Generational Dynamics World View - Printable Version +- Generational Theory Forum: The Fourth Turning Forum: A message board discussing generations and the Strauss Howe generational theory (http://generational-theory.com/forum) +-- Forum: Fourth Turning Forums (http://generational-theory.com/forum/forum-1.html) +--- Forum: Theories Of History (http://generational-theory.com/forum/forum-7.html) +--- Thread: Generational Dynamics World View (/thread-51.html) Pages:
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RE: Generational Dynamics World View - John J. Xenakis - 11-02-2019 ** 01-Nov-2019 World View: Democide and crisis war deaths mps92 Wrote:> John, that's one of the most brilliant arguments I've ever I stand on the shoulders of giants. mps92 Wrote:> There is a tacit understanding among people who've studied history mps92 Wrote:> And perhaps mass suicide is necessary for the same I'm sympathetic to this argument, though I'm not aware of any evidence of human mass suicide like the lemmings. Whether lemmings commit mass suicide is debated. Those who say that they don't commit suicide claim that their migratory patterns just happen to require them to jump off a cliff en masse and kill themselves. I don't know how that differs in any significant way from mass suicide, so decide for yourself. http://www.animalplanet.com/wild-animals/do-lemmings-commit-suicide/ But in a generational Crisis era, like today, even if there are no human mass suicides ...err... was the Normandy landing a mass suicide? Don't a lot of armies go into battle, knowing that most of them will be killed? Isn't that mass suicide? I don't know. Anyway, even if there aren't mass suicides today, there are plenty of individual suicides in America, as the suicide rates are going up. A lot of suicides are, of course, related to the economy. According to reports, teens are increasingly committing suicide because they don't want to be a financial burden on their parents, and Boomers are committing suicide because they don't have enough money to live on, or because they're terminally ill, or because young people consider them more worthless than garbage. I don't see any reason why an older person would want to stay alive today. Tom Mazanec Wrote:> AFAIK, only the War of the Triple Alliance and the Thirty Years This highlights a puzzle that I've had for years. Generational Dynamics theory clearly implies that generational crisis wars reduce the population, but every time I mention this online, someone points out that it's not true. This conflict has been puzzling me for years. However, a month ago, Aeden posted something that actually solved the problem: aeden Wrote:> The often quoted University of Hawaii Democide Project makes is The "democide" concept resolves the issue because it makes clear that the majority of war-related deaths do not occur during the war, but occur because of government action after the war. This is like a jigsaw puzzle piece that completes the puzzle, because it ties together so many other theoretical issues. The web site claims that higher democide rates occur in societies that are "not free," but that falls apart in many cases. For example, in one place the web site is clearly puzzled why France, which is a free society and did not have large massacres after WW II, but then massacred tens of thousands of Algerians. The reason for the difference is that for France, WW II was an external war, fought between armies, while the Algerian war was a civil war. As I've written many times, the behavior of a society is very different from "normal" behavior when the generational crisis war was an ethnic, racial, tribal or class civil war, rather than an "external" war. The reason is that when an external war ends, the invading armies leave, and there's no interactions between the two populations. But after a civil war, the two populations have to continue to live with each other, in the same country, in the same cities, and sometimes on the same streets. It's not a pleasant situation when you know that you're neighbor down the street raped and killed your wife, then killed your children. In the latter case, when the war ends and a member of the winning tribe and his tribal cronies take control of the government, they discriminate against people of the losing tribe in many ways, sometimes simple economic depravation, and sometimes democide. Aeden points out that there is also evidence that guns are confiscated in societies where democide occurs, and that makes sense when you realize that the tribe that won the civil war doesn't want the losing tribe to have guns. To sort out the democide categories, you don't separate them into free/non-free. You separate them into three groups:
Whether a society is free or non-free, or whether a society confiscates guns, depends on whether the preceding crisis war was a civil war. Once those distinctions are made, then much of the web site narrative falls into place. Returning now to the original theoretical point, that theory implies that generational crisis wars reduce the population, that might actually be true when you include democide deaths related to generational crisis civil wars. This is a good subject for more research. RE: Generational Dynamics World View - John J. Xenakis - 11-02-2019 ** 02-Nov-2019 World View: Population growth Tom Mazanec Wrote:> Then why has the human population grown every decade since about Guest Wrote:> Because most wars fought since 1400 have not been world wars; they That's a really good analysis. You've obviously thought about this a lot more than most people have. The population grows faster than the food supply for humans, as it does for pretty much all animal species. That means that it's necessary to reduce the population every now and then -- through war, disease and famine -- so that the survivors have enough to eat. But actually that's not true. It's only necessary to reduce the rate of population growth every now and then, so that it's lower than the rate of growth for the food supply (and other resources). Even that's only true regionally, as you point out. If you look at the population of the world as a whole, then at any given time population continues to grow as usual in most of the world, while population (growth) falls in other regions, so that world population growth averages out to low level that's still positive. Here's a graph that I've always found fascinating:
