Fourth Generation War Comes to a Theater Near You | Chronicles - By William Lind

Mobs loot, burn, and vandalize while politicians advocate defunding the police. A commune was established in Seattle and turned into Lord of the Flies while government did nothing. Blacks demand equal treatment from police despite a violent crime rate many times greater than that of whites, and mainstream media will not report honestly the differences in crime rates. “Wokeness” spreads among idle youth who flunked English 101. What is going on?

What is going on, right here on American soil, is war; a new kind of war that is also very old, waged by entities other than states. I call it Fourth Generation War and, to paraphrase Leon Trotsky, you may not be interested in Fourth Generation War—but it is interested in you.

In the 1980s, when working with the Marine Corps, I came up with an intellectual framework I call the Four Generations of Modern War. Military historian Martin van Creveld’s books The Rise and Decline of the State and The Transformation of War are foundational works in my framework, which flows from one of the defining elements of the modern age, the rise of the state.

The Four Generations framework begins in 1648, when in the Peace of Westphalia the state claimed and subsequently enforced a monopoly on war. This seems automatic to us today; war means armies, navies, and air forces of a state or an alliance of states fighting similar armed forces belonging to other states.

But war’s definition was not always so narrow. Before Westphalia, many different kinds of entities fought wars: families (think of the Montagues and Capulets from Romeo and Juliet), clans, tribes, races, religions, and even business enterprises. India was conquered not by Great Britain, but by the British East India Company, a business with an army and a fleet. They used many different tools to fight; for the most part, armies and navies as we know them did not exist. Fighters ranged from every male able to carry a weapon, through poisoners inserted in a rival’s kitchen, to highly specialized mercenaries who hired themselves out to anyone with cash. The Grimaldis, whose descendents still rule Monaco, got their start as galley fleet entrepreneurs.

People fought for many different reasons, not just raison d’état (political reasons). They fought for eternal salvation, for slaves to sell, for booty, for land, for pay, and because young men with idle hands like to fight—and the local women liked fighters. War flowed not like the Arno but like the Everglades, slowly inundating everything.

The state, as it arose beginning around the year 1500, gradually put an end to this.  The state came to impose and sustain order and the safety of persons and property. War not made by states threatened that order. So, the state rounded up the non-state fighters and hanged them from the nearest tree, to the loud huzzahs of the population.

The First Generation War ran from Westphalia to about the middle of the 19th century. I discuss this period in detail  in my book co-authored with Lt. Col. Gregory A. Thiele, 4th Generation Warfare Handbook (2015). It was a time characterized by tactics of line and column, which led to (for the most part) orderly battlefields which led in turn to a military culture of order.

That culture continues in almost all state armed forces today. That’s a problem, because starting in the mid-19th century the battlefield became steadily more disorderly. Part of the reason state militaries now so often lose against rag-tag opponents is that they have in effect one foot on the dock and one foot on the boat.

Second and Third Generation War were both attempts to deal with the growing disorder of the battlefield, and both came out of World War I. Second Generation War was developed by the French Army. It reduced war to a highly centralized process of putting firepower on targets, a process that both upheld and required a culture of order. Third Generation War came out of the German experience in World War I. Commonly known as “Blitzkrieg” in its World War II manifestation, it sought not to control but to use the disorder of the battlefield through a military culture of maneuver, speed, decentralization, and encouragement of initiative.

When the Second and Third Generations met in 1940, the latter defeated the former in six weeks, even though the French had more and better tanks than the Germans. Ideas, not weapons, were decisive—which has not prevented the U.S. armed forces from clinging to Second Generation tactics even today. They don’t work, but no one seems to care anymore that we lose wars, so long as the money keeps flowing.

Enter Fourth Generation War. All over the world, state militaries find themselves fighting not other mirror-image state armed forces but the ghosts of premodern war. Once again, many different kinds of entities are fighting wars: clans, tribes, races, religions, businesses we call drug cartels, and so on. They use many different means, not just armies; invasion by immigration is perhaps the most dangerous. And almost always, the state armed forces, despite vast combat power superiority, lose.

At the crux of Fourth Generation War is a crisis of the legitimacy of the state. This crisis varies greatly in intensity from one state to another, but almost everywhere we see people in growing numbers transfer their primary loyalty away from the state to non-state entities: race, religion, ideology, or political causes such as animal rights, etc. Many of those people, who would never fight for their state, are willing, even eager, to fight for their new primary loyalty. The consequence is that the state loses the monopoly on war it claimed at Westphalia. As van Creveld says, the key change in the Fourth Generation is not how war is fought (although that does change), but who fights and what they fight for.

That is much of what we have seen going on in our streets over the past few months. Fourth Generation War has come to a theater near you. A variety of Fourth Generation “causes” have intersected with what I call a “supply-side war.” We have millions of kids who have been cooped up for two or three months. They have no work or school. They want an excuse to go out and fight, because that is what bored young people like to do. Especially young men; young women will demonstrate but when fighting starts they usually disappear.  

These youths need a cause to plead in answer to adults’ demand for “social distancing.” It doesn’t matter what the cause is; saving the pangolins could work as well as “Black Lives Matter.” Supply-side war provides the raw material in youthful fighters, while Fourth Generation War gives them something to fight for, a new primary loyalty to replace duty to country. And the state proves itself impotent against its own progeny. We have seen this same supply-side war dynamic in Libya, Syria, Iraq, Somalia, Afghanistan, and most of West Africa. Now we are seeing it in Chicago and Portland.

Conservatives know that the fall of the state is catastrophic. Life becomes, as our old friend Thomas Hobbes said, nasty, brutish, and short. A friend of mine has used Hobbes’ name as a pseudonym to pen a novel about this situation erupting in America, entitled Victoria: A Novel of Fourth Generation War (2014).

Security forces may put down individual disorders (and they should), but the only way to defeat Fourth Generation War is to restore the legitimacy of the state, to the point where it again becomes the primary loyalty of most of its citizens. What is the prospect for that in the United States of America in the year 2020? As President Trump would say, “Not good.”

