Government in the Postmodern West has returned to its roots, becoming once again a matter of one society conquering another.
In ancient times, most imperial conquests did not bring that much destruction, nor any massive number of dead bodies, when you consider how many bodies marched into battle. Rather, it was doing whatever was necessary to convince the current ruling social group to surrender to another. The conquerors often spoke a different language, had a different religious background, and a somewhat different culture. Much of the infrastructure was preserved, even the temples and shrines, and certainly the libraries. However, they were often nothing more than a shift-change in who sat on the same old throne. The people being ruled might encounter some new laws, but for the most part were left to continue their lives as before.
The notion the governed can participate in government has been a pipe dream for a long time, and will remain ever thus. In ancient times, people were subjected by someone who had the ability to project physical force the subject couldn’t or wouldn’t bother to overcome. In democratic regimes, there is the pretense the people are involved. They possess no greater influence than under the various forms of monarchy, oligarchy, etc. If the rulers provoked them to revolt, the people would rise up and perhaps succeed in winning themselves a new set of rulers. That was about the extent of it. The primary difference now is the addition of mass deception on a scale we tend to not notice.
Plenty of times insurrections were squashed. Few wars of conquest presented the scale of slaughter which we have seen with putting down revolts. Should we add in the factor of an intent to reduce the population anyway, we should hardly be surprised if the current ruling regime of psychopaths will slaughter the participants, even if only by small increments, of the current wave of revolts in the West. Granted, some countries have a tradition of revolution, but they also come with a massive dose of deception, in which the revolt simply changes the names of and in the ruling society.
I’m utterly cynical about a revolt in Greece actually changing anything there. Even if genuinely good people get take over the reins of government, the Greeks will revolt again all too soon. It’s their way of life. Italy and France share some of that cultural DNA. Germany has simply a different flavor of it, a different mythology and methodology which produces much the same results. You could go on with other countries, but take an overview of history and you’ll see it’s all pretty much the same.
Not here. The record of crushed revolts is very long, very deep. There have been several coups-in-effect, but it all took place at the top, a mere change in social group which ruled. We have this huge national cultural blindness to the vast gulf between the rulers and the ruled. It’s not a matter of mere class stratification, but an entirely different culture hidden in plain sight. So alien is this different culture, there is a whole army of bureaucrats who live in perpetual schizophrenia in order to survive. Upon entering the workplace, they are totally different people. They don’t lose their individual character and sense of humor, but what they are willing to do, what they consider immoral, is totally different from the world they live in back at their suburban homes. America may share much with the rest of the world, but there will be no real revolts here, despite appearances.
We cannot consider OWS to be all one thing. There is a shared element of disgust at what has been done to us, and they all seem to share the blindness of how we have participated in our own predicament. However, each place where this thing has sprouted has a different character, and will encounter a different flavor of official response. In places where the general welfare isn’t that bad, the OWS protests will be tame and lifeless. In other places, the protesters are themselves economically devastated already, and this is entirely personal. If you don’t feel the pain, it’s hard to get too committed. But what will produce the most dramatic difference is the local government response in each locale.
Government is not all one thing. It is all one society, but there are varying levels of awareness, varying types of awareness, and the tools differ widely for doing what they see as necessary. Sometimes a particular national policy will be steered entirely by one small group, though it would be hard to identify the thread of their influence until long after the fact. So while the Vietnam War was one thing publicly — stopping communism — with plenty of rulers very sincerely involved in that, there were plenty of other threads in the fabric which participated as a means to pressing some other agenda. But in my mind, the single most powerful thread was the CIA and the heroin trade. Were it not for that, I doubt our national involvement would have ever gotten off the ground. To this day, there are folks who were there in government offices of power and influence who may not realize how they were gamed into that.
The really sickening part is the vast number of citizens who still believe it was all justified, to include an astonishing percentage of Vietnam War veterans.
In some cities, OWS will be successfully subverted and compromised. In others, it will face a crackdown. In some cases, that crackdown will mean blood in the streets. OWS will not succeed, because the real problem all the participants agree on — the intentional poverty of the country — is not going to be stopped. That’s because our ruling society has already revealed their determination to also reduce the population of the US. The rulers are quite willing to slaughter the types of folks who would revolt that way, and in the process, to make them as miserable as possible.
Not so much in terms of reducing the raw numbers our whole population, but they plan to dramatically reduce the proportions of the current dominant society. They would hardly balk at increasing the number of Third World refugees. Think about it for just a moment. The Assyrians and Babylonians were very big on reducing the tendency of revolt by mixing the cultural groups. They would deport whole nations, scattering the tribes and clans across the empire in a broad mix which left each batch isolated by jarring differences with their neighbors. Meanwhile, the ruling class, the top society of each conquered nation, was forced to live in a ghetto just outside the royal palace grounds, away from their native populations. It’s not so much our current ruling society has read the annals of Assyrian and Babylonian conquests, but that folks who rule can instinctively work this out: Fractured and isolated identities means little conviction in complaining when they are squeezed.
So, for example, I predict the violence of police tactics in NYC will not abate; it will increase. The people who actually rule this country have already paid into the pot, and the critical leadership of NYPD has been bought off. The mayor is one of those who do the buying, so it won’t matter what he says publicly; watch his actions. Specifically, watch what he permits. Much of what happens in the public eye is pure theater. Don’t make the mistake of thinking every part of the protest is clean, and many aren’t doing the same crap, staging photo and video opportunities. Look for the more diligent press members to be suppressed, often as brutally as the protesters. The original action in NYC will get increasingly ugly, and the lapdog press will be showing it. That’s because it will serve as a warning, a PsyOp in itself.
We live in interesting times.
