Looking Ahead

A very thought provoking essay from Dr David Warren, in two parts.

From Essays in Idleness

Looking ahead

When the next American Civil War starts, I imagine it will look something like Hong Kong: a big melee spreading through all public spaces (I note that USA is bigger than Hong Kong). But there will be fairly limited casualties, at first, each of which will become the subject of unrestrained media outrage, until the media collapse under physical reprisals. Later, the better and better armed demonstrators, on both sides, will tactically “evolve.” The surveillance state itself will begin to disintegrate, and with it any hope of restoring public order, through agencies such as police, courts, and prisons. Things like border surveillance will be abandoned, with immediate consequences, but as the attraction of going to the States diminishes, no one will mind. More noticeably, the economy will break down. Because the American military was designed chiefly to defend against foreign powers, on a very large scale — and the threat will instead be domestic and scattered — the Army will be (at first) effectively neutralized. Isolated firefights between Democrat and Republican soldiers will escalate to firefights between ships and aeroplanes, but these will end fairly quickly as a Pentagon dictatorship seizes control. Within a year, I expect, though only a small part of their arsenal will prove useful, bullet-enforced curfews will restore relative peace to the streets. I don’t expect the death toll to be more than a few hundred thousand, at least from direct conflict as the guns come out. Interruptions of food supply, and the spread of disease, will cost much more — but possibly less (proportionately) than in the last Civil War, in which both sides were better organized.

That it will spread to Canada, I cannot doubt, developing from the refugee crisis across “the world’s longest undefended border,” as snowflakes of all descriptions, by their millions, run for their lives, then resume their clashes up here. Mexico would also suffer from this “white flight,” except, the chaos from Mexican cartels’ energetic efforts to reclaim significant parts of Texas, California, and the Southwest, would have the paradoxical effect of ending the outbound refugee traffic there. For the most part, other foreign countries would avoid direct engagement. Instead, Islamist and Socialist regimes around the world would be busy consolidating their own local positions, sparking numerous “little wars” by their attempts at regional expansion. Each would be settled as the larger and more ruthless power won.

Still, I shouldn’t expect the anarchy to continue. Tyranny quickly fills a vacuum of authority (moral as well as material), and answers to a growing demand for safety. Nothing, of course, will be learnt from the adventure, and I should think that within a decade or less, resistance to the new President-for-Life will have all but evaporated.

Like China’s, the American GDP would soon be growing again by leaps and bounds. The Right will appear to have won, utterly. The Left will actually have achieved their agenda.

But what do I know about future events?

Perhaps the “battle of the worldviews” will resolve itself in some other way. The only thing I can safely predict is that, as the U.S. Constitution continues to dissolve, over the heat of parties that do not care for it, the country’s stability must also dissolve.

Who knows what happens, then? For there is no indication that those who demonize the established American order (with all of its long-observed faults and foibles), will come to their senses; especially those who do not realize they are playing with fire, and toy gratuitously with utopian schemes to radically expand government intervention in daily life.

The good news: “political correctness” will not last much longer.

Looking forward, cont.

The French Revolution (remember that?) was, in some reckonings, the Extinction Event for Western Christendom. There have been quite a few since, but that one was memorable for heralding “populism”: the manipulation of great masses of The Peeple, chiefly through well-publicized lies, to form battering rams in support of small parties of Paris intellectuals. A national state (“France” with all her diverse regions) “progressed,” in a blink of historical time, from a constitution which balanced monarchy, aristocracy, and the commons, to one in which the Leftists of the day could order massacres of their more conservative rivals.

“Bliss was it in that dawn to be alive,” as young Wordsworth declared. Young intellectuals across Europe were inspired, though most, like him, lapsed into reaction as they grew and matured, and as the consequences of this “progress” became clearer, in the Reign of Terror, then the Napoleonic Wars that engulfed Europe. With Nappie’s narrow defeat, however, a century of more-or-less peace befell the Continent: 1815 to 1914.

Politics continued, of course: war by other means. Stability returned where monarchies could be restored, but elsewhere, The Peeple were sometimes led to triumph in the establishment of “pure” if temporary democracies, governed by the lowest orders of society, with the passing support of the most gullible. Atheism was everywhere advancing. Christianity was also recovering, as it is wont to do. Contradictions were abounding.

We’ll leave later progress to another day: Communism, Nazism, Fascism, Maoism, and the succession of other “popular” socialist movements in the century since. Today this is all old hat, for the most part unknown to the half-educated and maleducated. The contemporary university student has, typically, no knowledge of history or historical time, and is a moral and spiritual vacuum, inflamed by passions he also does not understand.

My own view is not that it’s the end of the world; rather that we are entering, internationally, another of these progressive “dawns.” The latest ideology is Environmentalism, or we might call it Deep Ecology (a rejection of humanity itself, but using the conceits of a superannuated humanism). It is the new promise of a “liberty” detached from such old-fashioned restraints as human decency, and the sane. The century ahead should be very interesting, in the sense of the old Chinese proverb.

I watch today’s international “Extinction” marches with fairly lively contempt. It is a demonstration for — What? The young (including the compulsively senile) declare what they are against, but can never coherently explain what they are for. They will let Fate take care of that, meanwhile they make, once again, their quickly developing abstract demands, in little irruptions of malignity, currently symbolized by a strident Swedish teenager with Asperger’s syndrome. (Pray she will be cured!)

This overwhelmingly white “rebellion,” whose participants are inclined to accuse all opponents of “white supremacy,” is defined more generally by the abandonment of Reason. This follows universally from the abandonment of Faith: it is an old story.

As in the past, those responsible for public order look on with growing cowardice. This was my own second formative political experience: watching the custodians of order retreat and dissolve during the riots of 1968. (The first, was being caught in a bloody riot at Lahore, as a younger child, trying to get home from school.)

An auld acquaintance, with a gift for irritating me, tells me he is making (another) “documentary” with my tax money — a film about how the world is coming to an end, and how this is making people in Montreal unhappy. I imagine the Capitalists will be the culprits. They invariably are.

The world, as I mentioned, is not coming to an end, until God wills it. We are merely making it more miserable for ourselves to live and die here.

Perhaps gentle reader is already aware that I am a fervent Reactionary, and an enemy of all Change and Revolution that cannot lead to Heaven. A Reactionary must, after all, “accentuate the positive.”

The paradox is that these people can only be defeated by joy, and a love that cannot be reduced to lubricity. I invite gentle reader to look on joyfully: for notwithstanding the occasional inconvenience, the Kingdom of God is always at hand, today as yesterday and forever.