Monday, February 13, 2017
Twelve Stars Versus Barbarism
The fine folks at DiEM25 have their proposal up for a New Deal for Europe. Excellent stuff. Also, shouts out to the people of Romania for their wondrous and inspiring anti-corruption protests. Soon the whole planet is going to be one gigantic EuroMaidan.
Sunday, February 12, 2017
From the Party of Lincoln to Huylo's House-serfs
It's been a long, slow decline from the Republic Party of Lincoln the Liberator to the repulsive slagheap of Domwald the Despot, from the party which lambasted the corruption of Big Government to the party of gerrymandering, voter disenfranchisement and prisons, from the party of small business to the party of Goldman Sachs, from the party which ended slavery to the party of an outright Fascist who swears fealty to Putinism's tinfoil Czarism. John Schindler, top notch intelligence expert and historian (check out his excellent Fall of the Double Eagle, an incisive look at the military implosion of the Austro-Hungarian empire in 1914, the disaster which triggered the horror and carnage of the 1914-1945 Thirty One Years War), delivers the goods: The Spy Revolt Against Donald Trump.
Full disclosure: I'm in political disagreement with Schindler on 95% of all political issues. But this is an emergency situation where that 5% matters. Either we fight for a Republic in which political disagreements are still possible, or we perish in an autocracy too horrible to contemplate.
It's either Amerimaidan, or Ameripocalypse.
Choose, America.
Full disclosure: I'm in political disagreement with Schindler on 95% of all political issues. But this is an emergency situation where that 5% matters. Either we fight for a Republic in which political disagreements are still possible, or we perish in an autocracy too horrible to contemplate.
It's either Amerimaidan, or Ameripocalypse.
Choose, America.
Saturday, February 4, 2017
Wednesday, February 1, 2017
Sunset of the Super-empires
Many fine folks have stepped up to the plate to critique the suicidal kleptocracy, self-immolating authoritarianism, and self-destructive xenophobia of the US empire in its death-throes, so there's no need for me to duplicate their efforts.
But there is one thing we digital citizens of the planet ought to be thinking about which isn't drawn directly from today's nightmarish headlines, but which enables us to understand those headlines, and to begin to resist the catastrophe. It is something which makes this period of history uniquely dynamic and, in some ways, downright unmappable.
This is the fact that we are living in the twilight of the super-empires.
Back in 1910, just fourteen world empires controlled 90% of the world's population and 95% of its economic resources. These empires were, in rough order from the mightiest to the least powerful polity, the British empire, the US empire, the German empire, the French empire, the Russian empire, the Austrian empire, the Japanese empire, the Ottoman empire, the Dutch empire, the Belgian empire, the Italian empire, the Qing empire, the Spanish empire and the Portuguese empire.
All fourteen empires disintegrated over the course of the 20th century. The process was long and bloody, requiring two world wars, a depression, and a Cold War. The first to expire was the Qing dynasty of China in 1911, while the last to go was the Soviet Union, a.k.a. the Russian empire 2.0, which collapsed in 1991.
That doesn't mean they are gone entirely. The super-empires left significant legacies of influential social institutions, deep-rooted cultural practices, and pervasive modes of political mobilization.
While the economic hegemony of the US expired in the crash of 2008, its political hegemony lingered on, like a relentless advertising campaign for a product which has long vanished from the shelves, for another eight years. That hegemony came to a crashing end in November 2016 (a Clinton administration would have delayed the crash slightly until 2018, but the thing itself was inevitable).
What happens now is genuine multipolarity, where decisions taken by the EU, China, India and numerous other polities are as important (and sometimes more important) than those taken in the US. This is terrifying to nativists, bigots, xenophobes, and ultra-nationalists all across the world. They are furious -- a fury which more often than not takes the form of completely Americanized and wholly bogus anti-Americanism. The classic case of this wholly Americanized anti-American rage is Putinism, the fake nationalism of the one hundred Russian billionaires who are stealing the energy-rents of a nation of 142 million citizens.