If we speculate and apply some of these concepts to interpreting this graph, then historically, China was always very insular. Since ancient times, the Chinese viewed themselves as the Middle Kingdom -- there was the Kingdom of heaven, there was China (the Middle Kingdom), and there were the barbarians (the rest of the world). The Great Wall of China was begun in the Qin Dynasty around 200 BC, and they considered the South China Sea to be a "natural great wall" that they stayed completely away from, until recent times when they've been illegal annexing it for Lebensraum. So the Chinese mostly fought wars among themselves, and you can see from the graph that the population rose and fell quite dramatically. Then in 1206 the Mongols conquered China, and so there began to develop multiple generational timelines within China's population. By 1400, there were probably still huge dramatic rises and falls in the population -- on a regional level -- but the population of China as a whole continued to grow, generally matching the trend line. China then started having wars not only with the Mongols, but also with the Russians and with the Turks in Central Asia and with the Tibetans. The trend line, incidentally, could be thought of as a proxy for growth in food production, with population rising and falling depending on the availability of food. As I said, this is speculation. I've had that graph on file for 15 years. I got these figures in 2003 from a book called Historical Dynamics by Peter Turchin, but today I have no idea where the numbers came from, or what parts of China, Mongolia, Central Asia, Tibet and Russia they include. RE: Generational Dynamics World View - pbrower2a - 11-02-2019 (11-02-2019, 10:19 AM)John J. Xenakis Wrote: ** 01-Nov-2019 World View: Democide and crisis war deaths Infamous camera footage that showed lemmings going off a cliff was staged, with people literally driving the lemmings to the cliff. http://www.animalplanet.com/wild-animals/do-lemmings-commit-suicide/ Quote:But in a generational Crisis era, like today, even if there are no Effective suicides include drug abuse and some STDs. Such are often slow suicide by people who have little for which to live. Street drugs by hypodermic needle? That is something that nobody with something for which to live would do. Note also that poor people have a far-lower survival rate into old age than do the non-poor. If the elderly seem to get more politically conservative with age, then it is because the people with the most stake in the economic order (which is usually conservative in politics) are more likely to see old age as a time for most fully enjoying life -- until their bodies give out. Poor people might be priced out of overpriced pharmaceuticals while the rich own pharmaceutical stocks. Such is the American way of medicine -- and medical neglect. Quote:Tom Mazanec Wrote:> AFAIK, only the War of the Triple Alliance and the Thirty Years Simple explanation: the veterans who come back from Crisis wars have typically been denied the opportunity to imagine anything unconventional. The post-Crisis world has plenty of work to do, and even raw labor gets paid well in reconstructing a world that either neglected to build such basics as housing during the war or has experienced the destruction of urban properties that need to be rebuilt -- bigger and better, of course. WWII veterans came back without visionary ideas of how to make the world intellectually richer than it had been. The harsh reality of military life is incompatible with intellectual inquiry except on technical matters -- like building pontoon bridges. But even after the war, soldiers on occupation or defensive duty may get to hear the Vienna Philharmonic and visit the Rijksmuseum. In 1943 such was impossible; in 1947 such was easy. Such makes a difference between the GI and Silent generations. Quote:However, a month ago, Aeden posted something that actually solved The tyrants who take away guns (as opposed to non-tyrants... an arch-conservative like Margaret Thatcher did not undo the strict gun laws of the UK) also flood society with propaganda that demonizes the pariahs of the society, whether kulaks in Russia, Jews in the Third Reich, or people not Sunni Muslims in ISIS territory. Persons become vermin -- loathsome rats, flies, and cockroaches, among others. Think of the scene in Der ewige Jude in which a small Jewish population spreads throughout the world is shown as arrows as if military conquests which cuts quickly to a scenes of hordes of rats. The late Rudolph J. Rummell coined the word democide, mass murder of people for military, economic, and political reasons. He correlated democide to the absence of political freedom and hence to responsible government. The most criminal regimes were among the least free -- like Stalin's Soviet Union, Nazi Germany, Thug Japan, NDH Croatia, Mao's China, the "Democratic People's Republic" of Korea (and absolute monarchy, for all practical purposes), Ethiopia under the Derg, the Ottoman Empire during WWI, Imperial Russia, Warlord China, and "socialist" regimes in Vietnam and Yugoslavia. Also notable was the horribly-misnamed "Congo Free State", the personal fief of the Belgian king who tried to turn that fief into one horrible concentration camp-plantation. Famines? India has had a nearly-solid record of democratic government, and despite remaining poor, has never had a famine during independence. The last famine in Europe was in Nazi-occupied Netherlands, a country that was typically a net exporter of foodstuffs before the war. Famine shows not so much crop failures as it does the decision of leaders that some things, like an ideology, are more precious than human life. Stalin's Soviet Union and Nazi Germany were far from gun-free societies. People in good standing with the ruling Party could keep its guns. Oh, so the Nazis took away the right of gun ownership from Jews? They also outlawed other things for Jews
