Generational Dynamics World View

[John J. Xenakis]

** 01-Nov-2019 World View: Democide and crisis war deaths

mps92 Wrote:> John, that's one of the most brilliant arguments I've ever
> heard. Is that an original argument that you came up with
> yourself?

I stand on the shoulders of giants.

mps92 Wrote:> There is a tacit understanding among people who've studied history
> or biology - that disease is one of the natural mechanisms to
> avoid overpopulation. That's why there was no disease in America
> until the Euros arrived - the population density on this continent
> was too low to support an epidemic. Therefore, vaccinating and
> attempting to defeat disease is going against mother nature, and
> perhaps letting disease kill people is actually the moral
> solution. Frankly, I'm surprised that the first world hasn't had
> another epidemic (I guess the last one was HIV?). It's badly
> needed.

mps92 Wrote:> And perhaps mass suicide is necessary for the same
> reason. Although, I would add that wild animals do not commit
> suicide. Suicide hasn't always been one of nature's "tools" to
> reduce the population, just something that has emerged
> recently. But for every person that chooses to commit suicide,
> perhaps that saves one person from starving to death in the next
> famine. So in a way, suicide is actually the most reasonable way
> to reduce the population.

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...t-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
> War significantly reduced population on even a national
> scale.

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
> very clear that when the government goes after the guns of its
> citizens, genocide happens and has happened 16 times in the 20th
> century.

> http://hawaii.edu/powerkills

> In 1911, Turkey established gun control. From 1915-1917, 1.5
> million Armenians, unable to defend themselves against their
> ethnic-cleansing government, were arrested and exterminated.

> 2. In 1929, the former Soviet Union established gun control as a
> means of controlling the “more difficult” of their citizens. From
> 1929 to the death of Stalin, 40 million Soviets met an untimely
> end at the hand of various governmental agencies as they were
> arrested and exterminated.

> 3. After the rise of the Nazi’s, Germany established their version
> of gun control in 1938 and from 1939 to 1945, 13 million Jews,
> gypsies, homosexuals, the mentally ill, and others, who were
> unable to defend themselves against the “Brown Shirts”, were
> arrested and exterminated. Interestingly, the Brown Shirts were
> eventually targeted for extermination themselves following their
> blind acts of allegiance to Hitler. Any American military and
> police would be wise to grasp the historical significance of the
> Brown Shirts’ fate.

> 4. After Communist China established gun control in 1935, an
> estimated 50 million political dissidents, unable to defend
> themselves against their fascist leaders, were arrested and
> exterminated.

> 5. Closer to home, Guatemala established gun control in 1964. From
> 1964 to 1981, 100,000 Mayans, unable to defend themselves against
> their ruthless dictatorship, were arrested and exterminated.

> 6. Uganda established gun control in 1970. From 1971 to 1979,
> 300,000 Christians, unable to defend themselves from their
> dictatorial government, were arrested and exterminated.

> 7. Cambodia established gun control in 1956. From 1975 to 1977,
> one million of the “educated” people, unable to defend themselves
> against their fascist government, were arrested and exterminated.

> 8. In 1994, Rwanda disarmed the Tutsi people and being unable to
> defend themselves from their totalitarian government, nearly one
> million were summarily executed. The total numbers of victims who
> lost their lives because of gun control is approximately 70
> million people in the 20th century. The historical voices from 70
> million corpses speak loudly and clearly to those Americans who
> are advocating for a de facto gun ban. Governments murdered four
> times as many civilians as were killed in all the international
> and domestic wars combined. Governments murdered millions more
> people than were killed by common criminals and it all followed
> gun control. Historically, American gun control legislation has
> been imitating Hitler’s Nazi Germany gun control legislation for
> quite some time. Consider the key provisions of the Nazi Weapons
> Act of 1938 and compare it with the United States Gun Control Act
> of 1968. The parallels of both the provisions and the legal
> language are eerily similar.

> Only fools and corpses follow -them-.

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:

• Democide deaths after a generational crisis war which is an
  external war.
  
  
• Democide deaths during a generational crisis war which is an
  ethnic, tribal or class civil war.
  
  
• Democide deaths during the Awakening and Unraveling eras following
  a generational crisis war which is an ethnic, tribal or class civil
  war.

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.

[John J. Xenakis]

** 02-Nov-2019 World View: Population growth

Tom Mazanec Wrote:> Then why has the human population grown every decade since about
> 1400?

