11-01-2018, 07:47 AM
(10-29-2018, 11:36 AM)Bob Butler 54 Wrote:(10-29-2018, 10:04 AM)Bill the Piper Wrote:Teejay Wrote:Although given the Middle East has just started it's Fourth Turning which is predicted to one hell of a battle between Islamists and Secularists. A possible final battle of the 'War on Terror' or more appropriately the 'War on Islamism' will probably occur during this Fourth Turning or in the first half of the First Turning. Islamists who are Islamic identarians could be subject to this McCarthyite purge as well.
I see it differently. The Middle East might have had its 4T in the 1960s, with the rise of nationalistic strongmen like Saddam, Qaddafi, etc. Then the 2000s, with al-Qaeda reaching peak popularity, look like a 2T since we know religion is most potent during an awakening. So the Middle East might have a 3T right now, which would explain the fragmentation of power and the existence of fallen states like Libya or Yemen.
IMHO Islamists are not equivalents of the alt-right, but of American boomer Jesus freaks or missionary "social purity movements" of the early 20th century. Purging Islamists as if they were identitarians would however be a good step, but the Western Left is chronically incapable of being opposed to anything concocted by brown people.
I have another perspective. Both the capitalist-democratic-colonial powers and the communists treated the locals in the Middle East like trash. They were more interested in cheap oil for their own people than improving the lot of the locals. When it came time to oppose the establishment, both the capitalists and the communists had discredited themselves, leaving them clinging extra hard to the old Islamic Agricultural Age value systems the only option.
A Venezuelan politician a few decades ago called oil, the basis of an economic boom that did little good for the Venezuelan masses, la mierda del Diablo -- the $#!+ of the Devil. If I were to tell countries how to develop, I would tell them to first put emphasis on improving the lot of peasant farmers who would then become a domestic market for cottage industries that, among other things, offers shoes for the feet of the peasants.
With capitalism comes vice; with Communism comes tyranny. Muslims can apparently tolerate tyranny if it fits their national cultures; Marxism-Leninism is un-Islamic. So are brothels, gambling casinos, and cocktail lounges. Vice is infamously unimaginative.
Quote:Alas the old systems are autocratic, leaving strongmen in charge. Right now there is no path for improvement. The Islamists are but one faction building on local alliances based on a religious sects, tribal identity or a political party. It seems to matter little which, as all result in corrupt strongmen with strong self interest defeating any attempt at checks and balances. As long as they give loyalty to these things, the idea of tolerance and workings of democracy are alien to them. They will go in circles indefinitely.
I can think of people who would do much the same in America, except that it would be done in the names of Christianity and 'free enterprise' -- with the words 'free enterprise' contorted to explain that the owners and bosses are free to use their economic power to dominate everyone else.
Quote:The West might favor democracy, often thinking the transition is far easier than it turns out to be, but this has always been rough to implement. The people of the Middle East don't trust it, and you end up with corrupt strongman government. It seems to always take a century or three to switch over to true democratic norms. We ourselves have our elite robber barons to take care of. It is hard to feel the Middle Eastern people are not doing as well as expected when every other attempt to transition stumbles and fails for centuries. Even Anglo America had to fight wars for centuries, faced many many crises, to get as far as we have. We're not there yet.
Western democracy has had its setbacks -- and we know well the biggest one. Hurt feelings from a military defeat, hyperinflation that turned a class of small-savers into paupers made Germany a country with no middle class and little stake in capitalism or democracy -- and the economic meltdown beginning in 1929 made the country a combat zone for extremists Right and Left.
I see the post-Industrial era, the Information era, rending the assumptions of many Americans that all that they need do to do well is to work making things. Remember well: even more than education, the factory was the quickest way out of extreme poverty. Detroit, the city that started to put the world on wheels, was once the richest big cities in the world. Now it is the poorest big city in America (unless you want to call places like Camden and Gary 'big cities').
I could make the case that the contemporary robber barons are worse than those of the Gilded Age. At least the railroad, meat-packing, steel, oil, and vehicle plutocrats were initially innovators who brought forth new ways of creating wealth and consumer goodies. Making a concession that the plutocrats who got rich in the computer business and medical technology are innovators who needed a prosperous populace to prosper as they do, many of today's plutocrats are simply heirs and rentiers who have the most reactionary interests. Example: Donald Trump is a successful landlord, a rent collector.
Quote:Progress is being made. Alas it is by the people with the most modern values giving up and migrating to western countries where democratic values have already taken hold. Alas, they are running into prejudice from our own conservatives. Did I mention that we aren't all the way transitioned ourselves?
It took America "four score and seven years", roughly, to decide that slavery that made America a glaring hypocrisy would have to die. It took America almost two centuries to decide after independence that local government had no right to disenfranchise people because of having slave ancestors.
And then of course there is Donald Trump, who has dredged the most primitive drives in the American psyche -- drives that sophisticated and intelligent people recognize are left in the mental abyss. The Information Age, which allows someone like me to access knowledge even from antiquity to recognize that human nature has changed little even if institutions and economic realities have, has left multitudes behind and, having often destroyed the nexus between ability to work and having a job that sustains one, has made someone with a primitive mind (Donald Trump) the most important person in America.
The ideal subject of totalitarian rule is not the convinced Nazi or the dedicated Communist but instead the people for whom the distinction between fact and fiction, true and false, no longer exists -- Hannah Arendt.