Embracing Realism with an Attitude of Pessimism and a Foreboding Sense of Fatalism

By Doug “Uncola” Lynn via TheBurningPlatform.com

 

We perceive our civic challenge as some vast, insoluble Rubik’s Cube. Behind each problem lies another problem that must be solved first, and behind that lies yet another, and another, ad infinitum. To fix crime we have to fix the family, but before we do that we have to fix welfare, and that means fixing our budget, and that means fixing our civic spirit, but we can’t do that without fixing moral standards, and that means fixing schools and churches, and that means fixing the inner cities, and that’s impossible unless we fix crime. There’s no fulcrum on which to rest a policy lever. People of all ages sense that something huge will have to sweep across America before the gloom can be lifted – but that’s an awareness we suppress. As a nation, we’re in deep denial.

– Straus and Howe (1997):  “The Fourth Turning”, FIRST EDITION page 2

 

The books Generations (1992) and The Fourth Turning (1997) by historians William Strauss and Neil Howe identified and categorized recorded cycles of history across multiple cultures and eras.  Both books analyzed the timelines of historical events and correlated them to specific life cycles identified as generational “types”.   Strauss and Howe addressed the concept of time in the context of both circular and linear perspectives.  In so doing, they described the “saeculum” as a “long human life” measuring approximately 80 to 90 years and comprised of four turnings, each lasting around 20 to 22 years.

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FOUR HORSEMEN OF THE APOCALYPSE ON THE MARCH

“The least-bad scenario is a hard landing, global recession worse than the 1930s. The worst-case borrows from the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse: war, famine, pestilence, and death.” – Kenneth S. Deffeyes

Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse - Wikipedia

“When hopes and dreams are loose in the streets, it is well for the timid to lock doors, shutter windows and lie low until the wrath has passed. For there is often a monstrous incongruity between the hopes, however noble and tender, and the action which follows them. It is as if ivied maidens and garlanded youths were to herald the four horsemen of the apocalypse.” – Eric Hoffer

I don’t pretend to be a biblical scholar or have any particular expertise in interpreting scriptures, and certainly not the Book of Revelation, supposedly written by John of Patmos during the reign of Roman emperor Domitian sometime between 81 AD and 96 AD. But I did suffer through twelve years of Catholic school, with plenty of time reading the bible for homework assignments. I know many people take everything in the bible literally. I do not adhere to that understanding. I believe most, if not all, of the bible is parables and symbolism written by men as a means to guide early Christians in how they should live their lives. The wisdom imparted by these writers is vast and deep. The Book of Revelation is the most apocalyptic, mysterious, and prophetic.

I would agree with scholars who say Revelation does not refer to actual people or events but is an allegory of the spiritual path and the ongoing struggle between good and evil. But, as our modern-day world seems to be coming apart at the seams, the battle between good and evil is reaching a zenith, only seen at crucial turning points in history.

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FOURTH TURNING 2022 – BAD MOON RISING (PART FOUR)

In Part 1, Part 2, and Part 3 of this article I examined the power of propaganda and the use of fear to invoke a mass formation psychosis on millions of weak-minded victims of global elitist psychopaths weaponizing a flu as part of their plot to Reset the world as lords of a global fiefdom, with the lowly peasants owning nothing and being happy to be permitted to live. The trillions in debt created by central bankers and debased political hacks, play acting as wise all-knowing leaders, are also part of the plan to crash the global economy and further the aims of these globalist billionaires and their parasitic front men.

The third segment of this unholy trinity has been the engineered civic decay spawned by the traitorous deeds of politicians, who have encouraged the invasion of over two million illegal freeloaders, aided domestic terrorists (BLM & Antifa) in burning and looting our cities for a year, facilitated the teaching of degeneracy to our children, and have pitted family against family, friend against friend, employer against employee, over a Big Pharma experimental therapy that doesn’t do anything but enrich those peddling it, injuring and killing millions, and tearing the last vestiges of our civil society to shreds.