We face a bifurcated culture. The elite that controls the state has for decades waged war on the common culture in the name of the ideology of cultural Marxism, also known as “wokeness.” While many Americans who cling to our historic Western, Christian culture also remain loyal to the state, their position is unsustainable because the Deep State is dominated by cultural Marxists.

Conservatives’ loyalty to America is to an America that has largely disappeared among elites. At some point, they too will transfer their primary loyalty to something other than the America we know now. Probably they will transfer it to many things, not just one, adding to the disintegrative forces working on the state.

Restoring the legitimacy of the state requires a federal government that actually cares about America “beyond the beltway,” and neither political party offers that. Washington has become a classic royal court toward the end of a dynasty. Court politics is everything; the rest of the country is only a stupid cow to be milked and beaten.

Some years ago, when I lived in D.C., I enjoyed a lunch with the third secretary of the Russian Embassy. We agreed that the United States had become a one-party state, which is something Russians know something about. The one party is the Establishment Party, and no matter which of its wings win, the Democrats or the Republicans, nothing important changes. The same people get the same old jobs, the money keeps flowing into bottomless sinkholes (welfare spending for Democrats, military spending for Republicans), everyone in town prospers and the rest of the country becomes poorer.

The 2016 presidential election broke from this script. Donald Trump, who was not a member of the one party and who dared defy cultural Marxism (any member of the Establishment who does that instantly becomes an “un-person”), grabbed the brass ring. That is the one party’s ultimate nightmare, that someone breaks their lock on policy, power, and money. The Establishment’s bitter, rabid hatred for President Trump springs from that fact and that fact alone. What he says or does is immaterial. Were he St. Francis of Assisi returned to mortal life, their vitriol toward him would be no less.

Regrettably, even if Trump wins re-election, he will be able to do little to restore the state’s legitimacy—a legitimacy he represents to many who voted for him, who in turn are further alienated from the state by the Establishment’s hatred of their champion. The one party owns the Deep State, which has served them well by sabotaging almost everything the president has tried to do. What he has attempted has often been right and good, but the list of his accomplishments is short.

The Deep State’s lock on effective action by the state makes the quest to restore its legitimacy nigh on hopeless. Only a state that works for all Americans, that effectively provides order, competent services, and gradually increasing prosperity for all, not just more riches for the royal court, can be legitimate. The one thing Americans, right and left, can probably agree on is that the chances of that occurring are slim to none.

So, is the future of the American state hopeless? Probably. I can see three possible outcomes to the crisis of legitimacy of the American state.

The first is that the dynasty falls and a competent new establishment class replaces it, one that can make the federal government work for everyone and that ceases to wage ideological war on its own people. In theory, this is possible, but I see no signs of it happening, nor any forces on the horizon that are capable of doing it. The system is so loaded against third parties that this route is effectively blocked. The Democrats are hopelessly in thrall to cultural Marxism because their base either believes in it, profits from it, or both. President Trump has shown himself incapable of remaking the Republican Party in his anti-Establishment, politically incorrect image. Could his successor do it, perhaps someone such as Tucker Carlson? Hope springs eternal, but hope is also a fool.

A second possibility is that both left and right could see the horrors that widespread Fourth Generation War on American soil would bring, step back, and work together to avoid it. There is a way to do that, by returning to American federalism as it was practiced before 1860.

When the Constitution was drafted and ratified, none of the men involved ever imagined that life in, say, Massachusetts and South Carolina would become the same. Still less did they conceive that the Constitution gave the federal government authority to make them the same. Were we to return to their understanding of federalism, we could maintain the union while accommodating cultural differences. Some states would be right, others left. If you found yourself being governed by people you despised, you would not need to fight. You could simply move. We would still be one country for foreign policy, defense, macroeconomics, and infrastructure. But leftists would be free to misrule the West Coast to their hearts’ content, while conservatives enjoyed the neighborliness and good food of the Old South.

The third and most likely possibility is that the country breaks apart in widespread Fourth Generation War. Welcome to Libya, Syria, and a growing portion of the world.

If the third possibility becomes reality and America as we know it disappears from the world’s landscape, its vanishing will be part of something larger: the end of the modern age that gave birth to the state.

As the late Jeffrey Hart wrote, the modern age began when Western men discarded metaphysics and said, in effect, “We are no longer interested in questions of ultimate meaning; from now on, we care only about the physical world.” From that time onward, a focus on the practical defined modernity. Out of it came ships that could cross oceans and navigation to guide them; steam power, then electricity, medicine that allowed Western men to live anywhere in the world; and, by the beginning of the 20th century, world domination by the Christian West.

We threw away that domination in three great Western civil wars: World War I, World War II, and the Cold War. Now, the West is just one contending culture among many, the state to which the West gave birth is failing everywhere, and the questions of ultimate meaning that modernity discarded are returning to haunt its senescence.

Can the times be redeemed? Probably not, but as men of the West, we must try.

William Lind

William S. Lind is a columnist for The American Conservative and the agent for Thomas Hobbes’s novel Victoria, which is a follow-on to his earlier smash hit, Leviathan.

https://www.chroniclesmagazine.org/fourth-generation-war-comes-to-a-theater-near-you-1/ 

Vox Popoli: Three and three

If conservatives, Republicans, and the Alt-Right want to survive the conflict with Antifa and the violent forces of globalism, then all of them would do very well to read this book: 4th Generation Warfare Handbook. I would strongly advise getting the paperback, both for future reference and the ability to share it with others.

This is not a practical guide. But it establishes core principles that need to be understood, from which specific practices and policies can be developed.

The Three Classic Levels of War

The three classic levels of war – strategic, operational, and tactical – still exist in Fourth Generation war. But all three are affected, and to some extent changed, by the Fourth Generation. One important change is that, while in the first three generations strategy was the province of generals, the Fourth Generation has given us the “strategic corporal.” These days, the actions of a single enlisted man can have strategic consequences, especially if they happen to take place when cameras are rolling.