Let's go to the last one. Dogs. Dogs defend loved ones as if they were defending their puppies... and dogs defend their human partners as ferociously as bears and Big Cats defend theirs. Dogs may be Man's Best Friend, but they are one of the last animals that I would want to make into enemies. Multiple dogs? If you misbehave among multiple dogs you might as well be facing a tiger, for multiple dogs attack as if one giant predator. Good behavior -- canine and human -- is all that keeps medium-to-large dogs from being man-eaters. Power, speed, agility, strength, cunning, voracity, keen senses, and sharp claws and teeth? I know the rules that keep Canis lupus familiaris from becoming Canis leo , Canis tigris, or Canis ursus. Add to that, the Nazis flooded the airwaves and public space with incessant demonization of Jews, and with enough of that people start to normalize the nasty things done to them -- but of course, out of sight and out of mind from the ghetto to the gas chamber. It would have taken little for Jews to make their case that they were not the ogres that the Nazis depicted. Whether the horror is done in the effort to get super-cheap labor (the Atlantic slave trade) or to steal the assets of a model minority (German Jews), contempt for human life is far more likely to become a norm where the government treats the exercise of conscience as a crime. RE: Generational Dynamics World View - John J. Xenakis - 11-02-2019 ** 02-Nov-2019 World View: CCP plots mysterious Hong Kong change, as riots continue Thousands of angry protesters continued anti-government demonstrations in Hong Kong on Saturday, after they had already gone on for 22 weeks. The violence was the worst in weeks, as they set fire to metro stations and vandalized buildings including China’s official Xinhua news agency. The police responded with tear gas and water cannons, resulting in enormous chaos. However, the big Hong Kong news this week was non-news -- the mysterious unspecified governmental changes that the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) in Beijing is planning. Hong Kong was the main agenda item on a four-day meeting, or plenum, of top CCP leaders in Beijing this week, where Xi Jinping is said to have further consolidated his power as dictator, the most powerful since Mao Zedong, who caused disaster in China, killing tens of millions of people and almost completely destroying China's agricultural infrasture with the Great Leap Forward and the Cultural Revolution. Now Xi Jinping will have the opportunity to do something equally disastrous in Hong Kong. We don't know what the CCP is going to do, but we can be pretty sure that, whatever it is, it will make things worse. At a press conference, Shen Chunyao, a CCP official, said that the "one country, two systems" philosophy would be continued. He said the following about the plenum decision: Quote: "Ruling Hong Kong and Macau under the one country, two So it sounds like the CCP plans to change how Hong Kong is governed, but no specific information is provided. We do know that it will emphasize national security, which means that it will be even more repressive, which will really piss people off. And we also know that there will be an emphasis of education of young people in "the constitution and the Basic Law, Chinese history and culture, in order to boost their national consciousness and patriotic spirit," which will REALLY piss people off. The problem with teaching Chinese history to Hong Kongers is that most of the people are descendants of people who fled the CCP under Mao in 1949 and then lived under benign British rule, so teaching history will certainly remind them of Mao's bloody dictatorship. At any rate, all we know is that the CCP is plotting some mysterious change in Hong Kong's government. Hong Kongers will have to wait breathlessly to see what it is. ---- Sources: -- Beijing reiterates call for Hong Kong to prioritise national security, patriotic education https://www.scmp.com/news/china/diplomacy/article/3035913/beijing-reiterates-call-hong-kong-prioritise-national-security (South China Morning Post, Hong Kong, 1-Nov-2019) -- Hong Kong protesters trash Xinhua agency office in night of violence https://www.reuters.com/article/us-hongkong-protests/downtown-hong-kong-becomes-battleground-as-night-falls-idUSKBN1XC03J (Reuters, 2-Nov-2019) RE: Generational Dynamics World View - Warren Dew - 11-02-2019 (11-02-2019, 10:19 AM)John J. Xenakis Wrote: Returning now to the original theoretical point, that theory implies Why does generational dynamics imply that generational crisis wars reduce the population? Or are we talking about some extension to that theory? RE: Generational Dynamics World View - John J. Xenakis - 11-02-2019 (11-02-2019, 09:11 PM)Warren Dew Wrote:(11-02-2019, 10:19 AM)John J. Xenakis Wrote: Returning now to the original theoretical point, that theory implies Because the population grows faster than the food supply. 3-Nov-19 World View -- Anti-Iran, anti-government protests spread across Iraq - John J. Xenakis - 11-02-2019 *** 3-Nov-19 World View -- Anti-Iran, anti-government protests spread across Iraq This morning's key headlines from GenerationalDynamics.com
**** **** Anti-Iran, anti-government protests spread across Iraq **** Anti-government protesters stand on a building in Baghdad last week (CNN) Tens of thousands of protesters gathered in the capital city Baghdad and cities across Iraq on Saturday to continue anti-government and anti-Iran protests that began in early October. In the Umm Qasr port, which is in southern Iraq, south of the city of Basra, hundreds of people were wounded in clashes between security forces and protesters, as protesters set up blockades and burned tires to shut down the port. Operations at the port, which receives the vast bulk of Iraq's imports of grain, vegetable oils and sugar, have been at a complete standstill since Wednesday. The protests are similar to those that I described last week in Lebanon. ( "21-Oct-19 World View -- Massive anti-government street protests paralyze Lebanon" ) Like Lebanon, Iraq is in a generational Awakening era, like America in the 