Guest Wrote:> Because most wars fought since 1400 have not been world wars; they
> are relatively localized conflicts. Also, the firepower involved
> was much less. Yes, you could butcher a lot of people with swords
> and knives, but you had to catch them first. With carpet bombing
> it's much easier to kill huge numbers of people. Countries at
> peace could see populations grow, as opposed to countries at
> war. Improvements in medical care and diet (especially food
> production) play a huge role. Infant mortality was sky high in the
> past, and now it is rock bottom. WW 3 will play out
> differently.

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:

• Population of China -- 200 BC to 1700 AD

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.

[pbrower2a]

(11-02-2019, 10:19 AM)John J. Xenakis Wrote: ** 01-Nov-2019 World View: Democide and crisis war deaths

mps92 Wrote:>   John, that's one of the most brilliant arguments I've ever
>   heard. Is that an original argument that you came up with
>   yourself?

I stand on the shoulders of giants.

mps92 Wrote:>   There is a tacit understanding among people who've studied history
>   or biology - that disease is one of the natural mechanisms to
>   avoid overpopulation. That's why there was no disease in America
>   until the Euros arrived - the population density on this continent
>   was too low to support an epidemic. Therefore, vaccinating and
>   attempting to defeat disease is going against mother nature, and
>   perhaps letting disease kill people is actually the moral
>   solution. Frankly, I'm surprised that the first world hasn't had
>   another epidemic (I guess the last one was HIV?). It's badly
>   needed.

mps92 Wrote:>   And perhaps mass suicide is necessary for the same
>   reason. Although, I would add that wild animals do not commit
>   suicide. Suicide hasn't always been one of nature's "tools" to
>   reduce the population, just something that has emerged
>   recently. But for every person that chooses to commit suicide,
>   perhaps that saves one person from starving to death in the next
>   famine. So in a way, suicide is actually the most reasonable way
>   to reduce the population.

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.

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...t-suicide/

Quote: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.

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
>   War significantly reduced population on even a national
>   scale.

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.

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 problem:

aeden Wrote:>   The often quoted University of Hawaii Democide Project makes is
>   very clear that when the government goes after the guns of its
>   citizens, genocide happens and has happened 16 times in the 20th
>   century.

>   http://hawaii.edu/powerkills

>   In 1911, Turkey established gun control. From 1915-1917, 1.5
>   million Armenians, unable to defend themselves against their
>   ethnic-cleansing government, were arrested and exterminated.

>   2. In 1929, the former Soviet Union established gun control as a
>   means of controlling the “more difficult” of their citizens. From
>   1929 to the death of Stalin, 40 million Soviets met an untimely
>   end at the hand of various governmental agencies as they were
>   arrested and exterminated.

>   3. After the rise of the Nazi’s, Germany established their version
>   of gun control in 1938 and from 1939 to 1945, 13 million Jews,
>   gypsies, homosexuals, the mentally ill, and others, who were
>   unable to defend themselves against the “Brown Shirts”, were
>   arrested and exterminated. Interestingly, the Brown Shirts were
>   eventually targeted for extermination themselves following their
>   blind acts of allegiance to Hitler. Any American military and
>   police would be wise to grasp the historical significance of the
>   Brown Shirts’ fate.

>   4. After Communist China established gun control in 1935, an
>   estimated 50 million political dissidents, unable to defend
>   themselves against their fascist leaders, were arrested and
>   exterminated.

>   5. Closer to home, Guatemala established gun control in 1964. From
>   1964 to 1981, 100,000 Mayans, unable to defend themselves against
>   their ruthless dictatorship, were arrested and exterminated.

>   6. Uganda established gun control in 1970. From 1971 to 1979,
>   300,000 Christians, unable to defend themselves from their
>   dictatorial government, were arrested and exterminated.

>   7. Cambodia established gun control in 1956. From 1975 to 1977,
>   one million of the “educated” people, unable to defend themselves
>   against their fascist government, were arrested and exterminated.

