The Transition

Many institutions have no convincing justification for their own existence.

Guest post by Robert Gore at Straight Line Logic

Western civilization is characterized by its institutions. Its foundations have been government, organized religion, the military, science, technology, business, academia, media, art, and entertainment. Institutions have been bulwarks of order and have enabled Western civilization to reach unprecedented plateaus of achievement and prosperity. Now, they’re under assault and crumbling, which has been often noted and decried but usually not analyzed or understood as the outcome of an epochal transition.

Institutions have been the victim of their own success. The Industrial and Information Revolutions have put goods, services, wealth, data, and choices in billions of hands in what amounts to an historical blink of an eye, less than two centuries. The average American lives better and longer than royalty did back in monarchy’s heyday and has more personal power. Kings and emperors of yore could order people around and toss them in dungeons, but they couldn’t hop on the Internet and communicate with someone on the other side of the planet or hop on a freeway and journey five hundred miles in a day.

Institutions’ loss has been individuals’ gain, and many of the latter are questioning the necessity of the former. Institutions are staring into an abyss. Many, including governments, do not have convincing justifications for their own existence. They offer little to average people and in many cases they’re a net negative, imposing nothing but burdens. Their leaders are solely devoted to furthering their own prerogatives and power. Now, institutions are fighting a rearguard action to halt or slow a transition that at best will dramatically reduce their power and could mean their extinction.

COVID, climate change, foreign wars, censorship, woke, open borders, surveillance, and digital passports and currencies are Last Gasp efforts to preserve institutional status, wealth, and power. The institutions have responded to their own drum roll with what vigor they can muster, but those causes inspire vapid virtue signaling, not authentic passion. Their only wellspring of true passion is hatred for anyone who believes differently, who challenges their science, propaganda, and mendacity, and, more broadly, their right to dictate and coerce, and to cancel, punish or execute anyone not toeing their line.

Their objective failures—many of which count in their corrupt reckonings as successes—are manifest. The COVID response, particularly vaccines’ deaths and adverse events, completely discredited governments, public health, institutional medicine, the pharmaceutical companies, and social and mainstream media, while inflicting severe collateral damage on official “science,” big business, and central banks. The institutions are regrouping under the banner of climate change, but it’s clear from the pushback they’re already receiving that their agenda can only be implemented through violence and high-tech totalitarianism.

Repeated failures and ever-mounting resistance would seem to be enough to doom their totalitarian designs. Unfortunately, in their desperation and hatred, the willingness of the elite to wage actual, kinetic war on the rest of us shouldn’t be underestimated. While the COVID vaccine death toll numbers in the millions, war still has no rival for murderous effectiveness. However, offensive violence is no solution.

Nuclear weapons changed warfare in a way that’s not generally recognized. The threat that a global nuclear conflagration could eliminate humanity rendered their use a high-risk proposition. The Hiroshima and Nagasaki bombings in 1945 remain the only wartime use of nuclear weapons. Under the umbrella created by nuclear weapons’ unemployability, technological advances have fueled the development of a staggering array of armaments that has decisively shifted the military balance from offensive to defensive warfare.

World War II was the last major war in which an offensive, or more correctly, a counter-offensive, won. The allied powers repelled the axis powers, but at huge cost. Industrial-scale, mechanized warfare’s awesome destructive power left all the major participants except the U.S. in ruins, their populations decimated.

Offensive military power has become enormously expensive relative to the defensive technologies and strategies that can be employed against it. Since World War II, there have been few successful invasions. Both sides were stymied in the Korean War. U.S. invasions have been a string of disasters since Vietnam. Afghan goat herders defeated both the Soviets and the U.S.

On the cusp of victory in Ukraine, the Russian Special Military Operation would seem to belie the trend of offensive failures. However, the Russians have actually won by playing defense. They moved through their major objective, the Donbass region of Eastern Ukraine, where the majority of the population speak Russian. Many of them want to be part of Russia and hate the Ukrainian government, which has waged war on them since the 2014 coup. Consequently, the Russians were supported by the local population.

This past year featured a Ukrainian counteroffensive that was supposed to drive the Russians back from Donbass and retake the Crimean peninsula. NATO and Ukrainian strategists refused to recognize that their offensive was akin to sending cavalry units against machine-gun and artillery emplacements. They were up against an opponent well-armed with land mines, state-of-the-art field artillery and long range missiles, air cover, and surveillance and attack drones. The Russian military, which has a long tradition of waging defensive warfare, employed a complex three-layer defense. The Ukrainians rarely progressed through even the first layer, impaling themselves on the tip of the Russian spear and taking massive losses.

The successful Russians strategies and tactics will, or should be, studied by military analysts in the U.S. However, what’s most important is that those tactics implicitly acknowledge a truism central to the transition in progress. High-cost offensive warfare can be stymied and often defeated with relatively low cost defensive weaponry and asymmetric warfare.