Nowhere is the fury of the revanchists at the end of US hegemony more pronounced than in the heartlands of the former super-empires. Every single leading revanchist movement is located in a former super-empire: Brexit in the UK, the Despot in the US, Putinism in Russia, Erdoganism in Turkey, rampant xenophobia in Austria, Belgium, France, and the Netherlands, Berlusconism and its successors in Italy.
What they all have in common is the desire to return to the days of imperial glory -- the glorious days of men with guns and women without voting rights, of unrestricted power for a tiny elite and grinding poverty for everyone else.
The five exceptions are nations which either had a full-scale anticolonial revolution, e.g. China, or else openly confronted the burden of their imperial and colonial crimes, e.g. Japan and Germany thanks to their post-1945 democratizations, and Portugal and Spain thanks to their 1970s democratic revolutions.
Just as these revanchisms have begun to unite into a single coordinated movement, so too must the resistances against these revanchisms begin unite across national borders, to share experiences, tactics, and stories, and to learn from each others' struggles. From the global commons, we must begin to construct a global solidarity.
But there is one thing we digital citizens of the planet ought to be thinking about which isn't drawn directly from today's nightmarish headlines, but which enables us to understand those headlines, and to begin to resist the catastrophe. It is something which makes this period of history uniquely dynamic and, in some ways, downright unmappable.
This is the fact that we are living in the twilight of the super-empires.
Back in 1910, just fourteen world empires controlled 90% of the world's population and 95% of its economic resources. These empires were, in rough order from the mightiest to the least powerful polity, the British empire, the US empire, the German empire, the French empire, the Russian empire, the Austrian empire, the Japanese empire, the Ottoman empire, the Dutch empire, the Belgian empire, the Italian empire, the Qing empire, the Spanish empire and the Portuguese empire.
All fourteen empires disintegrated over the course of the 20th century. The process was long and bloody, requiring two world wars, a depression, and a Cold War. The first to expire was the Qing dynasty of China in 1911, while the last to go was the Soviet Union, a.k.a. the Russian empire 2.0, which collapsed in 1991.
That doesn't mean they are gone entirely. The super-empires left significant legacies of influential social institutions, deep-rooted cultural practices, and pervasive modes of political mobilization.
While the economic hegemony of the US expired in the crash of 2008, its political hegemony lingered on, like a relentless advertising campaign for a product which has long vanished from the shelves, for another eight years. That hegemony came to a crashing end in November 2016 (a Clinton administration would have delayed the crash slightly until 2018, but the thing itself was inevitable).
What happens now is genuine multipolarity, where decisions taken by the EU, China, India and numerous other polities are as important (and sometimes more important) than those taken in the US. This is terrifying to nativists, bigots, xenophobes, and ultra-nationalists all across the world. They are furious -- a fury which more often than not takes the form of completely Americanized and wholly bogus anti-Americanism. The classic case of this wholly Americanized anti-American rage is Putinism, the fake nationalism of the one hundred Russian billionaires who are stealing the energy-rents of a nation of 142 million citizens.
Nowhere is the fury of the revanchists at the end of US hegemony more pronounced than in the heartlands of the former super-empires. Every single leading revanchist movement is located in a former super-empire: Brexit in the UK, the Despot in the US, Putinism in Russia, Erdoganism in Turkey, rampant xenophobia in Austria, Belgium, France, and the Netherlands, Berlusconism and its successors in Italy.
What they all have in common is the desire to return to the days of imperial glory -- the glorious days of men with guns and women without voting rights, of unrestricted power for a tiny elite and grinding poverty for everyone else.
The five exceptions are nations which either had a full-scale anticolonial revolution, e.g. China, or else openly confronted the burden of their imperial and colonial crimes, e.g. Japan and Germany thanks to their post-1945 democratizations, and Portugal and Spain thanks to their 1970s democratic revolutions.
Just as these revanchisms have begun to unite into a single coordinated movement, so too must the resistances against these revanchisms begin unite across national borders, to share experiences, tactics, and stories, and to learn from each others' struggles. From the global commons, we must begin to construct a global solidarity.
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