>   8. In 1994, Rwanda disarmed the Tutsi people and being unable to
>   defend themselves from their totalitarian government, nearly one
>   million were summarily executed. The total numbers of victims who
>   lost their lives because of gun control is approximately 70
>   million people in the 20th century. The historical voices from 70
>   million corpses speak loudly and clearly to those Americans who
>   are advocating for a de facto gun ban. Governments murdered four
>   times as many civilians as were killed in all the international
>   and domestic wars combined. Governments murdered millions more
>   people than were killed by common criminals and it all followed
>   gun control. Historically, American gun control legislation has
>   been imitating Hitler’s Nazi Germany gun control legislation for
>   quite some time. Consider the key provisions of the Nazi Weapons
>   Act of 1938 and compare it with the United States Gun Control Act
>   of 1968. The parallels of both the provisions and the legal
>   language are eerily similar.

>   Only fools and corpses follow -them-.

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:

• Democide deaths after a generational crisis war which is an
  external war.
  
  
• Democide deaths during a generational crisis war which is an
  ethnic, tribal or class civil war.
  
  
• Democide deaths during the Awakening and Unraveling eras following
  a generational crisis war which is an ethnic, tribal or class civil
  war.
  

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.

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

1. religious services
   
2. membership in such professions as law, teaching, and journalism
   
3. ownership of newspapers of any kind
   
4. access to broadcasting
   
5. ownership of cars, bicycles, or horse-drawn vehicles
   
6. use of public transit
   
7. patronage of theaters. live or cinematic 
   
8. the practice of medicine except for a Jewish clientele
   
9. education for Jewish children
   
10. being out and about without badges that drew attention to their membership of a discredited 'race'
    
11. marriage and sexual liaisons with "Aryans"
    
12. living anywhere other than restricted ghettos 
    
13. ownership of private businesses
    
14. ownership of dogs
    

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.

[John J. Xenakis]

** 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
systems policy is a key component of the governance system of our
country and it was an important item for discussion at the
plenum. ...

We must uphold the principle that ‘one country’ is the top
priority and the foundation for the implementation of ‘two
systems’, and ‘two systems’ must belong to and come under ‘one
country’ and be unified within ‘one country’. ...

The plenum has made the decision that we must enhance the system
and mechanism over the appointment of the chief executive and
principal officials in the special administrative regions, and the
system over the interpretation of the Basic Law by the National
People’s Congress, enabling the central government to exercise its
authority as stipulated in the constitution and the Basic Law.

[We will] establish a sound legal system and enforcement mechanism
for the safeguarding of national security in the special
administrative regions, and support the special administrative
regions in strengthening law enforcement.

[We will] strengthen national education of Hong Kong and Macau
people, especially civil servants and youth, including education
of the constitution and the Basic Law, Chinese history and
culture, in order to boost their national consciousness and
patriotic spirit."

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/diplomac...l-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-hongk...SKBN1XC03J
(Reuters, 2-Nov-2019)

[Warren Dew]

(11-02-2019, 10:19 AM)John J. Xenakis Wrote: 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.

Why does generational dynamics imply that generational crisis wars reduce the population?  Or are we talking about some extension to that theory?

[John J. Xenakis]

(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
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.

Why does generational dynamics imply that generational crisis wars reduce the population?  Or are we talking about some extension to that theory?

Because the population grows faster than the food supply.

[John J. Xenakis]

*** 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
  
• History of the Iran/Iraq war
  
• Confessional governments in Lebanon and Iraq
  
• Global protests -- around the world
  

****
**** 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):

• In Lebanon, it started with the introduction of new charges
  for phone calls on WhatsApp. On Tuesday after two weeks of protests,
  prime minister Saad Hariri stood down.
  
• In Chile, a 4% rise in subway fares brought a million people there
  out into the street.
  
• Ecuador's government has been forced to repeal a bill that would
  have ended fuel subsidies.
  
• In Bolivia, they've been fighting street battles since the
  election on October 20. President Morales is trying to hang on for a
  fourth term.
  
• In Hong Kong, the unrest has moved well beyond the Extradition
  Bill that sparked the protests, and is now being driven by a much
  wider set of grievances.
  
• In Iraq, thousands have defied a curfew to demand more jobs,
  better public services and an end to corruption. Some 200 people have
  died there so far.
  
• In Russia, it was the exclusion of opposition candidates from
  council elections.
  
• In Barcelona Spain, the jailing of separatist leaders from
  Catalonia.
  
• And across the world in recent week,s we've had recent climate
  change protests in more than 200 countries.