What succeeds on the tactical level can easily be counter-productive at the operational and strategic levels. For example, by using their overwhelming firepower at the tactical level, state forces may in some cases intimidate the local population into fearing them and leaving them alone. But fear and hate are closely related, and if the local population ends up hating the state forces, that works toward their strategic defeat.

Fourth Generation war poses an especially difficult problem to operational art: put simply, it is difficult to operationalize. Often, Fourth Generation opponents have strategic centers of gravity that are intangible. These may involve proving their manhood to their comrades and local women, obeying the commandments of their religion, or demonstrating their tribe’s bravery to other tribes. Because operational art is the art of focusing tactical actions on enemy strategic centers of gravity, operational art becomes difficult or even impossible.

Three New Levels of War

While the three classic levels of war carry over into the Fourth Generation, they are joined there by three new levels which may ultimately be more important. Colonel Boyd identified these three new levels as the physical, the mental, and the moral levels. Furthermore, he argued that the physical level – killing people and breaking things – is the least powerful, the moral level is the most powerful, and the mental level lies between the other two. Colonel Boyd argued that this is especially true in guerrilla warfare, which is more closely related to Fourth Generation war than is formal warfare between state militaries. The history of guerrilla warfare, from the Spanish guerrilla war against Napoleon through Israel’s experience in southern Lebanon, supports Colonel Boyd’s observation.

This leads to the central dilemma of Fourth Generation war: what works for you on the physical (and sometimes mental) level often works against you at the moral level. It is therefore very easy to win all the tactical engagements in a Fourth Generation conflict yet still lose the war. To the degree you win at the physical level by utilizing firepower that causes casualties and property damage to the local population, every physical victory may move you closer to moral defeat, and the moral level is decisive.

Some examples from the American experience in Iraq help illustrate the contradiction between the physical and moral levels:

• The U. S. Army conducted many raids on civilian homes in areas it occupied. In these raids, the troops physically dominated the civilians. Mentally, they terrified them. But at the moral level, breaking into private homes in the middle of the night, terrifying women and children, and sometimes treating detainees in ways that publicly humiliated them (like stepping on their heads) worked powerfully against the Americans. An enraged population responded by providing the Iraqi resistance with more support at each level of war, physical, mental, and moral.
• At Baghdad’s Abu Ghraib prison, MPs and interrogators dominated prisoners physically and mentally – as too many photographs attest. But when that domination was publicly exposed, the United States suffered an enormous defeat at the moral level. Some American commanders recognized this when they referred to the soldiers responsible for the abuse as, “the jerks who lost us the war.”
• In Iraq and elsewhere, American troops (other than Special Forces) quickly establish base camps that mirror American conditions: air conditioning, good medical care, plenty of food and pure water. The local people are not allowed into the bases except in service roles. Physically, the American superiority over the lives the locals lead is overwhelming. Mentally, it projects the power and success of American society. But morally, the constant message of “we are better than you” works against the Americans. Traditional cultures tend to put high values on pride and honor, and when foreigners seem to sneer at local ways, the locals may respond by defending their honor in a traditional manner – by fighting. After many, if not most, American military interventions, Fourth Generation war has tended to intensify and spread rather than contract.

The practice of a successful Fourth Generation entity, al-Qaeda, offers an interesting contrast. Osama bin Laden, who came from a wealthy family, lived for years in an Afghan cave. In part, this was for security. But bin Laden’s choice also reflected a keen understanding of the power of the moral level of war. By sharing the hardships and dangers of his followers, Osama bin Laden drew a sharp contrast at the moral level with the leaders of local states, and also with senior officers in most state armies.

The contradiction between the physical and moral levels of war in Fourth Generation conflicts is similar to the tension between the tactical and strategic levels, but the two are not identical. The physical, mental, and moral levels all play at each of the three classic levels – tactical, operational, and strategic. Any disharmony among levels creates openings which Fourth Generation opponents will be quick to exploit. 

https://voxday.blogspot.com/2017/08/three-and-three.html?m=1

The 4GW challenge in America - by Vox Day

What many people who were either upset about my observations concerning Dallas or are completely mystified by my assertion of the need for the US police to demilitarize and deescalate fail to grasp is that the current approach of intimidation and overwhelming force is absolutely doomed to failure in the situation in which they find themselves.

While Bill Lind's perspective on the police is, understandably, outdated, it only underlines the vital importance of the police ceasing to act more like occupying military force and less like the traditional Officer Friendly.

Remember, this is the guy who literally wrote the book on USMC tactics, and if we apply his observations, it is eminently clear that the US police are doing nothing more than setting themselves up for defeat in the long term.

From "Understanding Fourth Generation War", 4th Generation War Handbook.

In Fourth Generation warfare, the weak often have more moral power than the strong. One of the first people to employ the power of weakness was Mahatma Gandhi. Gandhi’s insistence on non-violent tactics to defeat the British in India was and continues to be a classic strategy of Fourth Generation war. When the British responded to Indian independence rallies with violence, they immediately lost the moral war.

Operations David and Goliath show a strong military force, with almost no limits on the amount of violence it can apply to a situation, versus a very weak irregular force. The weaker force has the moral high ground because it is so weak. No one likes bullies using their physical superiority in order to win at anything, and unless we are extremely careful in how we apply our physical combat power, we soon come across as a bully, i.e. Goliath.

Most important, we see the central role of de-escalation. In most Fourth Generation situations, our best hope of winning lies not in escalation but in de-escalation (the “Hama model” discussed in the next chapter relies on escalation, but political factors will usually rule this approach out). De-escalation is how police are trained to handle confrontations. From a policeman’s perspective, escalation is almost always undesirable. If a police officer escalates a situation, he may even find himself charged with a crime. This reflects society’s desire for less, not more, violence. Most people in foreign societies share this desire. They will not welcome foreigners who increase the level of violence around them.

