The New Crisis War Unfolding Now?

[pbrower2a]

(07-25-2018, 07:30 AM)Marypoza Wrote:

(07-24-2018, 07:47 PM)Tim Randal Walker Wrote: I have been reviewing some archived threads.  The MegaSaeculum thread, the Alternating Paradign thread, the Two Lifetime thread.

In the MegaSaeculum thread, it is predicted that this 4T will be a "Mild Crisis".    I mention this because, so far, the USA seems to be experiencing a relatively mild 4T.

In the Two Lifetime thread, it was suggested that there are two alternating kinds of questions:  1.  Stick with the status quo, or return to a past status?  2.  Stick with the status quo, or transform the outer world?  Number one would correspond to to a Dionysus cycle, and number two would correspond to an Apollo cycle.  If choosing the status quo, the 4T of a Dionysus cycle may offer, in addition, some comparatively minor reforms.

With our present cycle we have been seeing an attempt to revert to the Gilded Age.  Preserving the status quo means preserving the New Deal paradigm.  Such worldly reforms growing out of the Boom Awakening are basically about patching up the old status quo.  We may get health care reform, for example, but nothing as drastic as revamping the economy (The Great Power cycle) or founding a new country (the Revolutionary cycle).

-- a Mild Crises could explain why we can't figure out if we're in a 4T or still in an extremely long 3T.  Maybe we're supposed to be fighting the Culture Wars this time around.  I honestly can't see a civil war involving 2 opposing armies. I can & do see guerilla style civil unrest, & on the non-violent side, mass protests as we move forward into this 4 T

Had things gone right, then we might have had a cultural crisis in which Americans simply wipe away the bad practices of a 3T -- the mindless mass culture, the crooked business practices, and the anti-scientific superstition and bigotry.  By now we have a President and leadership within his Party who want what looks like a New Feudalism, an order in which 95% or so of the people suffer for 2% as the Will of God. But this is incompatible with our democratic heritage which implies the responsibility of government to the People instead of the people toward some entrenched elite that has every tool of repression at its disposal.

If one assumes that the intensity of a Crisis is its destructiveness (World War II was the most destructive Crisis Era ever), then the intensity arises from the dreadfulness of one of the possibilities. When one considers what the Great Powers were going into the Crisis of 1940 -- the British and French Empires, the Soviet Union, the United States, the severely-flawed Republic of China, and the monstrous Evil Empires of Nazi Germany and Thug Japan, it is easy to see why that Crisis could be so horrific. The United States of America might have been less willing to build an atom bomb had it not been for the atrocities of Nazi Germany -- and had it not been for such horrors as the Bataan Death March, maybe Japan might have been spared what destruction it received.

We still do not know how this Crisis will go. Crises Eras are typically the shortest phases of the cycle as they usually force decisive resolutions. Those who want wars for profit or national glory find that the war isn't so profitable and glorious as it might seem -- and that it requires ever-increasing exactions of life, capital, and toil. Those who might not have wanted war and got it want to get the war over with. FDR may have made a convincing speech that expressed his contempt for war -- but once he got it, he would stop at nothing to prevent  a fascist victory.

I look at the political leadership of America in the last three Crisis Eras -- and I see great moral and intellectual leaders. There may have been no such leader as the center of the American Revolution, but there were enough excellent ones who could eventually work out a response to the danger of the time that we got through well. Abraham Lincoln is the epitome of wartime leadership throughout his Presidency. FDR was basically the attempt to stop the hemorrhaging of the economy in an economic meltdown (something like Obama, who may have been more effective with the economy but less able to change the political culture) in his first two terms -- probably because Obama rescued the people who wanted a New Feudalism . Trump is the intended vehicle of that New Feudalism -- and he fails at that because of Americans resisting him and his policies, or America becomes the Evil Empire that the rest of the world must resist -- and will resist!

Think carefully of the enemies that America had in the Second World War. Japan has far greater economic prowess now than it had in the 1940s. Its scientific community is excellent. It could hardly be more up-to-date in technology. Germany is similar in many respects, and it does not have France and Britain as enemies -- and indeed, in a war with America those are likely allies. Against a fascist America it would have the Royal Navy and the Royal Air Force on its side. Whoops -- I just spoke of two of America's friends in the last Crisis War not being reliable allies -- excuse me, partners in crime. 

If you thought the destructive power of World War II could not be exceeded, think again. America was out of the range of propeller aircraft such as the Stukas and Zeros that rained apocalypse upon Warsaw, Amsterdam, Coventry, and Manila. Even if the munitions are no more powerful, the jet aircraft can put such places as Denver and Dallas within range of carrier-based jet fighter off the coast of California -- or off the American East Coast. Chicago at the end of a Crisis War could look like Warsaw after the end of a short Crisis war even without the use of nuclear weapons.

Crises work out contradictions between power and reality. If we do not live in a time of unsettling contradictions, then what is an unsettling condition? Political and economic power in America (for now) is clearly on the right, with persons close to fascist ideology as their principles. Objective reality is probably center-left by American standards, which reflects where ABC, CBS, and NBC news are, where NPR and PBS are, and where the vast majority of big-city daily newspapers are. The only semblance of feudalism in the American heritage is the legacy of the slave-owning planters, and technology and learning have made that heritage unsupportable. We have the most despotic or dictatorial President ever, yet we have decades of democratic heritage. We have competent news media that have not changed their journalistic standards and were largely reliable for telling the truth -- yet the President lambasts any story that he dislikes as 'fake news'. Americans mostly believe in Christian moral principles, and in general if they are not Christians they have the moral principles if not the theology. Nothing about Christian morality fits Donald Trump, whose Christianity is identity and sentimentality. 

History, to paraphrase Hegel, is the resolution of contradictions. Crisis eras are the times in which the contradictions become most severe -- and pressing.