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Tuesday, August 03, 2021

NOWHERE MAN IN NOWHERE LAND -- EIGHT

  

WESTERN MAN SINKING INTO THE QUICKSAND OF HIS DECEIT AND HUBRIS

  

   Is this the end of Western Dominance?

 

      IS THIS END OF WESTERN DOMINANCE?


“I maintain, then, that scientific psychology (and, it may be added, the psychology of the same kind that we all unconsciously practice when we try to "figure to ourselves" the stirrings of our own or others' souls) has, in its inability to discover or even to approach the essence of the soul, simply added one more to the symbols that collectively make up the Macrocosm of the culture-man. Like everything else that is no longer becoming but become, it has put a mechanism in place of an organism. We miss in its picture that which fills our feeling of life (and should surely be “soul" if anything is) the Destiny-quality, the necessary directedness of existence, the possibility that life in its course actualizes.

I do not believe that the word "Destiny" figures in any psychological system whatsoever — and we know that nothing in the world could be more remote from actual life experience and knowledge of men than a system without such elements. Associations, apperceptions, affections, motives, thought, feeling, will — all are dead mechanisms, the mere topography of which constitutes the insignificant total of our "soul-science." One looked for Life and one found an ornamental pattern of notions. And the soul remained what it was, something that could neither be thought nor represented, the secret, the ever-becoming, the pure experience.”



Oswald Spengler (1880 – 1936), German historian and philosopher, The Decline of the West, Volume 1: Form and Actuality, 1918

“Today we live so cowed under the bombardment of this intellectual artillery (the media) that hardly anyone can attain to the inward detachment that is required for a clear view of the monstrous drama. The will-to-power operating under a pure democratic disguise has finished off its masterpiece so well that the object's sense of freedom is actually flattered by the most thorough-going enslavement that has ever existed”

Oswald Spengler, The Decline of the West, Volume 2: Perspectives of World History, 1922

CONSTANT GARDENER THROUGH TIME

One of the ironies of the times is that the complexions and complexities of the world are changing so rapidly that we get the feeling that we are truly in a new day.  Yet, when a historian out of the past, in this case, German Oswald Spengler, is quoted with his assessment of the plight of the West, it reads as if the ink is not yet dry though written nearly one hundred years ago.  Why is that?  Could it be that we never learn from history?

At the height of the Roman Empire, it stretched from Britain and the Atlantic to North Africa and Mesopotamia.  In the fourth century, it was menaced by Germanic tribes, principally the Visigoths.  The Visigoths chieftain, Alaric, was in his mid-twenties.  In 395 A.D., Emperor Theodosius the Great died, and the Roman Empire was divided into Eastern and Western divisions.  The Western Roman Empire was moved from Rome to Ravenna, northwest of Rome on the Aegean Sea, as it was believed to be a more defensible city to ward off invaders.  Ravenna was the capital from 402 until Rome was sacked in 476. A.D., ending the Western Roman Empire.  

 

The Fall of Rome was a process of decline in the Western Roman Empire in which it failed to enforce the rule of law, to maintain a vibrant economy at home by keeping its people employed, engaged in enriching activities, and in good health.  Instead, it became embroiled in politics and incapable of managing, securing, and logistically supporting its far-flung empire.  What had led to Rome’s greatness was now crushing it through its lack of viable leadership, obvious dysfunction, and patent neglect.   

Rome lost its knack for innovation, engineering, and decisive action in governance and military leadership.  The Visigoths used heavy horses to trudge through the Roman flanks as steeled armor tanks would centuries later, while fertile fields at home lay untilled, as farmers were made soldiers, which resulted in Rome being unable to feed its army or its people.  Rome had exercised draconian control throughout the empire by having the best army and governance on the planet with a vibrant and supportive culture back home in Rome.   

 

The first collapse was that of the culture.  Christianity had become the state religion in 305 A.D. with Emperor Constantine, but Rome had been conditioned for centuries with other religious practices.  

The “idea of Rome” was fading and with it the efficiency of civil authority, the cohesiveness of patriotic Roman citizenship throughout the Empire, and the competence of its Emperors.  But the world was changing and Rome refused to acknowledge much less change with it.

This was evident with the increasing influx of “barbarians” from the North sullying the Roman culture with foreign languages, primitive practices, and customs countermining Roman identity and pride in Roman citizenship.  

The collapse of Rome began in 376 A.D. with a large-scale upsurge of Goths.  This disturbance upset the social integrity and cultural balance of Roman citizenry and led to clashes of violence. 

In 476 A.D., Flavian Odoacer, an Arian Christian, disposed of the Roman Emperor Romulus and became emperor, but was not at all effective in distributing the spoils throughout the empire to his favorites, weakening the empire further, dying in 493.  The die was cast.  