1960s, following the Iran/Iraq war (1980-88), which was a Persian-Arab war. Today's protests are not sectarian (anti-Sunni vs anti-Shia) but are anti-government, and particularly against massive government corruption. **** **** History of the Iran/Iraq war **** Most generational crisis wars in the Mideast occurred in the context of World War I and the collapse of the Ottoman empire. Iraq's generational crisis war was the 1920 Great Iraqi Revolution, which was a watershed event in Iraqi history. It was not a sectarian (Sunni vs Shia) war. Instead, the entire country Sunnis, Shias, tribes and cities were united in fighting the British colonists. Sixty years later, in 1980, Iraq's dictator Saddam Hussein launched an invasion of Iraq. This following Iran's revolution in 1979, and Saddam thought Iran would be weakened for an easy conquest. Instead, Saddam's invasion united the Iranians. The Iran/Iraq war was one of the longest and bloodiest wars of the 20th century. Chemical weapons and large-scale missile attacks were used. There were millions of casualties and refugees in both countries. This war had a profound influence on the entire Mideast. Since then Iran has attempted to gain political influence in Iraq. The biggest opportunity came in the last three years, when ISIS was occupying much of Iraq, and Iraq's army was failing to eject them. Iran trained and funded Shia militias called the Popular Mobilization Units (PMUs), which played a major role in expelling ISIS from the country. This gave Iran a great deal of influence in the country. **** **** Confessional governments in Lebanon and Iraq **** There were generational crisis wars throughout the region in the 1970s and 1980s. The Iran-Iraq war pitted Arabs against Persians. Lebanon's civil war was related to Syria's civil war, which pitted Arabs against Shia/Alawites who, in turn, were aligned with Iran. Iran has enormous political influence in Lebanon through its puppet militia Hezbollah, which is the military arm of the Shias in Lebanon. Iran and Syria came out of their respective civil wars with extremely bloody repression of their enemies. In Iran, Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini in 1988 ordered the torture, rape and massacre of tens of thousands of political prisoners and political enemies. In Syria, Bashar al-Assad is still conducting genocide and ethnic cleansing of his political enemies, the Arab Sunnis. In my recent article on Lebanon, I described how Lebanon's constitution was written to split control of government institutions (prime minister, president, parliament) into three sects, Sunni Muslim, Maronite Christian, and Shia Muslim, respectively. The purpose of this form of government was to present the kind of violence that has occurred in Iran and Syria. It turns out that this is called a "confessional system of government," where power is divided based on sectarian affiliation or confession. So after the dictator Saddam Hussein was ousted by the Americans in 2003, Iraq adopted a confessional form of government for the same reason. The confessional form of government has worked fairly well in both Iraq and Lebanon, because its prevented the kind of massive violence that's been occurring in Iran and Syria. However, rioters in both Iraq and Lebanon are protesting against their governments for the same two reasons: First, corruption, the sectarian-based divisions give the sects too much financial power over their respective institutions, and allow them to steal as much money as they like. And second, Iran has too much influence, and the country is serving Iran's needs instead of its own. Both countries are in extreme poverty, and protesters are giving both of those reasons as the cause. Iran's dream for several years has been full control of the "Shia crescent" -- Iran, Iraq, Syria and Lebanon, including an open highway from Tehran to the Mediterranean Sea. This is all falling apart now, with anti-Iran protests in Iraq and Lebanon, and loss of influence in Syria. **** **** Global protests -- around the world **** Winston Churchill's history of World War II describes the obvious "Gathering Storm" that preceded the war, making it apparent that war was coming. Today we see a similar Gathering Storm -- regional wars, trade wars, surging xenophobia and nationalism in almost every nation, and in recent months a surge in street protests. Just today, Pakistan had to be added to the list of countries experiencing major anti-government street protests. The street protests in Chile have been going on for months, and have forced Chile to cancel plans to hold two international conferences. One was an economic conference where Donald Trump and Xi Jinping were supposed to attend and sign a trade deal, and the other was a climate change conference. As part of its coverage of the Chile street protests, the did an interesting story on the spread of global protests. Countries experiencing major anti-government street protests. Top row (L-R): Barcelona/ClimateChange/Russia; Middle row: Bolivia/HongKong/Iraq; Bottom row: Ecuador/Chile/Lebanon (BBC) The BBC noted that the number of countries with large protests has grown dramatically in the last few months. The BBC report provided a one or two sentence summary for each country. Here they are (my transcription):
All of the protests are based on worsening economies, and that's happening because the growing debt bubble days have largely ended, and so there is much less money in the world than there used to be, meaning that there are many more people who cannot get money to buy food with. The world is being held together with duct tape and rubber bands, and at some point a rubber band will snap, and that will lead to the first declaration of war, and an escalating cycle of wars. John Xenakis is author of: "World View: Iran's Struggle for Supremacy -- Tehran's Obsession to Redraw the Map of the Middle East" (Generational Theory Book Series, Book 1) Paperback: 153 pages, over 100 source references, $7.00 https://www.amazon.com/World-View-Supremacy-Obsession-Generational/dp/1732738610/ Sources:
