Dmitry Orlov's Blog, page 9

Collapse Cafe Part II

Topics include supply chain cross-contagion, population decline, near-term human extinction, and community organizing. Click here for audio.

It's the Saudis, Stupid!

[Just nine days after I pointed out that Obama's latest “humanitarian” bombing puts American lives in danger, we have the video of the journalist James Foley's beheading at the hands of Daash, a.k.a. Islamic Caliphate, a.k.a. ISIS/ISIL. Well, that didn't take long! But there is more to the story: what stands behind this event, and others, such as 9/11, the Boston Marathon bombing, the Benghazi massacre and numerous other acts of terror is none other than America's best friend, the House of Saud. Here is a post by my friend Idris to explain this vital connection.]

The recent rise of the Islamic State (IS) in Syria and Iraq, along with its bedfellow Jahbat Al-Nusra (JN) is being viewed with alarm worldwide. It is the latest in a series of problems related to Islamic extremism for which Al Qaeda is the poster child. From Somalia to Yemen to Nigeria to the Levant to Afghanistan and Pakistan, to Chechnya to Xinjiang, China and even raising its head among the populations of western countries, both Muslim and non-Muslim are facing the ravages of the Salafi/Takfiri Nexus of Jihad.

However, there has been a failure to focus on the primary cause of these problems with their various manifestations worldwide. Saudi Arabia, with able assistance from several of its Gulf neighbors (with Qatar as the most prominent) has steadfastly promoted the rise of Islamic extremism. The extreme behavior now being manifested is the result of the extremist Wahhabi ideology that Saudi Arabia promotes and the billions of dollars it has spent to influence the entire Muslim world to adopt its extremist ideology or at least to remain silent as its poison spreads, particularly among the youth.

Saudi Arabia has for decades given scholarships to universities in the kingdom devoted to indoctrinating future Muslim leaders. It has funded Masjids, schools and Islamic Centers which have promoted their vitriol and which are usually staffed by graduates of their institutions. They have thus prepared the ground for what we are seeing now, as young Muslims from around the world flock to the Levant to wage Jihad under the banner of the various groups that the Saudis have long nurtured.

The Saudis and their Gulf co-conspirators have not limited themselves to promoting their hateful ideology. They have provided billions in material support for Muslims worldwide willing to take extremist action in accordance with Salafi/Takfiri principles. Any Muslim group worldwide willing to take violent actions that accord with this extreme Salafi/Takfiri worldview finds it easy to tap into the Saudi/Arab Gulf international network to receive funding and other forms of tangible support to launch their violent campaigns.

So next time you hear that Boko Haram or the Taliban or Abu Sayyaf or ISIL or some other Al Qaeda type organization has perpetrated some atrocity in the name of Islam... be sure to thank the Saudis! Its not that there are no just causes for which Muslims may feel compelled to resort to violent resistance... rather it is that Wahhabi ideology, propelled by billions of Petrodollars, has perverted nearly every corner of the Muslim world with its fanaticism.

The US, along with some its major allies, plays along with this travesty for several reasons. Most prominently, billions of Petrodollars recycled through their economies provide them with an exorbitant economic advantage. Secondly, they enjoy the ability to use crazy Jihadis against their enemies du jour. Want to push Russia out of Afghanistan? Send in the Jihadis. Want to topple Assad? Send in the Jihadis. Need to overthrow Gaddafi? Send in the Jihadis. Need to keep Somalia from developing its 100 billion barrels of oil and bringing down the price of oil to levels that would make US fracking uneconomical? Send in the (Ash-Shabab) Jihadis. Need to prevent Russian oil reaching the Caspian via Chechnya and Daghestan? Well you get the idea.

First they spend years priming Muslim groups with the backward, nihilistic Wahhabi ideology. Then, when frustration with their inability to achieve success (as a result of their backward, nihilistic ideology) makes these groups ready to take radical action, in come the suppliers of cash, arms, training and logistic support to make their dreams of Jihad a reality. Its a tried and tested formula that will continue to work until people realize that...

Its the Saudis, stupid!