Three hundred years of the West were to be suspended in indifference during the Dark Middle Ages, or until Charlemagne was crowned Emperor of the Holy Roman Empire in 800.

 

That said there is a lesson to be learned in this decline and eventual collapse.  The legacy of the Visigoths and their sacking of Rome led to the modern world that gestated for 300 years before emerging with Charlemagne.  Historians tell us that without that break with Roman dominance the modern world might never exist.  

DECLINE IN ERA OF FACEBOOK

After WWII, the United States was the supplier of products and services to a recovering world from that war.  In the seventy years that have followed, the world has recovered to a considerable degree and has become as some would describe a “global village.”  This has been enhanced by the ubiquitous Internet in this Information Age, as the population of the world, continues to swell with the chronic conflict and chaos that entails.  

India, with more than 1.5 billion people, has a middle class of more than 300 million, roughly the equivalent of the population of The United States.  China, a once and possibly future Super Power has even more impressive numbers, building new cities as fast as homes were once built.  

Japan has had several booms and busts since 1945, as has South Korea, while Indonesia, a nation of thousands of islands, is in the midst of a frenetic climate of technological change and economic expansion.  

This illustrates a data point of the future, but not the subtext.  Global society is out-of-control with democracies breaking out and then perishing as if overnight.  

There was the “Arab Spring” where democratic uprisings arose independently and spread across the Arab world in 2011.  It all started in Tunisia in December 2010 and quickly took hold in Egypt, Libya, Syria, Yemen, Bahrain, Saudi Arabia, and Jordon, only to fizzle out in many of these nations returning to even more draconian control. 

The “Arab Spring” started with demonstrations and protests both nonviolent and violent that led to riots and civil wars in the Arab world that began in December 2010 in Tunisia and spread throughout the countries of the Arab League and its surroundings.  By mid-2012 the Arab Spring had cooled considerably to be called the “Arab Winter,” especially for North Africa and the Middle East.  

The most radical sustained disruption from the Arab Spring was then and continues to be in Syria where that nation remains engaged in a civil war.

The “Arab Spring” is often compared to the “Russian Revolution of 1989,” when the Soviet Union fell, along with several Eastern European and Second World countries.  Formerly part of the Soviet bloc, they won independence, and became known as the “Autumn of Nations.”  

This latter revolution was not about effective civil disobedience or the organization and role of the Internet technologies.  It saw a narrow window open with the collapse of the Soviet Union and acted. 

Syria’s civil war, to date, has resulted in more than 100,000 citizens being killed and several million being displaced from their homes, jobs, schools, and businesses as nearly every major city in the nation is in some state of ruin from the constant bombings from Russia, the United States, and Great Britain as well as the Syrian Air Force.  

Russia and Iran have entered in support of Syrian President Basher al-Assad while The United States, NATO, and United Nations remain somewhat ambivalent in the collective support of the many factions of rebels.    

Muammar Gaddafi (1942 – 2011) of Libya came to power in a coup d’état in 1969 but during the Arab Spring was hunted down and killed in 2011.  Today, the country is in shambles with regions controlled in part by terrorist factions of ISSI and ISSL with segments claiming to be an Islamic State.    

Meanwhile, the United States, which has gone from a supporter of the world in recovery along with being the world’s lone policeman, has taken on the additional role of nation-building in Afghanistan and Iraq with somewhat embarrassing outcomes.  

No matter in which direction you examine the activities of the United States, a parallel comes to mind of the plight of Rome those many centuries before in which it was embroiled in similar circumstances.   

Rome destroyed Jerusalem, crushed the Jewish center of its religion in 70 A.D., only to adopt Christianity as its state religion in 305 A.D.   As Oswald Spengler opines, the soul is always in the subtext of events.

TECHNOCRATS TO NETOCRATS 

The power in today’s society where representative democracy is still in place is the media.  Journalists have never had such powerful tools before in communicating instantly wherever they are with their smartphones while flying to where the action is across the globe at Mach speed.  

We have come full circle.  Clerics once were the only literate class to keep records, chronicle events, and flatter those in charge to think they were in power – be they kings or emperors – when they controlled the agenda.  Then, we became a technocratic and bureaucratic society in which “specialists” had the ear of power, and often moved up to such positions.  

Now, we have media types.  They benefit from the netocrats who have developed all these wondrous “Toys of the Mind.”  Like the primitive Visigoths marching into Rome, netocrats, and their genius for intrusion, now invade our homes and private spaces at will and are changing our world forever.

