The Wonder Springs Chronicle

Redux Rendezvous VI

30 June 2010

Volume 12, Issue 26

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When I completed Monday’s article “In My Tent Leadership” on Gen. McChrystal and the war in Afghanistan, I couldn’t help thinking that to do this thing right we could have the makings of a 30 year war, in a country that no one thinks it truly is worth the bother. To my surprise when I opened my emails Tuesday morning I was hit with the headline “The 30 Year War in Afghanistan.” As I read the article from Stratfor, I began to understand that their analysis believed that our war in Afghanistan began in 1980, when we offered support to the mujahideen to block Soviet advances. With President Obama’s decision to escalate American involvement when he took office, the war entered Phase 4. It is now Obama’s war. This opens the question will this be Obama’s Vietnam?

Over the weekend reports say that the Canadians spent a billion dollars to protect the G20 leaders from anarchists riots in Toronto, where 900 people were arrested. Maybe Afghanistan is not such a bad investment in that context.

In a developing story ten deep cover Russian spies were arrested in America just like in the good old days of the Cold War. We could go on, but rather than focus on war as and end, perhaps a better description of war is an attempt to control chaos. Chaos however begets chaos, and in the common sense definition of what is happening in the world, the change we were told we could believe in, is really chaos seemingly feeding upon itself.

Since the end of the Korean Conflict, for the United States our wars have been defined in terms of either insurgencies or counterinsurgencies. In Vietnam we were engaged in a counterinsurgency with the Vietcong and the North Vietnamese. In the Gulf War we fought a traditional war, and abandoned the war efforts before either term really applied. With the true Iraq War a similar result was quickly obtained, but pacifying the country quickly became counterinsurgency, against indigenous militias, foreign mercenaries, Al-Qaeda, Iran, and others.

It seems that the Iraq counterinsurgency is finally working, but many problems still remain. Afghanistan is still a very open and troubling question. Historically, the only truly decisive counterinsurgency victory was the British success in then Burma, where Black ops personnel basically hunted down the communist bad guys and killed them. Half a century later Burma is now Myanmar, one of the most oppressive communist régimes in history.

Our Redux Rendezvous emphasis today however, is not to promote or even describe warfare, but rather to focus upon major current worldviews that seem to be either insurgencies or counterinsurgencies in a world in which we all hope will return to order, rather than deepening chaos. In the broader picture this is currently not so much a guns and bullets war, but rather an economic war, or wars.

To better explain the current world of fermenting chaos we have created five unique dominant worldviews that generally describe the communicants belief systems and are listed by our subjective ratings of power and/or noise and chaos potential, the top being the most powerful, chaotic, noisy on down. We will then discuss these worldviews briefly and then have some closing thoughts.

Laissez-Faire Scoundrels: Religion - Social Darwinism; Primary Adherents – Crony Capitalists and Incumbent politicians; Objective – Making money through structured material global economic competition.

Collectivist Elitists: Religion – Social Darwinism; Primary Adherents – Union leaders, communists, socialists, intellectuals, anarchists; Objective – A benevolent world society based upon egalitarian equality, administered by highly evolved intellectual leadership.

Radical Islamists: Religion – Jihadist Islam; Primary Adherents – Fundamentalist Moslems; Objective – Overthrow of Western culture, to be replaced with an Islamic Theocracy.

Traditional Independents: Religion – Historic Christians, Jews, Deists; Primary Adherents – Historic capitalists, Libertarians; Objective – Personal liberty, freedom, and prosperity through true free markets.

Complacent Agnostics: Religion – Agnostic, Spiritual but not Religious, Whatever; Primary Adherents – Sluggards, Narcissists, Disenfranchised; Objective – Personal peace and affluence by going with the flow.

Laissez-Faire Scoundrels were the hope of the world until the bubble based on unfettered inflated housing values, excessive financial leverage, and faultless debt, brought about a worldwide financial meltdown. That hope is about all that is left, even though massive government bailouts reportedly have saved the world from total financial collapse. Now a restored financial prosperity is just over the horizon, where it has been located, unchanged, for well over a year.

These Scoundrels became the ascendant economic and political classes after Alan Greenspan took the helm of the Federal Reserve during the presidency of Ronald Reagan, guiding the ship with the Objectivist philosophy of Ayn Rand to its homeport zenith under the presidency of George W. Bush. Being wise enough to foresee the impending collapse, Mr. Greenspan retired in 2006 leaving president Bush to attempt to find order from the collapsing chaos.

