. Gresham’s Law describes this phenomenon, which can be summed up in one phrase: bad money drives out good money. An emperor, a king, or a dictator might mint coins with half an ounce of gold and force merchants, under pain of death, to accept them as though they contained one ounce of gold. Each ounce of the king’s gold could now be minted into two coins instead of one, so the king now had twice as much “money” to spend on building castles and raising armies. As these legally overvalued coins circulated, the coins containing the full ounce of gold would be pulled out of circulation and hoarded. We saw this same phenomenon happen in the mid-1960s when the US government began to mint subsidiary coinage out of copper and nickel rather than silver. The copper and nickel coins were legally overvalued, the silver coins undervalued in relation, and silver coins vanished from circulation.
    >>The second step to reestablishing competing currencies is to eliminate laws that prohibit the operation of private mints
    >>The final step to ensuring competing currencies is to eliminate capital gains and sales taxes on gold and silver coins.
    http://www.lewrockwell.com/paul/paul434.html

  10. Study up on “free banking”. Lots of info available.
    >>Free banking refers to a monetary arrangement in which banks are subject to no special regulations or protections beyond those applicable to most commercial enterprises, where they are subject to standard bankruptcy laws in the event of a bank run, and where they are free to determine their own reserve ratios and issue their own paper currency (banknotes). In a free banking system, free market forces determine the total supply of banknotes and deposits that can be supported by any given stock of cash reserves. Such “cash” reserves generally consist of a scarce universally accepted commodity (such as gold or silver), as no central bank would exist to issue fiat currency in a free banking environment. In the strictest versions of free banking there is no role at all for a central bank, as the market would be left to determine what commodity would be accepted as money and what the relative price of that “money” commodity should be. In “true” free banking there is, therefore, no agency capable of serving as a “lender of last resort” in the usually understood sense of the term. Nor is there any government insurance of
    banknotes or bank deposit accounts.
    http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Free_banking

  11. The real story of American money is how the ordinary Whites who had good paying jobs blew their money on powerboats and monster trucks, when they should have been reinvesting their money into local businesses, local economic niches, and protecting these niches from predatory corporations.

    We have to defend our local economies as against pillagers. I think silver coins and local agriculture are part of this solution.

  12. His reply:

    True, that’s a bit confusing.

    Here’s an explanation. When I started this blog it was about warfare. Global guerrillas were criminal/warfare entrepreneurs. They were able to use connections to the global system, technological leverage, and new forms of organization to expand their fortunes and defeat larger foes.

    However, the opportunity is to use these same methods to build something new. That’s why, I think that it’s possible to be a global guerilla that does something good and positive.

    Sincerely,

    JR

  13. I think Robb should focus his attentions on the British Isles land mass. From what I gather of the Three Stooges show they are staging Great Britain has been dissolved, and now is the time for local positive GGs to form their networks. It seems the peasants old national system only exists for is taxation and monetization of bankster digital crime.

  14. The real story of American money is how the ordinary Whites who had good paying jobs blew their money on powerboats and monster trucks, when they should have been reinvesting their money into local businesses, local economic niches, and protecting these niches from predatory corporations.

    Because they didn’t know what money was, and the TV told them that buying kick ass boats and trucks was awesome.

    If Whites were smart, they would have demanded a special Fed Fund to help White people. But the TV told them that was racist, and the Republicans told them that would be socialism, so they didn’t.

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