Of course there are mischievous machinations on the part of imperial and former colonial powers to subjugate the Muslim world and in particular the hydrocarbon-rich Middle East. But both Muslims and non-Muslims need to realize that none of what we are seeing today would have been possible without the corrupting influence of Saudi and Gulf Arab sponsored Wahhabism/Salafism/Takfirism. Muslims in particular need to stop ignoring the dagger aimed at the heart of their religion by these sponsors of fanaticism. They must stop accepting their money, their books and their scholarships. It's all a poison pill!

Nor should the disguise of modernity used by those like the Qataris, who so strongly backed Morsi in Egypt, be allowed to hide their nefarious behavior. They are simply Wahhabis in suits. Just a week before Morsi was deposed, he publicly called on Egyptian youths to join the Takfiri Jihad in Syria. Muslims need to reclaim their true heritage from these usurpers.

On the other hand, Westerners should demand that their governments stop playing with fire by employing Islamic “beserkers” to do their dirty work. The blowback from their governments’ complicity with the Saudis has been extensive and includes highlights like 9/11, the Chechen Boston Marathon bombing, the consulate killings in Benghazi and the recent beheading of James Foley. Now with an entire well-armed and richly funded state spanning the borders of Syria and Iraq at their disposal and recruits flocking to their cause from all over the world, we can expect even more poisonous fruit from this tree planted and nourished by the Saudis and their helpers.

The first step to solving a problem is identifying its nature. Hence the importance of understanding the essential role that Saudi Arabia and its Gulf Arab allies have played in creating the world’s number one security problem. Thus far the Saudis, Qataris and their other Gulf Arab allies have managed to obscure the centrality of their role in spawning Al-Qaeda, ISIS/IS and their like. This needs to end!

Some people speculate that the ISIS/IS Frankenstein that they birthed may yet consume the Saudi Kingdom itself, but that would be little comfort to a world forced to deal with the furies that they have unleashed.

Obama bows before Saudi king

Collapse Cafe Part I

Topics include the situation around Ukraine, the geopolitical blundering of the United States, and how you too can destroy your economy by imposing unilateral sanctions. Click here for audio.

Interview

The thick façade of civilization

Michael Jaecks[This is a guest post by Capt. Ray Jason. To read more of his essays, please visit his blog. (And to read more of mine, please buy the book I just published.)]

Most of the sky was clear and starry, but ten miles out to sea there was a cluster of clouds filled with lightning. I was anchored peacefully behind a low island that afforded me a perfect view of this dramatic spectacle. Sitting on the foredeck with my back against the mast, I sipped some hot sake and marveled at this exquisite display. Each burst of sky fire was contained within an individual cloud. Some would erupt in amber-colored brightness and others would shimmer in soft silver or lavender. The almost Japanese lantern quality of the clouds sparked a memory within me that I struggled to recall. A second cup of sake unlocked the remembrance vault, and the incident drifted back. It was a good one.
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Permission to Steal Everything

There is a convoy of 280 gleaming white trucks moving through Russia toward Ukraine loaded with humanitarian aid for the populations of Donetsk and Lugansk. This isn't much, considering that well over a million people have been cut off from food, water, electricity and (soon) heat because of indiscriminate artillery bombardment by the Ukrainian military. But it's a start. But it seems like a rocky start; first, NATO's mouthpiece Rasmussen tries to characterize this humanitarian mission as a clandestine invasion. Then the Ukrainians start imposing various conditions. Let's consider these separately.

When was the last time Russia, or, for that matter, USSR, mount a clandestine invasion? If you said “Crimea,” then you need to understand that

1. Russian troops have been in Crimea continuously for the past 231 years;
2. they were there under an international treaty; and
3. their troop levels never exceeded the levels this treaty stipulates.