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FOURTH TURNING 2022 – BAD MOON RISING (PART THREE)

In Part One & Part Two of this article I laid out how those in power have used the power of propaganda and the psychology of fear to weaponize a flu to further their Great Reset agenda, while ensuring an economic and financial collapse through the issuance of trillions in unpayable bad debt. In Part Three of this article, I will examine how the civic decay in our society, created by the ruling class, will coalesce into a bloody firestorm of death and destruction during the remaining years of this Fourth Turning.

“One does not establish a dictatorship in order to safeguard a revolution; one makes the revolution in order to establish the dictatorship.”George Orwell, 1984

“The masses never revolt of their own accord, and they never revolt merely because they are oppressed. Indeed, so long as they are not permitted to have standards of comparison, they never even become aware that they are oppressed.”George Orwell, 1984

There had been a theory discussed a few years ago regarding the nature of Fourth Turnings alternating between externally focused and internally focused. It is more about the key drivers, as all Fourth Turnings are impacted by domestic and foreign influences. Even though the sample size is small, this Fourth Turning appears to be following the alternating pattern. The American Revolution was driven by conflict with a foreign power (Great Britain), with another foreign power (France) tipping the scales in favor of the patriots. The Civil War was almost entirely a domestic internal conflict, with Great Britain not fully supporting the Confederacy, and tipping the scales in favor of the North. The Great Depression was created by global central bank machinations, with World War II almost entirely fought on foreign soil, leaving the U.S. as the unchallenged leader of the free world after 1945.

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THIS DAY IN HISTORY – FDR orders “enemy aliens” to register – 1942

Via History.com

On January 14, 1942, President Franklin D. Roosevelt issues Presidential Proclamation No. 2537, requiring non-U.S. citizens from World War II-enemy countries—Italy, Germany and Japan—to register with the United States Department of Justice. Registered persons were then issued a Certificate of Identification for Aliens of Enemy Nationality. A follow-up to the Alien Registration Act of 1940, Proclamation No. 2537 facilitated the beginning of full-scale internment of Japanese Americans the following month.

While most Americans expected the U.S. to enter the war, presumably in Europe or the Philippines, the nation was shocked to hear of Japan’s attack on Pearl Harbor on December 7, 1941. In the wake of the bombing, the West Coast appeared particularly vulnerable to another Japanese military offensive. A large population of Japanese Americans inhabited the western states and American military analysts feared some would conduct acts of sabotage on west-coast defense and agricultural industries.

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FOURTH TURNING 2022 – BAD MOON RISING

“Try to unlearn the obsessive fear of death (and the anxious quest for death avoidance) that pervades linear thinking in nearly every modern society. The ancients knew that, without periodic decay and death, nature cannot complete its full round of biological and social change. Without plant death, weeds would strangle the forest. Without human death, memories would never die, and unbroken habits and customs would strangle civilization. Social institutions require no less. Just as floods replenish soil and fires rejuvenate forests, a Fourth Turning clears out society’s exhausted elements and creates an opportunity.” – Strauss & Howe – The Fourth Turning

Coronavirus: Is Germany doing enough to slow the outbreak? | Germany | News and in-depth reporting from Berlin and beyond | DW | 14.03.2020

“Institutions will be increasingly bossy, limiting personal freedoms, chastising bad manners, and cleansing the culture. Powerful new civic organizations will make judgments about which individual rights deserve respect and which do not. Criminal justice will become swift and rough, trampling on some innocents to protect an endangered and desperate society from those feared to be guilty. Expect a loss of personal privacy. Fourth Turnings can be dark times for the free spirit: Just as one kind of official may have new authority to do something for you, another kind—some hastily deputized magistrate—may have new authority to do something to you.”Strauss & Howe – The Fourth Turning

It’s been almost a year since my annual look ahead at the upcoming year. Last year’s article FOURTH TURNING DETONATION was a big picture overview of where we stood during the thirteenth year of this ongoing Fourth Turning Crisis. I had given up trying to make specific predictions because the twenty-year length of a Crisis period does not lend itself to specificity within a given year. My comment at the beginning of the article was:

“Predicting the actual events which will occur over a short-term time frame is a fool’s errand, so I prefer to try and discern the direction and amplitude of the ongoing Crisis to gauge how we should prepare for what is coming.”