For state militaries in Fourth Generation situations, the policeman is a more appropriate model than the soldier. Soldiers are taught that, if they are not achieving the result they want, they should escalate: call in more troops, more firepower, tanks, artillery, and air support. In this respect, men in state-armed forces may find their own training for war against other state-armed forces works against them. They must realize that in Fourth Generation war, escalation almost always works to the advantage of their opponents. We cannot stress this point too strongly. State militaries must develop a “de-escalation mindset,” along with supporting tactics and techniques.

There may be situations where escalation on the tactical level is necessary to obtain de-escalation on the operational and strategic levels. In such situations, state-armed forces may want to have a special unit, analogous to a police SWAT team, that appears quickly, uses the necessary violence, then quickly disappears. This helps the state servicemen with whom local people normally interact to maintain their image as helpful friends.

Proportionality is another requirement if state militaries want to avoid being seen as bullies. Using tanks, airpower, and artillery against lightly armed guerrillas not only injures and kills innocent civilians and destroys civilian property, it also works powerfully at the moral level of war to increase sympathy for the state’s opponents. That, in turn, helps our Fourth Generation enemies gain local and international support, funding and recruits.

De-escalation and proportionality in turn require state-armed forces to be able to empathize with the local people. If they regard the local population with contempt, this contempt will carry over into their actions. Empathy cannot simply be commanded; developing it must be part of training.... Each of these points touches a central characteristic of Fourth Generation war. If we fail to understand even one of them, and act so as to contradict it, we will set ourselves up for defeat.

Remember, for any state military, Fourth Generation wars are easy to lose and very challenging to win. This is true despite the state military’s great superiority over its Fourth Generation opponents at the physical level of war. Indeed, to a significant degree, it is true because of that superiority. In most Fourth Generation wars, state-armed forces end up defeating themselves.

What is very difficult for most people, even those with considerable military experience, to understand is that 4GW is a different type of war and it utilizes very different metrics. As Lind and LtCol Thiele point out, the central dilemma of 4GW is that what works for you on the physical level often works against you at the moral level.

"It is therefore very easy to win all the tactical engagements in a Fourth Generation conflict yet still lose the war." 

The US police are in very much in the same position as a state military occupying a foreign nation. Therefore, 4GW principles and tactics very clearly apply to the situation.

One can summarize the core anti-4GW strategy in a single sentence: Either kill them all or don't killanyone. 

https://voxday.blogspot.com/2016/07/the-4gw-challenge-in-america.html

The View From Olympus: Spreading Disorder and 4GW – William S. Lind

In the United States, the number of mass shootings continues to climb.  In Lebanon, Iraq, Hong Kong, and Chile, demonstrators fill the streets for weeks or months on end.  In France, that cradle of disorder, the yellow vests have gone quiet for now, but probably not for long.  What is going on? And what, if anything, does it have to do with Fourth Generation war?

To address the latter question, we need to remember that Fourth Generation war is rooted in a crisis of legitimacy of the state.  As people shift their primary loyalty away from the state to a wide variety of other things, the state loses its monopoly on war and on social organization.  And as those monopolies vanish, disorder spreads.

What we are seeing in spreading disorder is not Fourth Generation war itself.  But it is a failure of the state. As Martin van Creveld argues in The Rise and Decline of the State, the state arose for only one purpose: to establish and maintain order and safety of persons and property.  States that cannot do that lose their legitimacy.

Here is where we see an answer to our first question, what is going on?  In more and more places, states are failing to maintain order but remain as vehicles of the New Class, the Establishment.  The Establishment runs the state, not to provide security of persons and property for all, but for its own benefit. It uses its control of the state to give itself careers, money (lots of it), power, prestige, etc.  It then employs these to exempt itself from the consequences of state failure, i.e., it lives in gated communities, its kids go to private schools and its jobs don’t get shipped overseas.

One of the interesting characteristics of the new world disorder is that it is coming primarily from the middle class.  The yellow vests are a striking example. But the young people filling the streets of Baghdad and Hong Kong are also often of middle class background.  They are college students or recent college graduates. They are taking to the streets because around the world, the middle class is under ever growing pressure.  College degrees no longer bring good jobs. Pensions and paychecks no longer last to the end of the month. Maintaining even a vestige of a middle class standard of living requires going even deeper into debt.  The state arose to provide security, but it now yields growing insecurity for the middle class.

So far, the disorder appears to be directed against the Establishment that runs the state, not the state itself.  That is why it is not Fourth Generation war. If it proves possible to boot the Establishment out and replace it with governors who serve the middle class instead of themselves, the state is likely to remain.  However, if the Establishment is able to hold on to power despite its failure in governance, then at some point people are likely to start giving up on the state itself. At that point we will be looking at 4GW, and lots of it.

One of the few benefits of the circus that is the impeachment of President Trump is that it has compelled the Washington Establishment, America’s Deep State, to manifest itself.  The “witnesses” against the President (none of whom seem to have actually witnessed anything) are in highly paid, high prestige jobs. They have had distinguished careers, from the “right schools” on up.  They are all deeply committed to the Globalist world order. And they loathe the President because he is not one of them.

Should the Establishment succeed in driving President Trump from office, one way or another, the message to the people who voted for him will be simple: you don’t count and you never will.  At that point, many of those voters will begin to question the system itself, if they are not doing so already. And that system is the state.

In the end, states cannot remain both legitimate and a private hunting preserve of the New Class.  As Martin van Creveld said to me years ago in my Capitol Hill office, everyone can see it except the people in the capital cities.

Interested in what Fourth Generation war in America might look like? Read Thomas Hobbes’ new future history, Victoria.

https://www.traditionalright.com/the-view-from-olympus-spreading-disorder-and-4gw/ 

Fourth Generation War – Fourth Turning – 4GW- Whadat?

Bad news – it’s BAD – really BAD!

Good news – we can see it coming - if you have a sense of history!

Bad news – those who cause it cannot see it coming – they have no sense at all!

Good news – therefore they are unprepared to deal with the breadth of its consequences.