If Russia wanted to invade Ukraine, it simply would. The Ukrainian troops would surrender or run away, but then what? Nobody has an answer to that question, not even the Russians. Aid—yes, invasion—no thanks. The policy of letting Ukraine “stew in its own juices until the meat falls off the bone” (as I put it back in mid-March) is working quite well, with the added bonus that the EU and the US are now at each others' throats over their self-imposed sanctions. But it will take time, and this means that the population of Novorossiya, where Donetsk and Lugansk are located, and which ended up as part of Ukraine thanks to Lenin, has to be fed and heated through the next winter. Hence the humanitarian mission, which will be, if all goes well, the first of many.

The various Ukrainian conditions have to do with something quite different than countering the threat of a clandestine invasion. First they asked that the convoy pass through Kharkov instead of rolling straight toward Donetsk, making for a big detour. Then they demanded that the goods be offloaded at the border and loaded onto Ukrainian trucks, but they couldn't come up with enough trucks. Then they demanded that the Russian trucks cary Ukrainian license plates and that each truck carry a Ukrainian representative. Next it will be something else.

You may be confused at what might be behind all of these fairly ridiculous conditions and stalling tactics, so let me explain. The Ukrainians are doing their best to figure out how they can steal the goods from the convoy. Until they can find a way to do that, nothing will move, because nothing ever moves in Ukraine until everybody gets their piece of the action. During their two-decade-plus experiment with Western-style “freedom and democracy,” by which I mean oligarchy and prostitution, Ukraine has bred a subspecies of survivors adept at answering just one question: “Where's my piece of it?”

Take Arseny Yatsenyuk, the US State Department-assigned Ukrainian Prime Minister. He recently announced that Ukraine was out of money, unable even to pay its soldiers (this, by the way, is disingenuous, because Ukraine hasn't been paying or feeding its soldiers) and that therefore he is resigning. Ukraine got a couple billion dollars from Russia as a door prize for joining Moscow's Customs Union, under President Yanukovich, who was subsequently overthrown. Where's that money? Om-nom-nom, burp! Then, after the coup, the West gave Ukraine some loan guarantees and a few additional billions. Om-nom-nom, burp! So, with nothing left to steal, Yatsenyuk announces his resignation and heads for the airport, on his way to a warm sunny place where he can squander his ill-gotten funds on hookers and blow. His CIA minders had to retrieve him from the airport and frog-march him back to his office. He is not allowed to resign. He can't live the American Dream just yet—not until some brainless stooge gets to mutter the words “mission accomplished” and the CIA operatives head home, at which point the Ukrainians go back to trying to turn tricks at the Kremlin.

With regard to the convoy, getting the cargo off-loaded and put on Ukrainian trucks would have made stealing it easy, but that couldn't happen due to lack of trucks. (Remember, Ukrainian officials have been selling off government property and pocketing the proceeds for two decades now, so that very little is now left.) Forcing the trucks to carry Ukrainian license plates is a small concession, since these probably require a bribe (nothing happens there without a bribe) but perhaps they are looking for opportunities to waylay a few of these trucks and break them up for spare parts. Getting a Ukrainian representative on board each truck is another small concession: he will need to be fed, pacified with vodka and given walking-around money. But the main problem—how to steal a substantial portion, ideally all, of the humanitarian aid going to Novorossiya—remains unsolved, and until it is solved there will be deadlock. This makes it difficult to cooperate with Ukrainian officials, who don't seem to have any trace of human values left and function on a strictly biological level, but the Russians are trying.

How does a country sink to this level of degeneracy in just a couple of decades? Recently, Prof. Savelyev, who is an expert on, among other things, human evolution, ventured to explain. Human evolution, he said in an interview, has been primarily the evolution of the brain. In the short time that Homo Sapiens Sapiens has been in existence, its brain size increased dramatically. Although it is possible to declare that intelligence is of direct survival value, there is a more reasoned explanation for the pressure to increase brain size.