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-Suprem...732738610/

Sources:

• Protesters slaughtered, Iran tightens grip: 'We don't have any media spotlight on this,' says Middle East expert (Fox News, 1-Nov-2019)
  
• Iraqis pour into streets for biggest protest day since Saddam (Reuters, 1-Nov-2019)
  
• Pompeo says Iraqi government should listen to protesters (Reuters, 1-Nov-2019)
  
• Enraged Iraqi Protesters Blame Iran for Killings (Foreign Policy, 1-Nov-2019)
  
• Iran Is Losing the Middle East, Protests in Lebanon and Iraq Show (Foreign Policy, 22-Oct-2019)
  
• 'Fear factor is broken': protesters demand removal of Iraqi government (Guardian, London, 1-Nov-2019)
  
• Iraq / Lebanon / As protests rock Baghdad and Beirut, Iran digs in (Reuters, 1-Nov-2019)
  
• The Arab/Muslim World: Iran-Iraq War (1979 - 1988) (Jewish Virtual Library)
  
• Iran and Iraq remember war that cost more than a million lives (Guardian, London, 23-Sep-2010)
  
• Iran-Iraq War / The Imposed War (1980-1988) (Global Security)
  
• Iraq / Lebanon / Iran / Protests toppled two governments in three days, but the fight is only beginning (CNN, 2-Nov-2019)
  
• Why is Iran so afraid of Iraqi and Lebanese anti-government protests? (NBC News, 2-Nov-2019)
  
• Iraqi protesters block major port near Basra as unrest continues (Al-Jazeera, 2-Nov-2019)
  
• ‘All of Them Are Thieves’: Iraqis Defy Security Forces to Protest Corruption (New York Times, 25-Oct-2019)

Related Articles:

• Massive anti-government street protests paralyze Lebanon (21-Oct-2019)
  
  
• Riots in Iraq's Basra evoke fault lines of 1980s Iran-Iraq war (09-Sep-2018)
  
  
• Iraqi Sunnis are turning against al-Qaeda in Iraq (01-Apr-2007)
  
• Massive Beirut explosion killing Rafiq Hariri puts Lebanon into state of shock (16-Feb-2005)
  

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
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John J. Xenakis
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E-mail: john@GenerationalDynamics.com
Web site: http://www.GenerationalDynamics.com
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[John J. Xenakis]

** 03-Nov-2019 World View: Hong Kong knife attacker bites politician's ear off

• Alleged attacker after being beaten by crowd and saved
  by police (SCMP)

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/poli...er-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/n...-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/x...tm#e191026


** 2-Oct-19 World View -- Teenage protester shot by policeman in Hong Kong's worst day of violence
** http://www.generationaldynamics.com/pg/x...tm#e191002


** 22-Jun-19 World View -- Hong Kong protests show historic split between northern and southern China
** http://www.generationaldynamics.com/pg/x...tm#e190622


** 28-Jun-19 World View -- Book Announcement: World View: War between China and Japan - by John J. Xenakis
** http://www.generationaldynamics.com/pg/x...tm#e190628

[Warren Dew]

(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?

Because the population grows faster than the food supply.

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.

[pbrower2a]

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.

[John J. Xenakis]

** 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
> reduce the population? Or are we talking about some extension to
> that theory?

(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
> least population growth reduction, at some point. It doesn't have
> to be linked to the generational cycle.

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.

[pbrower2a]

(11-04-2019, 11:45 AM)John J. Xenakis Wrote: ** 04-Nov-2019 World View: Democide and population growth



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.

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
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.

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
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.

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
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."

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
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.

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
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.

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.

[Tim Randal Walker]

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.

[pbrower2a]

(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.

[Warren Dew]

(11-04-2019, 11:45 AM)John J. Xenakis Wrote: ** 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
>   reduce the population?  Or are we talking about some extension to
>   that theory?  

(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
>   least population growth reduction, at some point.  It doesn't have
>   to be linked to the generational cycle.  

That's a good point, and it's one of the reasons that I've been
puzzled by this issue for years.

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.

[pbrower2a]

(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

(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?  

(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
>   least population growth reduction, at some point.  It doesn't have
>   to be linked to the generational cycle.  

That's a good point, and it's one of the reasons that I've been
puzzled by this issue for years.

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.

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.

[John J. Xenakis]

** 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
> data.

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.

[Warren Dew]

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.

[John J. Xenakis]

** 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
> "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.

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.

[beechnut79]

(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.