[Alexander Bard and Jan Soderqvist present this idea in The New Power Elite and Life after Capitalism (2002). This is covered in NOWHERE MAN IN NOWHERE LAND – PART FIVE.] 

 

We have journalists acting as instant historians promoting a gospel that is meant to entertain but not necessarily to provoke thoughtful and appropriate action.  Consider journalists such as Thomas Freidman and his The World is Flat (2005).   The title is a metaphor for viewing the world as a level playing field in terms of commerce where all competitors have an equal opportunity with geographical boundaries and divisions increasingly irrelevant.  This metaphor applies equally to countries, companies, cultures, societies, and individuals.  He may be prescient but his role is to amuse because it calls for no action. 

Journalists and media types bombard the airwaves with their views, and these are repeated so frequently that people address each other as if a ventriloquist is speaking.  Oswald Spengler asks the rhetorical question, “What is truth?  For the multitude truth is that which it continually reads and hears.”     

[We also see how netocrats and the media are puppet masters in the current campaign run-up to the office of the President of The United States, but that is for another segment.]

 

Buried deep in the subtext of “free trade” is an absurd idea when it comes to the nature of people and nations.  If the world was engaged in actual free trade, would the United States be approaching a deficit of $20 trillion?

Trade with China has added considerably to this deficit with manufacturing and jobs of the United States going to China.  The same is true with the North Atlantic Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) where we find jobs and manufacturing going to Mexico.  Then, too, many American companies are relocating headquarter to operate in Canada or Mexico to avoid taxes and/or higher wages to American workers. 

Meanwhile, largely in the last quarter-century, the American workforce has changed from being primarily blue-collar to white-collar and professionals, requiring much more formal education and a completely different skillset on the job.  

Ross Perot, the American businessman who ran for President of the United States in 1992, denigrated NAFTA during that campaign with the slogan “the sucking sound down south,” referencing jobs going to Mexico.

Incredibly, you can find as many economists defending trade with China and NAFTA, as you can find economists against these practices, and they are supposed to be in the know.  

RISE OF CIVIL RELIGION  

Religion is always in the mix whatever the economic system.  Sixteenth-century Europe with the rise of the Protestant Work Ethic, inspired by the writings of John Calvin and translated into an economic philosophy by Max Weber is fading as Oswald Spengler noted in the early 20th century.   

 

The problem, as Spengler sees it, is that there is no soul in capitalism.  In this secular society of the 21st century without a soul, capitalism has become the civil religion.  It is not only profits over people, but anything goes that leads to this end.  

 

Money is the central theme in the campaign debates of these presidential candidates of both political parties in the current chapter of that quadrennial madness.  The way money remains central to the discourse is that these candidates always talk about jobs and how they are going to make the American economy robust again.  With Senator Bernie Sanders, there is no reason to be subtle about this.  He promotes the idea of everyone having a job, free college education, and healthcare with his voodoo economics.  The other candidates of both parties do the same but with more circumspect rhetoric.  

“Socialism,” writes Oswald Spengler“is nothing but capitalism of the lower classes.”  What Spengler doesn’t say, but is also true, and that is corporate welfare is nothing but capitalism for the upper classes.  It is a case of choosing your poison.  

The stagflation of the 1970s found the U.S. President, Congress, and the Federal Reserve abandoning “Keynesian consensus” of the “golden age of capitalism” by first blaming American labor and its demands, and then finding ways to export the best-paying jobs abroad to China, India, Japan, South Korea, and Mexico where workers are paid far less.  It is not difficult to substitute the Decline of the West with this typology:

 

       After four centuries for Europe and one century for the United States, we are living in the twilight zone of Euro-American capitalistic dominance;

       The “Barbarians at the Gate” are not Rome’s Visigoths, but terrorists, illegal immigrants, and idle American factory workers, against the rising economic competition from the Far East;

       Luxurious living and failure to husband the planet’s natural resources has led to global warming, pollution, displacement, and the closing down of many viable options;

       Restless populations, ethnic tension, domestic strife, civil unrest at home and abroad, a deterioration in language and common civility, and social justice find the Protestant Christian religion and culture no longer dominant.  

 

This has resulted in inevitable pushback, which Kevin Phillips reduces to a new American radicalism and decline.  His argument is reflected in his book, American Theocracy: The Peril and Politics of Radical Religion, Oil and Borrowed Money in the 21st Century (2006).