Bad news – that causes BAD things to happen!

Good news – they will lose not only because they are evil - but incompetent!

And that is the good news!

But first, what is Fourth Generation War – Fourth Turning or 4GW?

Fourth Generation War – a LimbrawLibrary word search

Fourth Turning – ditto

4GW – ditto

(UPDATE 8/28/20 - it looks like Blogger word search only provides By Date results now - bummer! I am still trying to get better results by using more explicit and complete phrases. - CL)

All of these are arranged by Relevance and can be flipped to By Date if you wish to do so – last first! The links add up to about a week’s worth of reading – and that is just my rough estimate.

In just the last few days, this subject has come up - The View From Olympus: Spreading Disorder and 4GW – William S. Lind – and - Vox Popoli: Not 4GW... yet

In fact, if you start from this post and scroll backward for the whole month of December, you will see confirmation of what these authors are saying – our government, society, culture, media and politics – and especially waging WAR - is ONE HUGE mission based on LIES!

Who Wants War

Why War? - $$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$ - “You and him go fight – I sell you guns and bombs!”

WeDaPeople vs. DaSwamp – if you understand the basics here, you will come to see 4GW play out in front of our eyes. Even Da-Impeachment, while a political sideshow, is part of the process – human nature and politics are joined at the hip!

No, we don’t know the day or the hour – but we can clearly see the pattern from history as explained by the authors of 4GW.

Let’s also understand something – I do not expect everyone to read these – only those who have a passion for understanding and perhaps actually establishing their own mentoring circle. Intellectual curiosity is a must at DaLimbrawLibrary – a library of references – designed to be used as the need to know, understand and research comes up!

If you somehow stumbled onto this blog site and are wondering what is going on here

In the meantime, all the signs of DaPerfectStorm are lining up – so be prepared!

Vox Day:

The Deep State is playing an incredibly dangerous game here and has been for some time. The thing is, no matter how it turns out, they are not going to win. Messrs. Van Creveld and Lind seldom see eye to eye politically, so when they are both seeing the same danger on the horizon, it behooves one to pay very close attention.

CIVIL WAR II – FOURTH TURNING INTENSIFYING (PART I) – The Burning Platform

“History offers even more sobering warnings: Armed confrontation usually occurs around the climax of Crisis. If there is confrontation, it is likely to lead to war. This could be any kind of war – class war, sectional war, war against global anarchists or terrorists, or superpower war. If there is war, it is likely to culminate in total war, fought until the losing side has been rendered nil – its will broken, territory taken, and leaders captured.” – The Fourth Turning – Strauss & Howe -1997

As we enter the final stretch of this vitriolic, deplorable, venomous, propaganda saturated, deceitful, rigged presidential election spectacle, it becomes painfully obvious this Fourth Turning is careening toward bloodshed, bedlam, confrontation, and civil war. The linear fixated establishment, who fancy themselves intellectually superior to the irredemables, are too blinded by their sociopathic, increasingly audacious subversion of the Constitution, to grasp the level of rage and disillusionment of a white working class that has been screwed over for decades.

As the Wall Street shysters frantically accelerate their embezzlement of what remains of middle class wealth, with the Fed and the corporate media propagandists as their wing-men, the country devolves into a corporate fascist state. The disposition of the nation grows dark like the sky before an approaching deadly blizzard. As passions boil over and violence portends, this Fourth Turning hastens towards a bloody decade ahead with an uncertain climax.

If you think this is just hyperbole, you either haven’t studied history or your cognitive dissonance and normalcy bias prevent you from seeing the unavoidable societal altering clashes, which occur like clockwork on an eighty year cycle, when the portents are right in front of your eyes. Historian Arnold Toynbee’s great war cycle that arise every 80 years or so, aligns perfectly with the Fourth Turning generational theory. Great wars occur when the generation that doesn’t remember the last catastrophic war ascends to leadership of the country.

We are eight years into a Crisis period which won’t end until the mid-2020s. As this bitterly vicious presidential campaign accelerates towards a finale which will leave the country divided and irate, the hostile opposing forces will be seeking revenge, retribution, and retaliation no matter the outcome. There is no doubt the regeneracy is well under way.

“The next Fourth Turning is due to begin shortly after the new millennium, midway through the Oh-Oh decade. Around the year 2005, a sudden spark will catalyze a Crisis mood. Remnants of the old social order will disintegrate. Political and economic trust will implode. Real hardship will beset the land, with severe distress that could involve questions of class, race, nation and empire. The very survival of the nation will feel at stake. Sometime before the year 2025, America will pass through a great gate in history, commensurate with the American Revolution, Civil War, and twin emergencies of the Great Depression and World War II.” – Strauss & Howe– The Fourth Turning 

It was five years ago I spent a couple fascinating hours with Neil Howe, co-author of the Fourth Turning, during the Occupy Wall Street protests. He thought the protests were all passion and no depth, engineered by anarchist Boomers. He was right. I thought OWS might be the start of the regeneracy, but it flamed out quickly. It was only a foreshadowing of what was to come. Whatever event or movement created the regeneracy, it would be driven by the toxic combination of debt, civic decay, and global disorder.

Neil was particularly worried about the Federal Reserve zero interest rate policy and how it was ruining our economic system, creating disincentives to saving and encouraging warped, debt driven speculation. And that was in 2011. The Fed keeping interest rates near zero on behalf of a corrupt establishment for the last eight years has been the primary factor in creating the anger, disillusionment and revolutionary spirit driving the regeneracy.

No critical thinking human being can deny this tumultuous presidential election and its equally turbulent primaries have been fueled by the dreadful self-serving response of the establishment to the 2008 Wall Street created financial collapse; the geopolitical anarchy created by U.S. interventionism in the Middle East; the civic decay created by a failing government educational system; rampant debt financed materialism enabled and encouraged by the financial/media complex; and racial division facilitated by the president and his social justice warrior brethren.