Most of the size gains have been in the prefrontal cortex—a part of the brain that does not have a strictly defined function but is implicated in modulating social behavior. Indeed, people with a lobotomized prefrontal cortex go on to function more or less normally (but do sometimes exhibit a startling lack of ethical or moral sense). But a lobotomy is by no means necessary to produce individuals with stunted morals and ethics: there is a critical learning period for developing a conception of the common good, the ability to cooperate with others in absence of selfish motivations, and a morality not directly grounded in biological self-interest. A social environment such as that which has prevailed in Ukraine during its period of “independence,” during which theft and prostitution were prized above all, is not conducive to developing any of these. A case can be made that such an environment exerts the opposite evolutionary pressure: if all desirable women are prostitutes and the only economic opportunities involve theft, then biological survival requires theft. This makes a large prefrontal cortex redundant, and those who have a smaller one perhaps make more efficient criminals. The result is a population dominated by people free of any human values, who pursue strictly biological goals of resource accumulation and reproduction.

My book The Five Stages of Collapse includes an extensive case study devoted to the Ik, a small tribe of hunter-gatherers in northern Uganda, which, when they were observed by the anthropologist Colin Turnbull in the 1970s, exhibited just such a level of cultural degeneracy. They had reached the sixth stage of collapse: cultural collapse. Turnbull's prescription was to destroy them as a people by breaking up their society and resettling them. Prof. Savelyev has something eerily similar to say: human evolution advances through appalling acts of violence in which the males of culturally degenerate populations, which have lost their human values and conceptions of the common good, are destroyed outright. History is replete with examples of such exterminations (among numerous other ones), and although we may regard them with horror, others may regard them with pride. For instance, Prof. Savelyev points out, the French are still quite proud of their revolutionary invention, the guilliotine. To them it was a civilized, efficient way to neatly solve the problem—by neatly slicing off the heads that contained the faulty circuitry.

According to Savelyev, the Ukrainian flag shouldn't be a field of sunflowers under a blue sky. A sausage impaled on a fork would be much more appropriate. After all, that is what they are fighting for. It's no point shaming them, for stealing or for lying. To them, telling the truth is a surprising new requirement, they didn't sign up for it, and they don't understand why it's necessary. All they have to do is lie well: “Donetsk is surrounded! We are about to prevail!” they tell you. Sure they are. Ask the rebels where they are going, and they will tell you matter-of-factly: “We are going all the way to Kiev.” Perhaps the French can send an aid convoy of their own, to Kiev, to coincide with the rebels' arrival. It could include a few guilliotines. In the meantime, I hope that Uncle Sam is having lots of fun playing with his Ukrainian mail order bride; after all, they have plenty in common.

Just Published: Societies that Collapse

CLICK TO ORDER
Dear Readers,

I am happy to announce that the essays I have written over the past three years are now available for purchase worldwide in book form. Of course, you can read these essays right on this blog, but I hope that having them all together in a single plump little book will make the experience more enjoyable. Presenting these essays as a single collection and juxtaposing the deadly serious with the downright whimsical makes difficult subjects a little bit lighter.

At the risk of overstating the obvious, I'd like to point out that it is your purchases of my books—nothing else—that make it economically possible for me to continue writing and for you to continue reading what I write.

I expect that I will have fewer opportunities to write in the coming months. I am going out into the ocean, you see, and although there will be periodic landfalls, I don't know how many anchorages will come equipped with open wifi or a 4G signal to allow me to blog from them. And so this retrospective offers you a way to continue reading my writings in the meantime should you wish to do so. Looking back, the topics that I wrote on have only become more relevant over time. I stand by everything I wrote, and hope that my work will continue to be worth revisiting as events unfold.

Many thanks to Matt Harter for doing the rendering of the planet's surface covered with highway interchanges and parking lots, to Will Kilburn for editing and proofreading the text, and to the developers at CreateSpace (part of Amazon) for streamlining the publishing process. I would also like to thank those of my readers, who never hesitate to point out whenever I goofed, allowing me to make corrections.