 

Phillips looks back to the 1970s at what havoc has resulted from that nightmarish ideological period of fiscal irresponsibility, political corruption, greed, and shortsightedness which he claims seeded the current crisis.  Coincidentally, I write about the same period in A Look Back to See Ahead (2007):

The 1970s was a time when young people were forced to participate in an unpopular war; when political upheaval was in the air; when corrupt politicians who lied and deceived the electorate reached a crescendo with Watergate; when drugs were ruining lives; when morality took a holiday; when new forms of bigotry and hatred were hatching; when the automotive industry was in sharp decline, while foreign automakers were eating our lunch; when an energy crisis rocked the land with OPEC’s oil embargo; when a paranoid president hunkered down and became a law unto himself; when Congress stayed the same, missed the changes, wouldn’t face them, and left the future up for grabs.

Phillips's unifying theme of oil and the role oil has played in American and world politics was heightened when the Evangelicals took control of the Republican Party and promoted a “debt culture” as the legacy of the 1970s.  He argues that extraneous events in the past have derailed world powers before, such as the Roman Empire and Great Britain at the peak of their respective dominance, signaling decline and ultimately falling off into disarray.    


THE 1970s AND BEYOND

If America’s capitalistic system is in decline can it be dated with any confidence? Perhaps the 1970s? Surely, the 1970s provides the mise-en-scene of that possibility as everything has been unraveling ever since.

There was the oil issue, of course, and the “Silent Majority” of the American theocracy asserting its will; and the high jinx of the Watergate scandal with the keystone robbers of The Committee to Re-Elect the President (CREEP), breaking into the Watergate building in a comedy of high jinx more suitable to a work of fiction. This was followed by the Watergate hearings, the discovery of the Nixon tapes, which led to the resignation of President Nixon, followed by the presidential pardon by President Ford.

In the midst of all this, there was the bombing of Cambodia during the Vietnam War for no other reason than to show the president was doing something in that war to ensure his reelection. Meanwhile, the OPEC embargo resulted in critical shortages of gasoline at the pumps of American service stations.

President Carter was then elected president replacing President Ford, finding him giving a “fireside chat” to the nation dressed in a cardigan sweater scolding Americans that they had a “crisis in confidence,” as the economy drifted into double-digit unemployment and double-digit inflation. If this was not enough, there was the Iran Hostage Crisis of 1979 where sixty-some American diplomatic employees were held hostage by Iran for 444 days. Americans were not happy campers in the 1970s as they had lost their moral compass and their way.

This chaos started early in the morning of June 17, 1972, when several burglars were arrested inside the office of The Democratic National Committee (DNC), located in the Watergate building in Washington, D.C. Members of President Nixon’s reelection campaign were caught attempting to install wiretap phones in the offices of the DNC as well as to steal secret documents. A cover-up followed, “hush money” was raised and paid to these burglars for their silence, and to keep the FBI out of the loop.

To add the absurd to the ridiculous, this madcap performance was the second break-in, as the first attempt at espionage proved to have resulted in a faulty wiretap, and they were in the process of installing a new microphone when caught.

In August 1974, Richard Nixon resigned, Vice President Gerald Ford became president, and immediately pardoning Nixon for all crimes he committed or may have committed while in office. The Watergate scandal changed American politics forever leading Americans to question their leadership and to think more critically about the presidency.

Amidst this imbroglio, Arab members of OPEC proclaimed an oil embargo in October 1973 which ended in March 1974. The price of oil had risen from $3 a barrel to $12 across the globe, and significantly higher in the United States. It was later called the “first oil shock,” but would be repeated again and again over time up to the present.

Author Kevin Phillips uses this canvas to argue his thesis against the rise of The Silent Majority led by the Pentecostals and how the United States' foreign policy became predicated on oil, the politics of oil, and the theocratic demands of this new majority.

He writes that the U.S. imports 60 percent of its oil, up from 33 percent in the early 1970s. As of April 1, 2016, about 78 percent of gross petroleum imports were crude oil, up from 2015. Americans consume 25 percent of the world’s daily oil production. Of the 520 million cars in the world, 200 million are driven by Americans, while the U.S. makes up only 5 percent of the world’s population.

At this writing, because there is a glut of oil on the market, gasoline at the pump is just under $2.00 a gallon with the price of oil per barrel of crude at $40.00, which Phillips sees could easily go back to $100 a barrel or more. With the newly expanding economies of China and India, this is not inconceivable.

Phillips sees the glory of the 20th century now the burden of the 21st century:

“Oil has soaked deeply – in all likelihood indelibly – into the politics and power structure of the United States, partly because over two bountiful centuries it has also seeped, sprouted, and oozed up from so many sections of so many states.  More than fuel, oil became a heritage and also the basis of a lifestyle.”

The spread of “born-again Christianity” and oil dependency has influenced foreign affairs and was to become personalized in the theocratic Presidency of George W. Bush then corrected in the Presidency of Barak Obama, only to be reasserted once again in the 2016 Presidential Campaign.

