03-17-2021, 10:02 PM
(03-17-2021, 09:25 PM)Tim Randal Walker Wrote: David Horn said:
"...events don't have to provide a clear and distinct 4T for the theory to be valid...we have had mild 4Ts in the past...the Glorious Revolution was more an amalgam of critical events than a singular crisis, yet we have no problem citing it as a 4T."
This appears to be how the present is playing out.
David Horn also said:
"Success is not mandatory...nor is outright failure. Some contests fight to a draw or something similar...."
Steve Ryan posted to the paleo 4T site that Ireland once had a Crisis with muddled results.
Perhaps this 4T will end up being called The Troubles or something similar.
If victory should require a nuclear exchange, then a draw would be better. Stalemate ends chess games and wars, too.
Turnings can be stretched, but that ordinarily requires an all-powerful leader able to repress all change not of his liking. A very long 1T might apply to Spain from the time in which Spain withdrew its Blue Division from the Eastern Front in 1944. (Technically the Blue Division was on leave from the Spanish Army while volunteering to serve the Axis side). Domestically, Spain was already under a rigid order characteristic of a 1T, but this had a dictatorship enforcing the conformity... brutally.
The real 4T for Spain culminated in the Spanish Civil War, a near certainty when a large part of the Spanish populace was about as modern as the United States at the time in culture and social values while another large part still had social values characteristic of a feudal society and whose sole concession to modernity was acceptance of advanced technology in warfare, repression, and material productivity.
(At one point in this Crisis Era I saw the Spanish Civil War as a possible analogy for a country as ideologically polarized as the USA at the end of the 3T. Think of the posts of Classic X'er as an example of what the Right might have on the surface... with savage brutality within range of eruption at any moment in which such was possible). That has not happened, and such is all to the good.
Spain under Franco had a huge brain drain, as anyone seeking to exercise creative abilities or enjoying social justice left for other countries. Spanish political refugees may have replaced much of the wartime losses of France.
Franco kept a 1T-like era seemingly in operation from at the latest the early 1940's until his death in 1975. Then Spain went into an Awakening Era -- belatedly, and perhaps not for long, but long enough to force huge changes in Spanish social norms.
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.