The rescue of Wall Street and destruction of Main Street by the Fed, Wall Street and the captured politicians of both parties in Washington D.C. has created the angry, acrimonious, throw the bums out mood boiling over in flyover America. The widening Grand Canyon gap in wealth between the haves and the have nots, produced by solutions from sociopaths in suits has reached the pitchfork and torch level.

The linear thinking ruling class has been in denial since this Crisis catalyzed in September 2008. Their looting, pillaging and ransacking campaign, designed to enrich and empower a small cadre of shadowy, powerful, wealthy men, had been successful for decades. When you control the currency and interest rates; rig the financial markets; buy the politicians; write the laws and regulations; own the corporate propaganda machines known as the mainstream media; operate a high tech surveillance state; create a dumbed down populace through government school indoctrination; and distract the masses with iGadgets, reality TV, hero worship, professional sports, social media, irrelevant cultural issues, and literally thousands of other modern day bread and circuses; you become arrogant and careless.

These sociopaths are so consumed with their ravenous fleecing of the middle class, waging wars for profit, and shredding the Constitution, they failed to recognize 2008 for the seismic earth shattering event that will change everything. The mood of the country shifted like tectonic plates beneath the nation. The mood continues to grow dimmer, as the peasants grow poorer and the modern day aristocracy (Wall Street bankers, corporate executives, corrupt politicians, shadowy billionaires) accumulate obscene ill-gotten wealth through their complete capture of the system. This perverted, degenerative, criminal degradation of our society is powerfully summed up by Jesse from Jesse’s Café Americain:

“Not all sociopaths wield knives and knotted cords. Some wear suits, and are exceptionally intelligent and articulate, obsessively driven, and are able to use and undermine the law and the rules for their advantage, like weapons.  It is never about the win, never about the money.  It is about the kill, the expression of their hatred, about elevating themselves with the suffering of others. Bind, torture, kill.  Not only with ropes and knives, but also with power and money, and the subversion of law.  Lawlessness is their addiction, their will to power.

When societies become lax and complacent, these sociopaths can possess great political power through great amounts of unprincipled money.  And over time they become almost anti-human, destroyers of all that is good, all that is life, all that offends their insatiable sickness with its goodness.  They twist the public against itself, and turn a broad sweep of society into their killing grounds. This is the undeniable lesson of the last century.  There are monsters, and they walk among us.”

Neil Howe has noted in previous articles the catalyst, climax and resolution of Fourth Turnings can be specifically dated. But the regeneracy is more of an era than a date. With only three previous American Fourth Turnings, I imagined the regeneracy to be a specific event where the American people, faced with growing peril and danger, put aside their differences and rallied around a strong leader to build something new. Boy was I wrong.

In retrospect, the American people were numbed by the Great Depression and the bloody initial battles of the Civil War. They just let FDR and Lincoln do whatever they needed to do. The regeneracy marks a growth in centralized authority and resolute governance at a time of great risk and urgency. I believe this era of regeneracy began at the outset of the presidential primaries early in 2016.

Based upon the reaction of the citizens in the last ten months, the dire problem facing the nation, perceived as the largest threat to our future, happens to be the Deep State establishment currently ruling the country. The captured mainstream media and grey beards running both political parties were completely stunned, horrified, and irate at the unprecedented success achieved by the two anti-establishment candidates, Trump and Sanders.

This election was supposed to follow the script as planned and coordinated by the establishment, with Hillary Clinton defeating Jeb Bush and continuing the corrupt status quo policies agreed to by the bought off leaders of both parties. They badly miscalculated the mood of the country and the whirlwind of change seeking to sweep away the stubborn remnants of a crooked, decrepit, putrid, existing social order. This collective middle finger to the establishment could only happen during a Fourth Turning.

This regeneracy is well under way and is poised to transform and replace the very foundation of this crumbling empire of debt, delusions, and denial. The unanswered question is what happens next. I posed that question to Neil Howe five years ago and he said the specific events of a Fourth Turning are unknowable, but the reaction to those events by the generational cohorts is consistent over time.

We are seeing the reaction of critical thinking Americans as they come to the realization the system is rigged against them. A revolutionary spirit is once again rising among the deplorables. I also asked Neil about the theory Fourth Turnings alternate between external conflicts and internal conflicts. He found the subject fascinating, but didn’t think there were enough data points to make a determination.

Based on the current path of this Fourth Turning, I’m now convinced of this alternating sequence between advancement cycles and atonement cycles. The advancement cycles can be seen as establishing, whereas atonement cycles are disestablishing. It is apparent each Fourth Turning alternates between an external struggle and an internal struggle. The American Revolution was a struggle against an external oppressor – Great Britain.

The Civil War was an internal struggle between the industrial North and the agrarian South. The Depression/World War II struggle was mainly against an external threat – Germany, Japan, and Italy. The American Revolution established our country. There was optimism and elation as a new republic, forged under an enlightened Constitution and led by judicious intelligent men, was born. It was clearly an advancement cycle.

The Civil War disestablished states’ rights, slavery, agrarian society and Constitutional rights. It was an atonement cycle for our actual and implicit sins. There was no glorious high. The resolution felt more like defeat, with the country exhausted, bitter and angry. The country had exhausted itself, spilling the blood of over one million men. The new High after an atonement cycle is like a cold miserable rainy dark Spring.

The Great Depression/World War II Fourth Turning established a new world order led by the United States. As the only major country left unscathed by the ravages of global war, the U.S. became the producer for the world, whose dollar was unquestioned as the currency of global trade. The new High was unleashed with fanfare and adulation. It was like a delightfully warm Spring, with flowers blooming and children frolicking.

All signs point toward this Fourth Turning being a life or death struggle between the ruling class of sociopathic bankers, corporate elites, and sleazy politicians versus the oppressed and infuriated middle class. The lying, deceit, rigging, deception, theft and other crimes perpetrated by the ruling elites will be atoned for. The heroic patriotic revelations from Edward Snowden, Julian Assange, and Bradley (Chelsea) Manning proving the government and politicians to be lying, corrupt, immoral, sociopathic traitors to the Constitution have undermined the last vestiges of trust in the system and the establishment. The alignment of generational dynamics will provoke the responses to events moving forward. We have been badly led. A silent coup by Deep State perpetrators has led to the complete capture of our economic, financial, judicial and political systems.