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KEYS: Generational Dynamics, Iraq, Baghdad, Umm Qasr port, Iran, Iran/Iraq war, Great Iraqi Revolution (1920), Saddam Hussein, Popular Mobilization Units, PMUs, Lebanon, confessional government, Hezbollah, Syria, Winston Churchill, Chile, Pakistan, Barcelona, Russia; Bolivia, HongKong, Ecuador Permanent web link to this article Receive daily World View columns by e-mail Contribute to Generational Dynamics via PayPal John J. Xenakis 100 Memorial Drive Apt 8-13A Cambridge, MA 02142 Phone: 617-864-0010 E-mail: john@GenerationalDynamics.com Web site: http://www.GenerationalDynamics.com Forum: http://www.gdxforum.com/forum Subscribe to World View: http://generationaldynamics.com/subscribe RE: Generational Dynamics World View - John J. Xenakis - 11-03-2019 ** 03-Nov-2019 World View: Hong Kong knife attacker bites politician's ear off
Sunday was another day of high drama in Hong Kong. There were clashes all day long between pro-democracy protesters and riot police, but generally speaking there was less violence and chaos on Sunday than there had been on Saturday. But then in early evening, the drama began. A man yelled something like "liberate Taiwan" or "reclaim Taiwan and Hong Kong" in Mandarin, and shouted other pro-CCP slogans. In Hong Kong, Mandarin can be thought of as the language of the Chinese Communist Party (CCP), while Cantonese can be thought of the language of the protesters. The attacker than pulled out a knife and wounded at least five people, leaving at least two in critical condition. Andrew Chiu Ka-yin, a local pro-democracy councillor, tried to subdue the guy with the knife, but the attacker then bit Chiu's ear off. The crowd then started beating the crap out of the guy with the knife, until the police came and saved him. Tensions between Mandarin-speaking northern China and Cantonese-speaking southern China continue to grow, raising growing concerns in the CCP of a full-scale anti-government rebellion, as happened in the Taiping Rebellion (1852-64), and Mao's Communist Revolution (1934-49). However, the CCP officials have no idea what to do about it, but we can be sure that whatever they do will only make the situation worse. ---- Sources: -- Blood spilled over political differences in Hong Kong, with six hurt as knife-wielding man attacks family after argument https://www.scmp.com/news/hong-kong/politics/article/3036111/riot-police-move-hong-kong-protesters-gather-sha-tin (South China Morning Post, Hong Kong, 3-Nov-2019) -- Politician's ear bitten off during knife attack in Hong Kong https://www.theguardian.com/world/2019/nov/03/at-least-five-wounded-during-knife-attack-in-hong-kong (AFP, 3-Nov-2019) ---- Related articles: ** 26-Oct-19 World View -- Mike Pence harshly criticizes China as US bans Chinese surveillance equipment ** http://www.generationaldynamics.com/pg/xct.gd.e191026.htm#e191026 ** 2-Oct-19 World View -- Teenage protester shot by policeman in Hong Kong's worst day of violence ** http://www.generationaldynamics.com/pg/xct.gd.e191002.htm#e191002 ** 22-Jun-19 World View -- Hong Kong protests show historic split between northern and southern China ** http://www.generationaldynamics.com/pg/xct.gd.e190622.htm#e190622 ** 28-Jun-19 World View -- Book Announcement: World View: War between China and Japan - by John J. Xenakis ** http://www.generationaldynamics.com/pg/xct.gd.e190628.htm#e190628 RE: Generational Dynamics World View - Warren Dew - 11-03-2019 (11-02-2019, 09:39 PM)John J. Xenakis Wrote:(11-02-2019, 09:11 PM)Warren Dew Wrote: Why does generational dynamics imply that generational crisis wars reduce the population? Or are we talking about some extension to that theory? That only implies that there has to be population reduction, or at least population growth reduction, at some point. It doesn't have to be linked to the generational cycle. RE: Generational Dynamics World View - pbrower2a - 11-03-2019 The people most vulnerable to persecution are all-too-often people who by any reasonable standard are 'model majorities' -- people identifiably different, but successful. That irks the Hell out of those of the anti-human, anti-capitalist forms of capitalism. Think of Jews in Spain before Jews got the choice to flee with nothing or convert and keep their property -- but be monitored for any lapses into old Jewish ways of life (in Spain, such could include failure to eat pork(pork of course violates Kosher dietary laws), keeping seven-fold candelabras, using unleavened bread on Easter Sunday, giving their children Hebrew names such as "Abraham" and "Sarah" (not always a strictly-Jewish practice -- see Puritan-era New England and of course Mennonites), or having secretive meetings on Saturday or known Jewish holidays. German Jews had no chance to convert. (If anything, I can see one thing that would have solved all the moral problems of the German and Austrian peoples between 1933 and 1945 -- Judaism!) Indeed, I once had an extended conflict with a neo-Nazi who attributed all sorts of vices, none of them particularly Jewish, to me. So I am a smart liberal with a German-sounding surname and I hate Nazis. I also had strawberry-blond hair at one time, which he could not see but I didn't tell him about. In the end I told him the following: 1. he is not the first to use antisemitic slurs against me; practically any German surname. is potentially a "Jewish" surname. 2. what he says about Jews is completely wrong with my experience. Most obviously Jews are not particularly greedy and materialistic, and if they succeed at something it is not out of a lust for ostentatious indulgence. 3. Even if the smears are false because I am not Jewish, they still hurt. Many German-Americans have experienced such. 4. The vast majority of Germans and German-Americans hate Nazis for much the same reason that most Italian-Americans hate Mafia groups and most Hispanic groups hate the drug-trafficking cartels. Every ethnic and religious group that I have ever seen hate the rogues of their groups. 5. Holocaust denial is absurd, cruel, and indefensible. It is only a matter of time before someone denies or trivializes race-based slavery. 