Laissez-faireism is really the antithesis of government central planning. This is because Ms. Rand grew up in Russia during the Russian Revolution and saw the havoc that the chaos of change to Czarist control to repressive Marxist central planning extracted from the Russian people.

However, because of a belief in the atheist religion of Social Darwinism, instead of power resting in the hands of the government elite, the more highly evolved leadership should ascend within large corporate structures to lead the masses to global prosperity.

The Collectivist Elitists are the remnants of the Marxists, communists, socialists, and Nazis that believe that the government can provide answers to human misery like their rivals the Laissez-Faire Scoundrels never could. They of course are correct in that assumption, except history has shown through massive governmental experiments in countries around the world and throughout the twentieth century, that model doesn’t work either.

Because of the dominance of the Laissez-Faire Scoundrels in the closing decades of the last century, it was pretty much assumed that the Collectivist Elitists were an extinct subspecies in America until the election of Barack Obama as president. Now we find, while still few in numbers, these government central planning gurus were hiding out in liberal universities, urban nonprofits, and labor union management for all these years.

Since this elitism is the focus of the President’s lifelong educational quest, we now find many Elitists within the government and other organizations. They now are beginning to reproduce and prosper, attempting to change the way the world works by revolutionizing the culture and forcing the Laissez-Faire Scoundrels to redistribute their wealth in the name of social justice for all.

The President however is not a stupid individual and has a broad education within the inner workings of both Social Darwinist subspecies. In that illumination, if push comes to shove, or some more extreme form of chaos building, it doesn’t take a highly evolved elitist of any venue to understand which subspecies will be eliminated from the gene pool of the evolutionary slough of despair.

The weekend violence in Canada recognizes that these Collective Elitists lack normal cultural power, so their only means of access to true leadership is through violent civil protest. When that protest is suppressed with strong governmental sanctions, historically the Collective Elitists in governmental positions can then ascend to power by calming the political storms. This has to occur contrary to any true insurgency, because they lack any true leadership training in running anything, and would be even more quickly eliminated from the evolutionary gene pool in rural areas, that don’t share their Social Darwinist religion and where insurgencies historically gain power, surrounding the cities and forcing urban surrender.

Radical Islamists are basically the rogue chaotic human disease in the worldwide travail. With their successful airline based attacks on New York’s World Trade Center and the Pentagon in Washington, DC on 11 September 2001 they quickly leapfrogged other worldviews of chaos. With the pronouncement of a War on Terror, president Bush quickly began forcing the jihadist faction of Al-Qaeda to take refuge in remote areas of the world, as they exist in Pakistan, Yemen, Somalia and other areas.

After the continued pursuit of the Bush Administration and President Obama’s escalation of the War in Afghanistan, while Radical Islamists are no longer a strategic threat, their ability to command resource allocations from the United States and other western allies allows them to slowly bleed human and military resources well beyond the Radical Islamist numbers and military might.

If you look at the historic contest between Islam and Western Civilization you see military clashes that many times put western culture into undesirable defensive positions. Heroics on the part of westerners coupled with the grace of God has saved the west from repressive effects of Islam.

Having said that, Radical Islamists have shifted to training individual attacks of annoyance rather than significant destruction, at least up to this time. That does not however preclude a significant attack within urban areas using means that could cause lasting disruptions in certain areas.

The future of western culture rests with the Traditional Independents. Throughout the rise of the Laissez-Faire Scoundrels, the Traditional Independents had become their coalition partners. That all began to change with the financial meltdown in 2008 and the subsequent bailout and stimulus attempts of both the Bush and Obama Administrations.

What all this has shown is that both tax cut deficit spending and expansive Keynesian deficit spending has not worked. In 2009 a new TEA Party movement began. Even if the TEA stands for Taxed Enough Already, this movement has much more potential than to just throw the Progressive Democrats and Republicans out of office.

The Traditional Independents are beginning to learn true American History and that is the potential source of power that has not been seen in North America since the American Revolution. Sure times of changed, but the fundamentals of the American Republic are based upon Godly Absolutes of Nature’s God that created humans in His image. Within that Godly worldview, the individual becomes responsible for his own personal existence and prosperity, but that also carries the duty to help others with a hand-up, not just a handout. That understanding of human cooperation has been abdicated to the government over the last century during the rise of Progressivism, causing a slow dumbing of the American will, conscience, and exceptionality.