A vast swath of the populace has been lured into living beyond their means. The existing system is unsustainable. The Boomer generation does not want to yield on their perceived entitlements. The Millennial generation is saddled with un-payable debts, living in their parents’ basements, working the night shift at Ruby Tuesday. Generation X is trapped in the middle of this generational struggle. The huge economic imbalances, created by politicians buying votes and engineering wealth inequality to benefit the few, have built up over decades like flood waters behind a weakening levee. When the levee breaks the morally bankrupt criminal social order will be swept away in the raging torrent to follow.

Winter will eventually turn into Spring, but it might be a bitter, gloomy, austere Spring. Every Fourth Turning brings on forecasts of imminent doom, but that is also a trait of Prophet (Trump, Clinton) Generations. It’s how they feel about the prospects of their imminent die off; they expect the entire world to go with them. The 2008 financial crisis was horrific, scary and an eye opener for those who blindly believed what they were told by their establishment zoo keepers. The regeneracy has begun; trust in the system has further disintegrated; this presidential election has further deepened this distrust of the entrenched establishment; and the coming bust for stocks, bonds, and real estate will knock out the supports for the dwindling remaining trust in this crooked system.

“This might result in a Great Devaluation, a severe drop in the market price of most financial and real assets. This devaluation could be a short but horrific panic, a free-falling price in a market with no buyers. Or it could be a series of downward ratchets linked to political events that sequentially knock the supports out from under the residual popular trust in the system. As assets devalue, trust will further disintegrate, which will cause assets to devalue further, and so on.”

Eventually, all of America’s lesser problems will combine into one giant problem. The very survival of the society will feel at stake, as leaders lead and people follow. The emergent society may be something better, a nation that sustains its Framers’ visions with a robust new pride. Or it may be something unspeakably worse. The Fourth Turning will be a time of glory or ruin.” – Strauss & Howe – The Fourth Turning

The next ten or so years will be atonement for decades of bad choices, corrupt leadership, living beyond our means, waging wars of choice across the globe, believing blatant falsehoods, exhibiting willful ignorance, ignoring facts, and failing to uphold the Constitution. Don’t think you can escape the consequences of this Fourth Turning. It doesn’t matter whether you lived according to a moral code, avoided debt, worked hard, paid taxes, and generally lived an upstanding honorable life.

The death and destruction headed our way will engulf the innocent as well as the guilty. I’m reminded of the penultimate scene in Clint Eastwood’s dark, brooding, vengeful western Unforgiven when Little Bill Daggett laments to “killer of women and children” William Munny that he doesn’t deserve to die this way. Munny responds, “deserves got nothin’ to do with it.” Then he pulls the trigger. This is the kind of future we will be dealing with, whether we like it or not.

In Part Two of this article I will use recent polling data to assess where the most likely sparks will arise to start the civil war conflagration which will accelerate the crumbling of the American Empire. To reinforce the obvious, Fourth Turnings NEVER de-intensify. They end after the spilling of much blood, incomprehensible destruction and the total defeat of the vanquished.

http://www.theburningplatform.com/2016/11/03/civil-war-ii-fourth-turning-intensifying-part-i/

The Worst Generation | The Z Blog

 For the most part, generational politics are a self-defeating enterprise, because you end up attacking your allies. It is hard to attack people about whom you know little, but it is easy to find fault with those you know well. Every generation strains against its parents and every generation strains to teach its children. This is why it has been encouraged among the majority populations in the West. It is an effective way of keeping a natural majority from forming up in opposition to the ruling elite.

That said, there is something useful to thinking generationally. Oswald Spengler relied upon a form of generational politics to put forth his theory of history. Of course, we have the old adage, “shirtsleeves to shirtsleeves in three generations”. This describes the inability of grandchildren to manage the wealth passed down to them from their grandparents and parents. This is Spengler’s argument in a nutshell. A civilization rises, accomplishes what it can and then falls into decline.

We are witnessing the end phase with the Global American Empire. It is not exactly a three generation cycle, but the basics are right. One theory of American history says the empire was founded at Gettysburg. That would mean the current generation of rulers is the fifth or sixth generation. On the other hand, some argue the Second World War is the founding of the empire, so that mean the third generation is in charge. The concept still works and is closer to the old adage.

Even if we place the start of the empire in the middle of that last century, the men who founded it were men of the prior age. Roosevelt was born in 1882 so he was an old man during the war. His Secretary of State during the war was born in 1871 so he was even older than his boss. Roosevelt’s Secretary of War was Henry Stimson and he was born in 1867. The point here is the generation that created the American empire were not the “greatest generation”, but their grandparents.

The best example of the distance between the generation that created the empire and the present is in the biography of Cordell Hull, FDR’s Secretary of State. He was born in a log cabin in Tennessee. He was a rising man of his community at 16, when he gave his first political speech. He fought in the Spanish-American War. His father killed a man in a blood feud. Hull is a bit of an outlier, but most of the people in that regime were tough guys who earned their position.

When the next generation took over for the founding generation of the empire, they were mostly men who fought in the war. Then as now, avoiding war was the instinct of the politically inclined, but they needed to have at least worn the uniform. JFK was in the Navy during the war. Johnson was in the war as was Nixon. Of course, Eisenhower was the last man of the founding generation to serve as President. Reagan was the first leader of the empire who had not worn the uniform.

The point here is that when we put aside the pedantry of the generational lines, we see the old adage comes into focus. Spengler’s observation about the life cycle of a civilization becomes clear. That founding period was made by tough men who had to endure great hardship while forging the empire. Their children inherited the empire, but many paid a price while it was being forged. They at least understood the enormous cost to their ancestors and appreciated it.