6. As a nominal Christian who recognizes the Nazis as proof of the need for Hell for the most egregious sins possible so that Heaven can be free of those sins, I can't imagine anyone risking eternal damnation by being a Nazi. And what if God is Jewish? I can't imagine any swastikas or Nazi salutes in Heaven, but all righteous people get to accept the truth. 7. I consider the Jews my cultural and moral brethren, and if I had to choose between being a Jew and a Nazi I would convert to Judaism because I could keep my moral and cultural values intact as a Jew. To be a Nazi I would have to be evil. Culture? This is as German as one can get. Johann Sebastian Bach would have heard his truest successor as a master of counterpoint in this rondo, really a one of the most wonderful fugues possible until the climax in which Mahler finally completes the phrase, after which all else is a short-lived anticlimax . Bach typically ends his fugue only when completing the phrase... so Mahler composes this 150 years after Bach dies. The world was very different in 1904 from what it was in 1750, and even 40 years after Mahler (1860-1911) died the world would be even more different. For one thing, the great music eritten in 1951 and later would largely be jazz with little connection to Back or even Mahler. Enjoy! Great counterpoint recognizes only one culture, the culture of excellence. RE: Generational Dynamics World View - John J. Xenakis - 11-04-2019 ** 04-Nov-2019 World View: Democide and population growth (11-02-2019, 09:11 PM)Warren Dew Wrote: > Why does generational dynamics imply that generational crisis wars (11-02-2019, 09:39 PM)John J. Xenakis Wrote: > Because the population grows faster than the food supply. (11-03-2019, 09:24 PM)Warren Dew Wrote: > That only implies that there has to be population reduction, or at That's a good point, and it's one of the reasons that I've been puzzled by this issue for years. The generational cycle is very general, and and any catastrophic event that affects the entire population creates its own generational cycle, with unique behaviors related to the catastrophic event. Events like this that I've discussed in the past include the 1918 Spanish Flu epidemic, and the 1929 financial panic. The most visible effects of the resulting generational cycles occur as I've described with the "58 Year Hypothesis," when a panic occurs 58 years after the event -- in these examples the false swine flu panic in 1976 and the false stock market panic in 1987, respectively. So when we're talking about something as drastic as a fall in population, or even a sharp fall in population growth, then it really has to be associated with some event -- a huge famine, a huge pandemic, or a huge war. And if it's a war, then it would have to be tied into the major generational cycle generated by a crisis war. I had assumed for years that the fall in population was caused by war deaths during a generational crisis war, but I was never able to find data to support that assumption. The introduction of the effects of "democide" still tie the fall in population (growth) into the war's generational cycle, but not directly into the generational crisis war that spawned the generational cycle. There is still speculation involved in this, and obviously a lot more research is needed, but the democide concept really is like a missing puzzle piece that completes the jigsaw. I really am pleased by how much it ties together the other theoretical pieces, particularly when democide occurs after a generational crisis war which was an ethnic, racial, tribal or class civil war. The democide occurs because the leader of the tribe that won the civil war keeps killing people in the opposition tribe for decades after the war ends, resulting in a loss of population through "democide." There are other population effects that appear to occur around a crisis war: delays in marriage and having children before and during a crisis war, increase in suicide rate before and during a crisis war, and then a baby boom after the crisis war. There's still a lot of stuff to be figured out here, such as how a regional democide affects neighboring nations, and how regional democides affect the global population as a whole. But I really see this as answering some major questions, and pulling together pieces of the Generational Dynamics theory into a whole picture. RE: Generational Dynamics World View - pbrower2a - 11-05-2019 (11-04-2019, 11:45 AM)John J. Xenakis Wrote: ** 04-Nov-2019 World View: Democide and population growth Scares may happen 58 or so years later, but near-repetitions typically happen about 80 years later because the generational cycle results in the last people with childhood memories of undesirable trends from the analogous turning are no longer around to check others. What goes really bad one time creates people who have memories, even if those are from childhood, of the cause. I see the speculative boom rife with corruption in the Double-Zero Decade as an analogue of the 1920's. Who was disappearing from the scene in time for the speculative boom of the Double-Zero Decade? The GI Generation, the last to remember a speculative boom going catastrophically wrong. Even children had to see some absurdity in people making big money by exchanging paper replicas of wealth... and after the Crash of 1929 the GI's stood for constraints on financial institutions. Bankers got special breaks, but they were the ones to connect savers with borrowers. They were not allowed to let people gamble on inflation. Loans had to be designed so that a defaulting borrower got burned, and that such was bad for the career of a lending officer. In short, the banks had to be the people to say NO to what Robert Ringer calls "LSD deals". Quote:So when we're talking about something as drastic as a fall in Huge drops in the population have involved war, genocide, famines, and pandemics. Overpopulation makes people more vulnerable to all of those because overpopulation cheapens the value of human life or makes people more vulnerable. Reductions in population growth or child-bearing lower than replacement? Such results from expectations. Population growth is highest in places just coming out of extreme poverty as death rates from disease and hunger fall, but