It can be argued that an offensive against the world’s most powerful military was obviously doomed, although nobody in the Western brain trust made that argument before the Ukrainians attacked. What truly signals the dawning of a new age has been the repeated successes since World War II of guerrilla or insurgent warfare against ostensibly much more powerful forces.

The Russians learned their lesson from the Soviet failure in Afghanistan. The U.S. government hasn’t learned anything from its string of failures. In Washington, nothing succeeds like failure. Its unconditional backing of Israel’s attempted elimination of Palestinians in Gaza finds it doubling down on what hasn’t worked.

The Israelis recognize a grim reality of fighting an insurgency on insurgent territory. To win, it’s not enough to kill the guerrillas, the guerrilla-friendly local population must be eliminated as well. The Israelis’ campaign has been merciless: destroying structures, killing Palestinian civilians, and making life intolerable for the survivors. The Israeli aim is to drive the Palestinians from Gaza and Israel for good. This meets international-law definitions of genocide and has been rightly decried around the world.

What will it mean if Israel fails? The Israelis may well reduce Gaza to rubble, but that would not be mission accomplished. Rubble provides excellent cover for guerrilla strikes. Hamas’ extensive tunnels indicate that it has prepared for this war for years. In all probability, it launched the October 7 attack to get things going. Israel’s negligence detecting and responding to that attack may have been intentional, indicating that it, too, wanted the war it now has.

Hamas has a network of allies across the Middle East. Israeli and U.S. forces and maritime commerce are under attack in Iraq, Syria, Lebanon, Yemen, the Red Sea, the Indian Ocean, and the Mediterranean. Yemen’s Houthis have already bottled up the Red Sea. It would be an easy matter for Iran to do the same in the Persian Gulf. Control of maritime commerce at important choke points calls into question a plank as central to the American Empire as it was to the British Empire before it: control of the world’s seas and oceans.

What happens if an American-led flotilla tasked with keeping the Red Sea or the Persian Gulf open comes under a swarming missile and drone attack, plus electronic warfare that disrupts its command and control capabilities, and destroyers or aircraft carriers are sunk? Missiles, drones, and cyber disruption cost a pittance compared to battleships, and it would then be apparent that they make conventional surface naval power a paper shark. The vessels in their watery grave would send the same message as the tanks smoldering on Ukraine’s battlefields.

The power of governments rests on their ability to use violence to control populations. Yawning cost disparities, decentralized technologies, and asymmetric warfare have rendered much of conventional offensive power vulnerable or obsolete, marking an historic, tectonic transition in the relationships between governments and governed. This is no secret, particularly in the non-Western world.

Across the globe, insurgents are taking the measure of governments and finding them wanting. Governments that are not feared cannot govern. As they confront their limitations, they will, being governments, make their situations worse.

The American government has a problem not shared with many others. Its potential insurgents—urban, suburban, and rural—are armed to the teeth. They already control many of the cities (see “Ants at the Picnic, Part Two”). Heavily indebted Washington cannot command the resources necessary to subjugate the population. It gets stretched thinner with each new dollar of debt, each new tax, each new institutionalized corruption, each new illegal migrant, each new substitution of gobbledygook ideology for rationality, and each new foreign intervention. Recognition of Washington’s weakness is behind the talk of secession and some states’ defiance of its dictates.

Washington’s weakness is shared by many Western governments, although most of them don’t have to contend with armed opposition. They do have to contend with increasingly restive populations, which by sheer force of numbers can upend existing political arrangements. To think that these beleaguered national governments can be replaced by a confederated or unitary global government that could then exercise effective control is delusional.

The imposition of global government would entail an invasion by an outside force of millions of globally dispersed localities. The global force would encounter the same problem Israel faces in Gaza. Overt and covert opposition could number in the billions.

The globalists would have to contend with organized insurrection, guerrilla warfare, sabotage, and terrorism, as well as random riots, criminality, and widespread disorder. They would have to resort to the Israeli “solution” in Gaza—mass extermination. While they are relying on propaganda, subversion, electronic control, and biological warfare, perhaps only nuclear weapons could achieve genocide at the necessary scale. Don’t put it past them. Don’t put it past the insurgents to acquire their own nukes.

Short of nuclear conflagration, the world will continue to devolve towards institutional failure, popular disillusionment, mounting rage, and chaotic fragmentation and balkanization. Today’s dinosaur governments are unable to exercise control, and many of them are slated for extinction. They will not be replaced by an even larger and more unwieldy dinosaur—global government—which is only the last, desperate hope of the fading regime. Instead, the vacuum created by failed governments will be filled by those proficient in decentralized violence. Those who have relied on centralized authority for their livelihoods, power, and status will find their worlds turned upside down. Many will not survive the transition.

Assume crash positions.

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