The profound development within Traditional Independents needs to be what we call at Wonder Springs, a Redux Rendezvous, focusing upon the creation and planting of small businesses as the backbone of a country that is based upon the principle that “History leads as the future follows…” This is a common sense construction that means that you must learn from history, not only to not repeat the mistakes of the past, but you must also learn the absolute truths required to make the present better.

The last third of the twentieth century has brought about a new subspecies of humanity in the United States and they are the Complacent Agnostics. Mid century theologian Francis Schaeffer described these people as seekers of personal peace and personal affluence at the expense of all other human values. Because they could, these people borrowed money really without a workable plan to ever pay it back, because they wanted their best life now, and the future, “Well I’m so vain, I think this section is about me, and I am proud of it.”

Most of these people were what historically were called Baby Boomers, who were born after WWII. In the sixties they were the hippies that decided to “tune in, turn on, and drop out” or something like that. Since they really were not able to compete in the real world, many of them stayed in education until they evolved into Collectivist Elitists, who knew they were smart enough to make communism succeed where other, less highly evolved creatures, had failed in virtually every other country of the world.

Those who weren’t smart enough to remain in school for thirty to forty years basically retired to the security of large corporations or the government. As a successful bureaucrat they knew they could really retire immediately and really do nothing, if they just kept their head down and didn’t make any serious mistakes.

Complacent Agnostics say what is happening in the world is not their fault. Since they really have never done anything, except perhaps pass this environmental lifestyle to their children and grandchildren, they do have a point. However in their shallow specialized expertise, there is an old saying that states, “If you are not part of the solution, you are part of the problem.” Put another way, “Dead wood is only good for building fires, for even green trees are required to make good lumber.”

Concluding, modern warfare consists of basically insurgency operations, which have the antitheses of counterinsurgency. Looking at history a number of insurgencies have failed, but with the possible exception developing in Iraq, there really is not a strong record for successful counterinsurgencies.

In American history, the American founders and patriots were responsible for the first truly successful large-scale insurgency war, which defeated the then world’s most powerful military. Today that same worldview and military structure is beginning to form in the Traditional Independents. Furthermore they control the rural areas, essentially leaving the urban areas for self-defeating battles between the Laissez-Faire Scoundrels and the Collective Elitists, while the Complacent Agnostics attempt to watch passively.

Just like Ayn Rand’s Objectivist worldview, there really is no compromise possible between Collective Elitists and the Laissez-Faire Scoundrels. So if too much social unrest is caused by the Collective Elitists, the Scoundrels will hire mercenaries to finally exterminate the endangered Elitists forever.

All the while the Radical Islamists, will from time to time attempt or cause some urban destruction, which will increase the urban angst especially among the Complacent Agnostics. The Agnostics will demand from the government oriented Scoundrels that they do something about the violent Collective Elitists also.

Traditional Independents are really the only group within the American population that now has any military training, thanks to our all-volunteer military forces. They are also the people who believe in the US Constitution including the Second Amendment. The M-16 is a tactical military weapon with limited recoil that shoots a small bullet a long ways, with a lot of impact.

That cartridge in a varmint rifle is a .223 Remington, almost a perfect varmint cartridge if you get the drift. Traditional Independents really don’t hunt varmints anymore, because varmints are by definition troublesome and mischievous animals. But since you really can no longer make a living out in rural America, varmint rifles are used pretty much for target practice, like seeing if you can drive nails at 100 or 200 yards. (I heard that story a few months ago and have been waiting for a time in which it might have an application.)

Seriously, there is a no-bullets war being fought for the future of America. Probably the only ones willing to admit that now are the Collective Elitists. They are also the most threatened, basically by those who share their Social Darwinist worldview. Survival of the fittest is a nasty natural law.

For the next year or so the Afghanistan War with Gen. Petraeus in charge will provide the focal point of contact with the Radical Islamists. The Complacent Agnostics will complain a lot, but there strongest political action might be to vote with the Traditional Independents to throw out the Laissez-Faire Scoundrels. So that pretty much leaves the opportunity to govern as Independents lead and Scoundrels begin going rogue and adopting a new religion.

That may provide a productive coalition, or fusion, along Redux Rendezvous principles where there is the opportunity to create new wealth to overcome the economic stagnation, deflation, depression, or whatever the future holds. In the process true free market capitalism will again build ships to sail the world’s rough economic seas, and provide an increasing wealth for the whole world, based upon human ingenuity and hard work. In the process, real war is averted because ideas, morals, and generosity are more forceful elements of change than real bullets.