habits of having large families remain intact. To be sure, the prospect for a child born in Tokyo is far better than that of a child born in Port au Prince, but it is clear that Japanese parents expect a certain level of economic privilege that Haitian parents don't have. This said, economic prospects in Japan have budged little from what they were in the depression of the 1990's. I am tempted to believe that all advanced-industrial societies eventually get to the point in which further increases in productivity do not result in improved lives for people. When many people had no stoves, it was possible to get rich by producing stoves to sell to those who lacked them. What remains as a market for stoves is either population growth or replacement. But such is so for just about everything. Quote:I had assumed for years that the fall in population was caused by war Democide is not a certainty. There are circumstances, largely that people are angry and looking for scapegoats that some demagogue offers as veritable sacrifices for the satiation of anger. Any successful, visible minority that seems to so be prosperous that any fool can see it as exploiters is vulnerable. German Jews went quickly from being a model minority to pariahs. I can think of groups in America who could experience such treatment if the economy fails. Quote:There is still speculation involved in this, and obviously a lot more Democide goes beyond a settling of accounts against culpable people. War criminals, perhaps including profiteers, may be obvious culprits. I do not consider the prosecution of fascist war criminals a sort of democide. Blaming whole populations? Driving out people without food and with slow transportation to the new demarcation line is obviously a way to kill people. Such allegedly happened to Germans in some countries after World War II. Massacres are usually democide. The times that instill the most hatred are the ones most likely to create tragedy on the grandest scale. So regiment the society, control the media so that there is no meaningful way of opposing harsh measures, and define people as enemies. But also worth noting is that democides come to an end, often due to military defeat. Quote:There are other population effects that appear to occur around a Fear, despair, and overall pessimism. Ordinarily the sunnier mood of a prosperous (or at least economically-resilient) 1T creates jobs rebuilding what was destroyed. Quote:There's still a lot of stuff to be figured out here, such as how a Well, Nazi Germany exported its democide to countries in which Jews reasonably thought themselves safe, including such countries as Greece and the Netherlands in which antisemitism was rare. I suspect that depopulation for any reason creates a vacuum that attracts population seeking to fill the vacuum. It is arguable that the English were able to settle the eastern coast of North America from Maine to Georgia because the First Peoples had largely died off in epidemics. Establishing a farm seems not to require great sophistication, so farm laborers and marginal farmers settle where people used to be. The promise of a better life encourages people to seek out better. RE: Generational Dynamics World View - Tim Randal Walker - 11-05-2019 Yes, I think that the 80 year span is a good theory because it is both simple and inevitable. That elder generation had been fading from public life/public influence due to its aging, and now that generation has begun to rapidly disappear. I recall a description of age 80 as the "fragility barrier"-an individual's body has become quite fragile, and he is living on borrowed time, in effect. RE: Generational Dynamics World View - pbrower2a - 11-05-2019 (11-05-2019, 12:06 PM)Tim Randal Walker Wrote: Yes, I think that the 80 year span is a good theory because it is both simple and inevitable. That elder generation had been fading from public life/public influence due to its aging, and now that generation has begun to rapidly disappear. I recall a description of age 80 as the "fragility barrier"-an individual's body has become quite fragile, and he is living on borrowed time, in effect. Prime example of a Xenakis scare: 9/11 happened 59 years, eight months, and about twenty days after the Pearl Harbor attack. Many people who did not remember Pearl Harbor saw that, at least for the time, saw 9/11 as an analogue to Pearl Harbor. So expect gasoline rationing! Seek a job in a defense plant! If you are of the right age, see a military recruiter! Instead of planning for a vacation or going on an expedition for a new wardrobe, buy war bonds! Americans may have thought of such, but they acted very differently. They went to the shopping mall and went on vacation. War plants did not hire everyone who wanted a job. Entertainers and pro athletes (blatant, tragic, and extreme exception Pat Tillman) did not give up precious time in lucrative careers to serve in the Armed Forces. There were no bond drives. Instead we had a corrupt speculative boom that one saw playing out in Sinclair Lewis' Babbitt, a novel that made more sense in the Double-Zero decade than in any other decade since the Roaring Twenties. OK, this Crisis will not be like the others. We are not under the thumb of a monarch tightening the screws on a people seeking more freedom as in 1775. We will have no interstate crisis between people who consider slavery an abomination and those who think it the most wonderful institution ever devised as a solution to economic need. Democratic institutions are paradoxically more secure in Germany, Italy, Japan... and possibly Bulgaria, Croatia, and Romania as well... as in the United States. (Thank you TEA Party and its ultimate exponent Donald Trump!), so any replay of "the day that will live in infamy" will be a cinematic reconstruction. I see the impeachment of Donald Trump as a pivotal event in this Crisis Era, whether Trump is removed or not. So perhaps this Crisis begins with an economic meltdown (see also the Great Stock Market Crash of 1929 and the Panic of 1857) and ends with (the best hope that I can imagine) a flurry of reforms of economic, educational, and political life. Bang or whimper? We