There is a reason for the American electorate to be suspect of the presidency in light of the nation’s ambivalence over the past score of years:

• We have had the preemptive war in Iraq and Afghanistan;

• The withdrawal of troops, creating a vacuum for ISSI and ISSL, then trickling troops back into the fray anticlimactically;

• The drawing of a metaphorical red line threatening action should the Syrian government use poison gas against its people, then doing nothing when the line was crossed;

• The stalled economies of the US and Europe is found in the impotence of doing anything;

• The building and testing of nuclear weapons by North Korea seemingly helpless to intervene;

• The threat of nuclear weapons falling into the hands of terrorists;

• The chronic stagnation of the civil war in Syria, and

• The delayed closing of Guantanamo Bay Detention Camp (GTMO).

Against these lingering vacillations, the religious fundamentalists are eclipsing moderate Protestantism and becoming the driving force to name the next president. Phillips writes:

“The Presbyterian Church, the Episcopal Church, the United Church of Christ, the Congregationalists, and the Methodists lost between 500,000 and 2 million members each, the last being the Methodist slippage. In the meantime, the Southern Baptist Convention added 6 million, the Mormons 3.3 million, the Pentecostal Assemblies of God 2 million, and the Church of God (Tennessee) some 600,000.”

Phillips claims one in four Americans is now affiliated with some self-described evangelical church, an estimate that does not include the rising number of Mormons and members of other sects, nor does it include the evolution of the troubled Roman Catholic Church in America.

This fundamentalism is not new as it flourished in 18th century Europe as evangelicals established the Protestant Work Ethic. President Bush’s strongest support was from evangelicals and practicing Christians generally, whereas President Obama’s greatest support was from African Americans, Hispanics, and women. That support has faded as of February 18, 2014, as the poll indicated that 71 percent regretted voting for him.

In the presidential election of 2004, of those who attended church more than once a week, 70 percent said they voted for President Bush; of those who went to church only a few times a year, 40 percent voted for Bush. Phillips argues that the Republican Party is becoming the first American religious party in defiance of the separation of church and state.

Another aspect of the slippage of capitalistic society, according to Phillips, is the personal debt of most Americans and the national debt of the United States. He claims it began thirty years ago with the Reagan Administration (1981 – 1989) when the federal government, American consumers, homeowners, and businesses borrowed at a much faster rate than their incomes grew.

This led to the total collapse of the American economy in 2008, nearly leading to a great depression. Recovery was tied to the Federal Government’s bailout of banks, Wall Street, and the automotive industry. This action was simply postponing an inevitable future collapse by assuming the escalation of the nation’s debt now.

America’s level of debt is at its highest during the last hundred years and climbing. The National Debt in:

• 1988 – end of Reagan Administration: $2.6 trillion

• 2008 – end of George W. Bush Administration: $10 trillion

• 2016 – end of Barak Obama Administration: $19 trillion

Whether it is a Democratic or Republican Administration nothing puts a brake on spending. While Republicans take pride in fiscal responsibility and conservative principles, they spend as wildly as do Democrats.

This is a threat to prosperity and could bring the economy to an economic cataclysmic halt, as neither party demonstrates a willingness to deal with government programs such as healthcare, social security, unemployment insurance, or government subsidies for corporate enterprises.

Nowhere Man continues to stir the American economic drink threatening to drive it permanently into Nowhere Land.

Meanwhile, Euro-American capitalists dance on the edge of the abyss in this Nowhere Land with The European Economic Community (EEC) mirroring many of the same problems of the United States only to a more critical extreme. Consider the insolvency of Greece and the failure of its austerity program. Then there is the economic tension and close to the economic collapse of many EEC members with the possible exception of Germany. Nowhere Man has found a home in Europe as well as the United States.

 
REBIRTH IN THE MIDST OF ALL THIS

We have seen the terrorist group Hamas crush the Fatah Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO) in democratic elections in 2006, while the democratic elections in South America in 2005 brought socialists to power in Bolivia, Venezuela and Chile. Most stunning was the victory for the indigenous people of Venezuela. South American societies are transitioning from agrarian reform to a belated industrial revolution in the climate of the Information Age.

Disturbing as this chaos might seem, it is consistent with the broad sweep of history. The struggle between Persia and the West for control of the Middle East has been going on since the start of human civilization.

Persia has become Iran and has the religious element of Shia Moslems versus Western Sunni Moslems elsewhere throughout the region. Then, the last hundred years are a continuation of 2500 years of war between Persia and the West to rule the trade routes and control the people and their indigenous cultures.