It is the third generation that is in charge now. This is incredible, given that their grandparents were born in the 19th century. Nancy Pelosi’s father, Thomas D’Alesandro Jr. was born in 1903. He dodged both wars, by the way. Joe Biden’s parents were a bit younger, born during the Great War. Senator Mitch McConnell’s parents were the same generation as Biden’s parents. In other words, the geezers of the gerontocracy are the third generation and their staff is the fourth.

It is the third generation that followed the type we see in both Spengler’s formulation and that old adage about business. When the Boomer politicians took over in the 1980’s and 1990’s they started to auction off their inheritance. The first step was the financialization of politics. The old “coalition of interest groups” system was replaced with naked graft. Wealthy interests bought the political system because the new generation of leaders had no emotional attachment to it.

That last bit is what distinguishes the third imperial generation. They have no attachment to the system they inherited. It is just something that they were born into so they take it for granted. Their parents at least knew people who had to shed blood for it and they had their grandparents around to contextualize their position. The current rulers of the empire are the spoiled grandchildren of the patriarch. They just want what they want because they feel entitled to it.

We see this in the increasingly reckless management of the empire. Hundreds of millions had to suffer because the spoiled rulers saw Covid as a chance to remake society in their image. Their parents and certainly their grandparents would have been ashamed of this behavior. Those prior generations were capable of shame because they understood the cost of being wrong. They paid it. This generation has never had to suffer so much as a hangnail in their lives.

This reckless and childish behavior is on full display with Ukraine. They are throwing a tantrum because their scheme to dissolve Russia has failed. The Russians finally had enough of the meddling on her border and invaded Ukraine. The whole thing could be resolved peacefully, but the spoiled American ruling class must have its way. While they bang their rattles on their highchairs, millions of Ukrainians suffer. The collective West is getting poorer and more dangerous as a result.

The arc of family dynasties usually leads to the final generations declaring bankruptcy and selling off what they can to earn some money. For civilizations, it means some period of crisis while the rotten generations in the final phase make their mistakes and bring the epoch to a close. The Global American Empire is coming to an end but the West is not going away. A new generation of builders will rise up, create a new civilization and the cycle will begin anew.

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https://thezman.com/wordpress/?p=27129

Guest Article: The View From Olympus: A 4GW Impeachment? - Martin van Creveld

By

William S. Lind*

As I have said many times, Fourth Generation war is at root a contest for legitimacy.  On one side is the state. On the other is a vast array of alternate primary loyalties: religion, race, tribe, gang, and locality, among others.  Around the world, the contest is going poorly for the state as a growing number of people shift their primary loyalty to one of the many alternatives, for which they are willing to fight.

Washington does not perceive it, absorbed as it is in its own struggles for power and money, but the same contest is going on in this country.  So far, to our great benefit, it has remained on the peripheries. Urban police know they are confronting it in the form of ethnically-based gangs, which are illegal business enterprises that fight.  But the mass of the American people appear still loyal to the state.

The appearance is, I think, deceptive.  On both the Left and the Right, doubts about the legitimacy of the federal government are growing.  Mostly, the doubts are about the legitimacy of the current President, although polls show public perception of Congress is also strongly negative.  There is no question many on the Left regard President Trump as illegitimate. Should a hard-Left figure such as Warren win in 2020, the Right will doubt her legitimacy.  But considering the current President illegitimate is different from thinking the state itself has lost its legitimacy.

Impeachment could change that.  President Trump’s supporters regard his election as proof their voices can be heard, that their interests will be considered in Washington.  They know that to virtually all Democrats and some Republicans, they are “unpersons”. Why? Because they are White, male, or non-feminist female, straight, and mostly Christian.  They are also struggling economically, which means they are not contributors to politicians’ campaigns. The coastal elites dismiss them as rubes and hicks inhabiting “flyover land”.  The Democratic Party, which has embraced the ideology of cultural Marxism, considers them all inherently evil “oppressors” fit only to kiss the feet of blacks, immigrants, gays, feminists, etc., PC’s sainted “victims” groups.

Again, should a Warren win in 2020, President Trump’s supporters will not consider her (or him) a legitimate President.  But if the unholy alliance between Democrats and the Deep State succeeds in driving President Trump from office through impeachment or some other means, that will be a very different story.  At that point, the message to President Trump’s supporters will be, “Your votes don’t matter, because even if you elect a President, we will drive him from office and reduce you to a silent serfdom.  You and your views are entitled to no representation. You are and will remain ‘unpersons.’”

At that point, in the vast electoral sea that is red America, the legitimacy of the system itself, i.e., the state, will be brought into serious question.  And when that happens, the chance of Fourth Generation war here on a large scale will rise dramatically. When you tell people they cannot achieve representation through ballots, they start to think about doing it with bullets.

That electoral map, the one that shows the results of the 2016 election by county, has significant military meaning.  The blue votes are concentrated in cities, which cannot feed themselves. As Chairman Mao said, “Take the countryside and the cities will fall.”  Nor can they be supplied from the sea, because most of the people in the military are Trump supporters, which means the red side will get most of the ships and planes.  The military problem is really quite simple, and need involve virtually no shooting or destruction. You just put the cities under siege and wait for the starving people to come out.  It won’t take long.

The message to Washington is clear and direct: if President Trump is driven from office by anything other than a loss in the 2020 election (if he runs), the legitimacy of the state will be brought into question.  That is a dangerous business that politicians of both parties would be wise to avoid. After all, they will be the first people hanged from the nearest lamppost if widespread 4GW comes here. An impeachment that leads to the checkpoints going up all over rural America is a very bad idea.

* William S. (”Bill”) Lind is the author of the Maneuver War Handbook (1985) and the 4^thGeneration Warfare Handbook (2011) as several other volumes that deal with war. This article was originally published on traditionalRight on 4.11.2019.

http://www.martin-van-creveld.com/guest-article-the-view-from-olympus-a-4gw-impeachment/