Yours,
Dmitry


Table of Contents
Dance of the Marionettes • Perfectly Comfortable • The Wheel of Misfortune • Trained for Success, Bred to be Eaten • A Modest Health Care Proposal • Shale Gas: The View from Russia • Down the Skyscraper • Sustainable Living as Religious Observance • Fragility and Collapse: Slowly at first, then all at once • Our Brave Experiment • Peak Oil Oppositional Disorder:  Neurosis or Psychosis? • Politics of the Unconscious • The Most Interesting Driver in the World • Suicidal Services • Le Vieillard Gros • In Praise of Anarchy, Part I • In Praise of Anarchy, Part II • In Praise of Anarchy, Part III • The Limits of Language • Due to circumstances under control • Meanwhie in Ireland • The Practice of Anarchy • A Royal Pain in the Ass • Meanwhile in Russia • Escape from the Merry Christmas Zone • The Image of the Enemy •
The Ecology of Hell • Pray for an Asteroid • Monkey Trap Nation • Understanding Organizational Stupidity • The Rationale behind the Boston Psy-ops • Meet the Chechens • Look for loopholes to avoid extinction • The Sixth Stage of Collapse • The Story of “Er” • Blessed are the Idiots • In Praise of Nomads • How To Time Collapses • “American” exceptionalism • The Good Life: Mobility, Anonymity, Freedom • Reichstag Fire in Kiev • The Madness of President Putin • Moneybag Logic

Obama risks American lives to save the devil worshipers

If you've been paying attention to the news, the US is bombing Iraq again, this time to avert a humanitarian crisis: a group of Yezedis is stranded on top of a mountain, driven there by those Daashing lads from the Islamic State (the Arabic name for them is “Daash”).

Now, if your reaction on hearing these news was “Who the heck are the Yezedis?” then you are in good company. This is a very obscure, fairly small, incredibly ancient cult, and few people have heard of them. I have, and so my reaction was “Oh no, they are killing the devil worshipers!”

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German Stunner: “West is on the Wrong Path”

Gabor Steingart, the the publisher of Germany’s leading financial newspaper Handelsblatt, just let loose with an editorial directly challenging Washington's idiotic anti-Russian policies.

The appearance of this document is very timely: just yesterday Russia unleashed the first round of counter-sanctions, banning the import of foodstuffs from the US and the EU. These counter-sanctions are cleverly designed to cause pain in proportion to the level of anti-Russian activity of the country in question; thus, the three Baltic countries, which are virulently anti-Russian in spite of having large Russian populations and surviving largely through trade with Russia, face staggering losses, followed by equally anti-Russian Poland, followed by the rest of the EU, including poor Greece, which is friendly to Russia and should be considered collateral damage. The greatest beneficiaries of these sanctions are all those countries that opposed (11) or abstained (58) when the UN voted to condemn Russia's annexation of Crimea: they get to leapfrog over EU and US economically by exporting foodstuffs to Russia. Russia's consumers and Russia's agricultural sector are also among the winners: Russians will eat healthier food, with no GMO contamination, while profits that used to flow to the US and the EU will now be invested in domestic agriculture, making Russia more self-sufficient in food and aiding in the development of rural districts. Another clever element to these sanctions is that farmers tend to be politically vocal and influential. I see tractors clogging the streets of Europe's capitals and dumptruck-loads of manure decorating the steps of government buildings before too long.

As to his diagnosis of Obama's true motivation, I think he has it wrong. It's not all about pleasing the Tea Party. They, and American voters in general, are irrelevant, it makes no difference who gets elected, and Obama's policies are not Obama's. There is a deeper reason why the oligarchs who own and operate the country formerly known as America are currently attempting to enlarge every problem they see, be it stoking civil war in Ukraine or provoking ISIS into attacking Americans: they are desperate to avoid a scenario where the US collapses on its own, with no external enemy to blame. Not only would it be just too humiliating, but also the population, suddenly brought out of its stupor, might turn on those actually responsible rather than helplessly blame some foreign scapegoat. Putin has to fit the bill, reality be damned.

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Some facts on flight MH17

Finally, here are some facts . In spite of most of the “evidence” offered by the Ukrainians or the US being either a forgery or missing altogether, it's looking like the Ukrainian military shot down the plane in a coordinated attack. The black box recordings, the air traffic control records, the satellite surveillance photos—where are they? They have been hidden away. Why? Because they don't support the narrative that “it's all Putin's fault”?