More directly, we are experiencing the impact of WWI on The Middle East and Europe as well. The war destroyed the old order and set in motion various trends and movements that have still not run their full course. The Ottoman Empire was the first victim of that war. It had allied itself with Germany and Austria against Great Britain, France, Russia, and ultimately, the United States. The spoils of war always go to the victors. The WWI Peace Agreement at Versailles punished Germany and Austria and led to the rise of Adolf Hitler and WWII.

The Allies essentially divided the Ottoman Empire between themselves. An even more important role in shaping the region's future was played out by the implicit forces of modern nationalism, which had been developing among various groups in the area (see Grolier Multimedia Encyclopedia).

More than four centuries after Europe imposed its presence and will in the New World with its explorers and Christian missionaries, we are seeing notable pushback in South America and the reemergence of its ancient original cultures.

This is consistent with nature in which any form no matter how twisted into another form will eventually return to its original state. The question remains: will this continue or will this cultural and political renewal drift back into Nowhere Land and dependence on the West?

There is precedence for this concern. South Africa ended its policy of buried apartheid and the draconian separation of the black races by the white Afrikaner government when The African National Congress (ANC) came to power and elected Nelson Mandela as its first president in an all-race election in 1994. Nobel Peace Prize Laureate, the Reverend Desmond Tutu, danced with joy as he cast his ballot, calling the change in government “a religious experience, a transfiguration experience, a mountaintop experience.”

When the country voted twenty years later in 2014, he said with sorrow, “I didn’t think there would be a disillusionment so soon. I’m glad that Nelson Mandela is dead. I’m glad that most of these people are no longer alive to see this.”

The Reverend Desmond Tutu was referencing the myriad of chronic problems facing the new South Africa: unemployment, corruption, poverty, crime, murder, illiteracy, mental and physical illness, including HIV/AIDS, problems that were much less widespread during apartheid.

South West African Township (SOWETO) was home to nearly a million Bantu when I lived in Johannesburg in 1968. Although it was not an ideal place to live, it appears to be far superior to the hundreds of squatter camps spread throughout South Africa in the 21st century, places without running water, sanitation, and security.

Yet, despite this assessment, South Africa remains the most advanced country in Africa with thriving cities that are integrated into a global economy. Millions of Bantu have been educated and risen out of poverty and hopefully will establish a foundation upon which to build the future.

The rest of Africa is a battleground, but what would you expect after hundreds of years under colonial rule? Africa entered the modern era as the possession of one or more European nations, such colonial powers as Britain, France, Germany, Belgium, and Portugal. These nations cut up the continent like it was a cake to exploit its rich resources to build their empires.

The destiny of the 48 sub-Saharan African states continues to be shaped by this legacy. Countries such as Zimbabwe, Tanzania, Uganda, the Central African Republic Djibouti, and Gabon still carry the haunting shadow of their recent colonial past.

This has created a dichotomy within Africa. You have a Western-imposed system of political governance that follows its economic model, living standards, and social norms; and then you have standards that are set by Africans that may emulate Western ideals while retaining African social norms, and an infrastructure (organization) and wealth distribution consistent with those norms.

The disparity between these two standards has been the foundation for Africa’s relationship with its former colonial masters and the rest of the world. Africans are moving in the direction of establishing their own identity and control.

When you shed the yoke of your codependent benefactor, chaos is likely to be experienced in both a personal and societal sense. Africa is often viewed as a dysfunctional continent riddled with institutional corruption, torn apart in civil war, ethnic conflict and civil strife, deteriorating infrastructure, endemic poverty, and pandemic disease. It is. This is the norm, but not the reality.

Underlying this surface turmoil, a professional middle class is emerging that is engaged in politics, government, business, medicine, science, industry, the military, and education. One hundred years into the future, Africa is likely to be pivotal to global power. It may take that long to completely unshackle Africa from the die the West has cast over this continent for the past 600 years. Africa now has to move out of the shadow of the West to establish its own identity reacquainting itself with its ancient civilizations.

The United States once a colonial subject fought for and won its independence, only to treat the American Indians as the Europeans had treated the Incas, Aztecs, and the Mayas. These empires, once regal in their own right, looked on the invaders as if gods, only to be conquered, murdered, and displaced, their cultures destroyed, their temples desecrated, and their civilizations left in ashes.

Isn’t it strange that the narcissism of the West deemed it was being humane to convert these New World societies to Christianity and Western culture at the expense of what they had known and had been for centuries? This echoes the sentiment of one American general, Peter Gregg Arnett (born in 1934), is quoted as saying about the Battle of Bến Tre in Vietnam: "'It became necessary to destroy the town (village) to save it.”

It was European culture that proselytized the New World into the Christian faith. It was European science that later sought connection with the universe, and for that endeavor came to question the validity of Christianity and the role of God and religion in an emerging technological society.

