DARK & DANGEROUS TIMES

Guest Post by Ol’ Remus

The dark and dangerous times following a catastrophic collapse are often imagined as violence without direction or purpose, save momentary advantage and survival. For most it serves well as a working assumption when norms, violated more than observed, cease to be norms. But like anything else, chaos comes in grades and flavors. There is survival value in knowing what they’ve been in the past.

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Roaming refugees. These are the locusts that swarm after a collapse, able to strip a community by weight of numbers. Typically hungry, desperate, leaderless and abandoned by leadership material, they’re drifters and opportunists. Small communities are overrun and looted in the manner of a flash mob. Bug-in preppers are the bon bons of preference for the more capable among them. Well sited survival communities are unlikely to be in the path of roaming refugees.

Gangs. Existing gangs are specialists dependent on a functioning urban environment. Once the cities and suburbs are stripped, “street smarts” are useless and they become parasites without a host. Surviving famine and scarcity takes a different set of skills, and the learning curve is steep. Ethnocentric gangs are most likely to remain intact, but most likely to attack each other. Pointlessly aggressive and impatient by nature, they’re a more dangerous subset of roaming refugees. The more ambitious gangs are marauders in the making. A survival community should overestimate their capabilities.

Marauders. In war, marauders are bands of military adventurers that strike at unexpected targets from an unexpected direction in unexpected ways. Unlike commandos deployed against high value targets, the marauder has a general mandate best described as “extreme cost effectiveness”. Seasoned marauders are inventive, patient, and have an almost otherworldly ability to sniff out opportunity. The safer a survival community believes itself to be, the more vulnerable it is to marauders.

Partisans. At the outset these will be existing militia, typically modelled as light infantry except without recourse to heavy weapons support, self-armed and trained primarily as skirmishers. Their first task is likely to be defending their home community from roaming refugees and gangs. As the emergency devolves other partisans will arise, some as patriotic resistance outfits, some as mercenaries for war lords with territorial ambitions, some warranting response in kind and some qualifying as candidates for an alliance. Partisans see a survival community as a source of supplies and recruits, either theirs or their enemy’s.

Government and quasi-government. Drastic downsizing will pressure fiefdoms with overlapping authority to battle for supremacy. Even within government no one will be sure who is king and who is not king. Subjugating and exploiting the productive territories that sustain them will be government’s only real job. The classic morphing of government will accelerate—every bureaucracy wants to be a police force, every police force wants to be an army. Martial law is a given, there will be no civil liberties. A survival community careless enough to draw their attention will have some hard times ahead.

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Iconoclast421
Iconoclast421

I’m not sure why people think there’s going to be this massive collapse. Sure, through the lens of history it might look that way, but for those living through it, it is going to be a long slow gradual process where living standards are chipped away one luxury at a time. With these people in control of the printing presses, they will ensure that any serious collapse is choked off by endless bouts of inflationary spikes. Look how bad it is in Venezuela, yet most people are getting by surprisingly well, mindbogglingly well actually. When you consider what their currency has done you’d think the country would be half burned to the ground and half its population gone by now but somehow they endure. Since this madness began 6 years ago, their population growth rate has only been cut by some 30%, and is still higher than the US, and that rate had been trending lower anyway so its almost as if the hyperinflation had no measureable impact at all.

Jake
Jake

Perhaps it is more like people “fear” collapse under this or that scenario. Being aware and prepared will pay off whether it involves a societal collapse, invasion, plague, any disaster you can think of.
As for the armament available, I would get somebody from the local Guard unit to get me one of those cute M113 Gavin tracks with a gun tub sporting a .50 BMG if we got to a situation where every community is on their own. I think a lot of people would shit if they knew the firepower parked right under their noses in their own towns they are unaware of. We’ve got amphibious tracks like the Gavin and surface to air missiles stored right down the street.

Ivan
Ivan

Not to mention what rolls around on rail cars and semis…

Persnickety
Persnickety

Iconoclast is mostly right. I think we’ve been in the early stage of collapse for 10-15 years now, if not longer. You could make a decent argument that Western Civilization’s collapse started in 1970 (US focused) or 1914 (UK focused).

Maybe it eventually goes Mad Max / The Postman, but maybe not. Regardless, a long slow slide in living standards is a collapse and we already seem to be in that.

diogenes
diogenes

Fuck it. Go down fighting like in The Battle of Thermopylae.

whiskey tang foxtrot

Hope it all goes well for the deep thinkers. My ass continues to buy ammo.

Huck Finn
Huck Finn

Nothing to fear but death itself, and that being inevitable why worry about it. If someone comes and takes my stuff and kills me, well fuck it, I’m old and I was going to die anyway. If they do I sure as hell will do my best to make sure I take as many of the fucks with me as I can.

rhs jr
rhs jr

The greatest threat to Americans is the same NeoCon government that is the greatest threat to the world. I look forward to the day that threat and it’s supporters are dead or in jail.

BB

I will sit it out as long as I can.I live in a good neighborhood with retired police officers and military personnel who are armed to the teeth. I plan on hooking up with them and fight like hell if I have to.It is scary just to think about such things at my age (57) but I will do all I can to protect my neighbors and neighborhood.

Rdawg
Rdawg

No doubt they’ll be thrilled to have a 57 year old truck driver with a hernia and heart condition. Diabetes too if I remember correctly.

More likely you’ll be turned into something useful like dog food.

Persnickety
Persnickety

You think the retired cops are in any better health? Do you actually know any cops?

Although a cop’s chance of getting shot is miniscule in most areas, the job is still bad for your health, in a way that combines the health problems of office work, truck driving, and warehouse work.

NickelthroweR
NickelthroweR

Greetings,
I believe that the more technocratic and technology driven a society happens to be gives a clue as to how quickly everything will go down the sh*tter.

Have a look at the human organism for example. I could probably stab you multiple times and smack you around some with a baseball bat and so long as I do not pierce any vital organs then you will probably survive. I mean, well, I could bust your knee caps and break your arms and carve you up a bit and you’d still survive. Hell, maybe live on for another 50 years. Who knows.

What I can not do is cut off your supply of oxygen even if I do it to champagne and music. No oxygen – no life and that is true of a technocratic society in that no electricity – no life. You could probably turn off the electricity in Russia or China without causing a total collapse because it wasn’t that long ago that these people didn’t have such things. Enough people remember life without electricity as to stave off a 90% collapse. That certainly isn’t true here in the USA as we depend on technology in the same way that the NAZI war machine had to have oil. Those fancy jets and tanks they had didn’t come with perpetual motion devices.

Jake
Jake

There is little doubt the Achilles Heel of the technological society is electricity.

steve
steve

I’m calling my place “the Alamo”. At 63 I ain’t bugging anywhere. I’ve got my shit here. It’s gonna cost someone their life to get it-their’s or mine.

Good thoughts though, Ol’ Remus

BB

Mad dog , that’s why I said I will sit it out as long as I can . Most of the guys in my neighborhood are older then I am but we all got good sniper rifles.
I no longer have a hernia .Got it fixed.Heart is in fair condition according to Doc.No Diabetes for me Thank the Lord so I will be able to at least fire my rifles.

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