{"id":214497,"date":"2020-10-04T07:55:33","date_gmt":"2020-10-04T07:55:33","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.thetruthseeker.co.uk\/?p=214497"},"modified":"2020-10-08T05:47:25","modified_gmt":"2020-10-08T05:47:25","slug":"america-is-finished","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.thetruthseeker.co.uk\/?p=214497","title":{"rendered":"America is Finished"},"content":{"rendered":"

John Quincy Adams \u2013 Strategic Review Sept 25, 2020<\/strong><\/h1>\n

About twenty years ago The Atlantic published a piece by Jeffrey Tayler named \u201cRussia is finished<\/a><\/strong><\/span>\u201d subtitled \u201cThe unstoppable descent of a once great power into social catastrophe and strategic irrelevance.\u201d Not a very successful prediction was it? But what he did was fashionable at the time \u2013 he described what was happening in Russia in the nineties and made a straight-line projection from there. His error was assuming the continuation of the straight line \u2013 and he made the error because he thought Russia was only \u201cZaire With Permafrost\u201d.<\/span><\/p>\n

My purpose in this essay is to apply the points that the author made about Russia twenty years ago to the United States of America today and adopt a simple straight-line projection based on a corresponding view of American history. This is not so much because I think that America really is finished \u2013 after all, as Adam Smith observed, there is a great deal of ruin in a nation<\/a><\/strong><\/span>, and America has seen hard times before \u2013 but in order to illustrate the perilous position America is in today. As the author of the Atlantic piece must now understand, straight-line predictions are always risky because \u2013 as happened in Russia \u2013 other forces can appear to change the \u201cunstoppable descent\u201d. But a straight-line prediction from the American situation as of the autumn of 2020 does point to an \u201cunstoppable descent\u201d into \u201csocial catastrophe and strategic irrelevance\u201d.<\/span><\/p>\n

In my opinion, Tayler\u2019s principal error, which constrained his estimation of what was possible, was his overarching view of Russia as a brutal, dysfunctional, backwards dictatorship.<\/span><\/p>\n

The hostility that Russians feel toward their government comes not from some innate lack of civic duty but from the terror, violence, and deceit that have since the late Middle Ages characterized the way in which their rulers have treated them\u2026<\/span><\/p>\n

Byzantium was moribund, its religion having suffocated the intellectual traditions of the Hellenes.<\/span><\/p>\n

Mongol khans, with all their pomp and cruelty, became the figures on which many Russian rulers would model themselves\u2026<\/span><\/p>\n

Muscovite czars, Ivan the Terrible foremost among them, destroyed all institutions that could rival their power, turning the nobility into servants, enslaving the peasants to the nobility, and employing Orthodoxy as their official ideology\u2014for Orthodoxy proclaimed the czar God\u2019s chosen representative on earth\u2026<\/span><\/p>\n

Russia, isolated and infused with a messianic sense of its own superiority over the West, suffered the predations of rulers bent on building a strong state\u2026<\/span><\/p>\n

Taking full advantage of Russia\u2019s absolutist traditions, Joseph Stalin followed in the footsteps of Ivan the Terrible and Peter the Great and set about strengthening the state, enacting programs of industrialization and agricultural collectivization: he enslaved vast segments of his population to build industries, mine the earth, and gather crops\u2026<\/span><\/p>\n

Can only expect more of the same from a country with that past.<\/span><\/p>\n

This is what might be called the Richard Pipes<\/strong><\/span><\/a> take on Russia. Let us consider what would be predicted for the future of America if we were to take the Howard Zinn<\/strong><\/span><\/a> point of view. That is to say, an America based on slave labor, the extermination of native peoples, exploitation of the poor by the rich under cover of an attractive but hollow ideology, predatory behavior in its neighborhood backed by merciless warfare wherever it doesn\u2019t get its way. You could expect only more of the same.<\/span><\/p>\n

Now the Pipes and Zinn views are not false<\/em>, but they are partial<\/em>. Russia is not nothing but a brutal dysfunctional dictatorship, it has its Father Zosimas too. Neither is America just a brutal, dysfunctional plutocracy, it has its spiritual values too. But, just as Tayler took a Pipes view of Russia, we will in what follows take a Zinn view of America. And just as Russia\u2019s future turned out to be much better than Tayler\/Pipes foresaw, let us hope that America\u2019s future is better also. We will take the points Tayler makes about Russia, apply them to America and project the future from that point through Zinn\u2019s perspective and see what we get.<\/span><\/p>\n