It was European economic philosophy that first invented capitalism, which rose to prominence in the Industrial Revolution. However, the excesses of capitalism would give rise to communism and clashes between the wealth creators and workers over the means and control of production and the profits generated. This continues to this day.

And it was the European colonizers who seeded and then cultivated the cultural programming of Western biases, beliefs, and practices into the natives of this New World.

The United States, which has been above the fray, taking comfort in the security of being separated from Europe and Asia by two great oceans changed overnight when the Japanese bombed Pearl Harbor on December 7, 1941, immediately declaring war on the Axis Powers of Japan and Germany entering the Second World War. That entanglement and war exposed the nation to foreign affairs to which it has had an ambiguous and ambivalent history.

The world is now in a new day with nations around the globe struggling to remove the final psychological shackles of Western colonialism. From that uncertainty, the world is forging into a mainly non-white, non-European, and non-Western future, which is neither a good nor a bad thing, but only reality.

Western influence in terms of economic and military clout, control of commerce, and trade is likely to continue for some time. Civilizations characteristically change with the momentum of the equivalent of tectonic shifts.

This is so because emerging non-Western societies will continue to be imitative and reflective of the West. It was true of the Romans who couldn’t look past the influence of the Greeks. Likewise, evolving democracies in South America, Africa, and the Middle East cannot seem to look past Western democracies even with their unconcealed contempt.

The low-brow culture of the West is explicitly present in Second and Third World countries with the “Golden Arches” of McDonald’s fast-food empire, along with the blazing marquees of Walmart supermarkets everywhere promising fast service at cheap prices.

Unfortunately, Western utopian optimism is not always a comforting sign. Nowhere Man is the face behind the mask, yet another American contradiction. The irony is that The United States continues to survive despite the out-of-control “cut & control” ax grinder obsession with the idea of progress that finds it stumbling forward into Nowhere Land.

The question that must be asked: will these emerging nations follow America’s folly into the tank, or will they emulate America’s energy, industry, sacrifice, courage, dedication, and struggle that led to its greatness, fostering the idea of democracy before greed, paranoia, duplicity, and impatience took hold?

THE AMERICAN LION

The United States rose fractionally and uncertainly until the early nineteenth century when a general from humble beginnings, poorly educated and considered mainly uncouth rose out of the wilds of the Carolina-Tennessee valley with muscular leadership heretofore unseen in America’s brief history.

Andrew Jackson (1767 – 1845) was an authentic countrified American, who fought the American Indians as a boy and lived with them as well. His father died before he was born, and his mother died of cholera when he was fourteen, leaving him an orphan to fend for himself and his brothers. This found him fighting against the British in the American Revolution (1783 – 1787).

Later, as an American general with restless bravado, he stymied the British when they attempted to reassert themselves in the American continent in the Battle of New Orleans (1815).

Ten years later, a self-trained lawyer, now a U.S. Senator from Tennessee, was denied the presidency in 1825 although winning the majority of the popular vote, but with insufficient electoral votes.

The U.S. House of Representatives awarded the presidency instead to John Quincy Adams (1767 – 1848), who acted as president from 1825 to 1829 when Jackson won the office and was president for two terms (1829 – 1837). In that time, he changed the Executive Branch of the U.S. Government forever (see Robert V. Remini’s Three Volume – Andrew Jackson, 1977 – 1984).

He had cunning, savagery, and a simpatico with Native American Indians. He had no room for the haughty manners, pomp, and circumstance of European cultivation favored by the Eastern Establishment. The reality of the times, outside the sequestered East Coast being obsequiously imitative of European Society, was the quite primitive nature of the rest of the United States.

Jackson detractors are quick to reference the American Indian removals from 1813 to 1855, which were accelerated during the Jackson Administration (see The Trail of Tears, Gloria Jahoda, 1975). Tribes of Native Americans were forced out of their sacred lands and homes in the South and mid-South, tribes such as the Cherokees, Seminoles, Chickasaws, Choctaws, and Creeks and forced to migrate to reservations west of the Mississippi and as far northwest as Washington and Oregon in the 1820s, 1830s, and 1840s.

People in the Midwest were no strangers to violence or survival of the fittest being neither intimidated by nor impressed with those with political power and positions in the U.S. Government in the East.

The feeling in the East for these frontiersmen was mutual. Aristocratic Thomas Jefferson said of Andrew Jackson, “One might as well make a sailor a cock, or a soldier a goose as a President of Andrew Jackson. He is a dangerous man unfit for the presidency.”