have yet to know. In the meantime we dispatched Osama bin Laden and Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi. RE: Generational Dynamics World View - Warren Dew - 11-05-2019 (11-04-2019, 11:45 AM)John J. Xenakis Wrote: ** 04-Nov-2019 World View: Democide and population growth I'd suggest that the cycles are not linked, just as the generational cycle is not linked to the 58 year echoes. Rather, when the population peaks, the form the culling takes depends on the time in the generational cycle. If it's the crisis period, maybe you get a deadly war where women and children are killed along with the men, or a war that takes out infrastructure and results in lots of civilian casualties. If it's a high, maybe you get executions of whoever the leadership doesn't like - Ukrainians under Stalin, whoever it was that Pol Pot was executing, prisoners taken by Aztec military raids. In unravelings, perhaps you get market redistribution of food away from the poor, as with the Irish Potato Famine. Maybe in an awakening, old people are left to starve - a lot of Lost didn't have social security to fall back on. Actually, I think the empirical evidence suggests that during crisis periods, population limitation tends to be connected to reproductive limitation. There were scads of people starving to death in the Great Depression, but there were plenty of people not having kids. In the current crisis, the percentages of nonreproductive "genders" is increasing. It would be interesting to take a wider look to find more data. RE: Generational Dynamics World View - pbrower2a - 11-06-2019 (11-05-2019, 05:52 PM)Warren Dew Wrote:(11-04-2019, 11:45 AM)John J. Xenakis Wrote: ** 04-Nov-2019 World View: Democide and population growth Good explanation, except that I interpret the Russian and Soviet history from about 1915 (when World War I started going badly for Imperial Russia) to 1945 (end of the Great Patriotic War) as a protracted Crisis. The mass death involved with the collectivization of Soviet agriculture looks like a Crisis in its results. I see NEP (New Economic Policy, an attempt to mitigate the harmful nature of Bolshevism) as an abortive High much as the late 1930's were in America. Forced collectivization killed more people than the Great Purge whose lethality is better known because the victims are well known. The Great Patriotic War came as the Crisis of other countries. Other countries that seemed to be headed to Highs got full-blown Crises, too. It might be possible to see generational cycles in ancient societies such as Rome, Greece, Persia, India, and China that have good record-keeping, but not so obvious in pre-literate societies or those whose record-keeping is spotty or destroyed. 1T killings are either victors' retribution (leftists and liberals under Franco), punishment of outright criminals of the previous Crisis war (people responsible for Buchenwald or Bataan), or suppression of dissidents who have shown overt disloyalty (Julius and Ethel Rosenberg). 2T killings are hard for me to define unless by terrorists that the society thinks that it can co-opt. 3T mass death is often, as with the Irish potato famine, poor people that an increasingly-plutocratic society finds expendable. In a 4T -- all Hell can break loose, and people have thought themselves model minorities for their successes suddenly become pariahs as alleged exploiters, rakes, and violators of cultural traditions. Also note well: the criminal justice system is particularly harsh in a 4T. The peak year for executions in the United States was 1935, which is about when American law enforcement found the tools for hounding the likes of John Dillinger and the Barrow-Parker gang to their doom. RE: Generational Dynamics World View - John J. Xenakis - 11-06-2019 ** 06-Nov-2019 High (11-05-2019, 05:52 PM)Warren Dew Wrote: > It would be interesting to take a wider look to find more That's what I've been doing for 17 years, having done thousands of generational analyses of hundreds of countries throughout history. There's tons of data in those articles and analyses. If you insist on continuing to use the word "high," then you really don't know what's going on in Africa, Asia and elsewhere outside the West. RE: Generational Dynamics World View - Warren Dew - 11-06-2019 What word would you prefer that I use? Personally I consider the "high" to be the most repressive era even in the US after WWII, but at least everyone on this forum knows what time period it means. RE: Generational Dynamics World View - John J. Xenakis - 11-06-2019 ** 06-Nov-2019 Recovery Era (11-06-2019, 08:30 PM)Warren Dew Wrote: > What word would you prefer that I use? Personally I consider the Recovery Era. I.e., win or lose, you have to recover from a generational crisis war. Or First Turning. It's a very austere, repressive time, often a violent time, when everyone is still traumatized from the war, and it's almost never a "high" time. RE: Generational Dynamics World View - beechnut79 - 11-06-2019 (11-06-2019, 08:30 PM)Warren Dew Wrote: What word would you prefer that I use? Personally I consider the "high" to be the most repressive era even in the US after WWII, but at least everyone on this forum knows what time period it means.I tend to believe that it was called a high because it actually was a loosening of the restrictive mood of the GDWWII years. Emotions may have been strained for those not in the Organization Man/Suzy Homemaker camp, but for the most part not as much as the turnings before and after. Many blue and white collar families alike, so long as they were not communist sympathizers didn’t have to worry about daddy coming home jobless. Mom and pop stores and diners were still abundant in an era of stability where the biggest disruption may have been Elvis Presley’s wiggle which some considered obscene. Households of the “Leave it to Beaver” era were swept away in a sea of prosperity and, for the most part outside of Hollywood, family stability as divorce was still highly stigmatized within the mainstream. And while the earth began to shake a bit when Rosa Parks refused to go to the back of the bus, the major upheaval was still a decade away. |