Yet, the young nation was ripe for a hinterland to rise out of its fertile soil with little in common with those in the East who resembled their European forebears more. Jackson was the genuine article and became the boilerplate of countrified Americans who were rising as Rome had risen out of a small city into an empire. Historian Arthur M. Schlesinger, Jr. (1917 – 2007) calls this “The Age of Jackson” (see 1945 book of that title).

Strains of primitive aggression have emanated from the American presidency in subtle or ruthless ways to prevail from Abraham Lincoln through Theodore Roosevelt, Woodrow Wilson, Franklin Delano Roosevelt, and Harry S. Truman. These flawed men, no less flawed than Jackson or no less authentic personalities followed their contradictory ways to eminence, but in the process displayed the distinctive American character.

Compared to the Founding Fathers of Washington, Adams, Jefferson, Hamilton, Jay, Franklin, Madison, and Monroe, all of whom had an elitist aristocratic temperament and style.  These other men were edgier, more impulsive, and intuitive. Lincoln and Truman were Midwesterners, Jackson was of the midsouth, while the Founding Fathers were all Easterners.

In 1945, one hundred years after the death of Andrew Jackson, the United States reached the apogee of its power with the victorious conclusion of World War II. Europe was decimated, its cities in ruin with some 20 million dead, while Russia lost 24 million, more than half of its civilian population, and likewise was in ruin. The United States suffered far fewer military casualties and practically no civilian losses from the war.

As the lone possessor of the atomic bomb in 1945, no nation so dominated the world since the halcyon days of the Roman Empire. The Union of the Soviet Socialistic Republic (USSR) would change this dynamic with “a nuclear arms race,” followed by the “Cold War” that Sir Winston Churchill predicted. He gave a speech in March 1946 as a guest of Westminster College, Fulton, Missouri, stating that post-war Europe was undergoing an “Iron Curtain” of Soviet rule separating the West from Russian by this military and ideological barrier. This would end, as would The Soviet Union, in November 1989 when the Berlin Wall was torn down.

Now, in 2016, the West, and mainly the United States, after more than a quarter-century of dominance shows signs of declining. The world’s wealth and its political center is shifting as are trade and commerce.

The United States is still the banker of the world, but it is not evident that it wants to be another Switzerland, which it is increasingly resembling. Communist China is practicing a new kind of capitalism other than that of Adam Smith. Meanwhile, the wealthy nations of the world are going from being technocratic to netocratic.

This is producing the clashing of new frontiers that recalls the United States when Andrew Jackson rose to prominence:

• Agrarian societies still dominate most of the population of the world. They are being driven as if by a pitchfork through the 19th century and 20th century and into the 21st century with callous disregard for their sanity and wellbeing. Many peoples are living in more archaic circumstances than primitive feudalism in police states with totalitarian rule.

• The exploding Information Age is leaving these people behind as it is only common in practice to a handful of Western and Eastern societies. Yet these societies act as if this technology has the answers for everyone when some 5 billion souls have more basic needs, such as electricity to light and fuel their homes, safe places to go to school, jobs to support their families, wholesome food to put on their dinner tables, safe water to drink, modern sanitation systems to ward off diseases, hospitals and clinics to attend to the sick, indoor plumbing, and schools safe for all children to attend without the threat of terrorists or rogue soldiers.

• People on the fringe fall below the radar as victims of senseless crimes as the indigent, underemployed and undereducated attack each other as human combustibles.

This decline is at the doorstep of the West, and no one illustrates this more poignantly and succinctly than Arundhati Roy in her little book, Capitalism: A Ghost Story (2014). She examines the dark side of democracy in contemporary India, which like China, is throwing caution to the win to become a 21st-century power. The pollution is so thick in some of China’s major cities that people have to wear face masks during certain times of the day.

In India, the problem is poisoned rivers, barren wells, and cleared-out forests. Hundreds of thousands of Indian farmers, people who love the land, but are unable to escape punishing debt, have committed suicide. China has the same problem as do people south of the Saharan desert in Africa. Millions of the impoverished in India and Africa make less than $2 a day.

In India, the 100 richest have assets the equivalent of the GDP of 25 percent of this country’s 1.2 billion people.

World peace and prosperity are not possible if the wealth of the world is controlled by twenty percent of the world’s 7.2 billion people. Many Second and Third World countries have been under Western powers for centuries.

Love, peace, and prosperity are not possible in this neoliberal era of capital accumulation going to the few. Low wages and investment has limited consumption and forced workers to borrow beyond their capacity to repay. This is only one aspect of the casino economy that has ensued since the 1980s across the West in deregulated labor, goods, and investment markets, signaling, if nothing else, the decline if not the ultimate demise of capitalism as the West has voted for going on the cheap.

NEXT – NINE – HAS NOWHERE MAN TAKEN CHARGE?



 

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