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IT’S A FOURTH TURNING: WHAT DID YOU EXPECT?

“Reflect on what happens when a terrible winter blizzard strikes. You hear the weather warning but probably fail to act on it. The sky darkens. Then the storm hits with full fury, and the air is a howling whiteness. One by one, your links to the machine age break down. Electricity flickers out, cutting off the TV. Batteries fade, cutting off the radio. Phones go dead. Roads become impossible, and cars get stuck. Food supplies dwindle. Day to day vestiges of modern civilization – bank machines, mutual funds, mass retailers, computers, satellites, airplanes, governments – all recede into irrelevance. Picture yourself and your loved ones in the midst of a howling blizzard that lasts several years. Think about what you would need, who could help you, and why your fate might matter to anybody other than yourself. That is how to plan for a saecular winter. Don’t think you can escape the Fourth Turning. History warns that a Crisis will reshape the basic social and economic environment that you now take for granted.” – The Fourth Turning – Strauss & Howe

What You Should Know About Getting Snowed In - CLC Lodging

“In retrospect, the spark might seem as ominous as a financial crash, as ordinary as a national election, or as trivial as a Tea Party. The catalyst will unfold according to a basic Crisis dynamic that underlies all of these scenarios: An initial spark will trigger a chain reaction of unyielding responses and further emergencies. The core elements of these scenarios (debt, civic decay, global disorder) will matter more than the details, which the catalyst will juxtapose and connect in some unknowable way. If foreign societies are also entering a Fourth Turning, this could accelerate the chain reaction. At home and abroad, these events will reflect the tearing of the civic fabric at points of extreme vulnerability – problem areas where America will have neglected, denied, or delayed needed action.” – The Fourth Turning – Strauss & Howe

I’ve been pondering this Fourth Turning in articles since its spectacular onset in September 2008, with the Wall Street/Federal Reserve initiated global financial implosion. The description above is apt, as this ongoing two-decade long storm gains intensity and our freedoms, liberties and rights are slowly extinguished as the electricity flickers and our modern civilization reverts to a more brutish state of antipathy among competing tribes, based on race, gender, class, party, geographic location, and now medical status.

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THIS DAY IN HISTORY – Japan surrenders, bringing an end to WWII – 1945

Via History.com

Aboard the USS Missouri in Tokyo Bay, Japan formally surrenders to the Allies, bringing an end to World War II.

By the summer of 1945, the defeat of Japan was a foregone conclusion. The Japanese navy and air force were destroyed. The Allied naval blockade of Japan and intensive bombing of Japanese cities had left the country and its economy devastated. At the end of June, the Americans captured Okinawa, a Japanese island from which the Allies could launch an invasion of the main Japanese home islands. U.S. General Douglas MacArthur was put in charge of the invasion, which was code-named “Operation Olympic” and set for November 1945.

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What Was World War II About?

Guest Post by Paul Craig Roberts

In the United States the feel good explanation is that the war was about making freedom and democracy safe.  In actual fact there were many agendas at play, and they had next to nothing to do with freedom and democracy.

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Back to World War II

Guest Post by Paul Craig Roberts

For the longest time the most widely read article on this website was “Germany Did Not Start World War II.”  This article has been moved into second place by “The Proof Is In: The Election Was Stolen.”

The third most widely read article is “Whites Were Slaves In North Africa Before Blacks Were Slaves In The New World.”

The fourth most widely read is about Professor Didlier Raoult’s study of the effectiveness and safety of the HCQ treatment of Covid.

The fifth most widely read is “The Lies About World War II.”

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FOURTH TURNING DETONATION (PART TWO)

In Part One of this article, I discussed the dramatic events that shaped 2020 and will continue to have a major influence on the direction of this Fourth Turning moving forward. The immense power of Mordor on the Potomac seems to be unassailable, but the little people still have a chance if they utilize their skills and intelligence to the utmost.

dc-mordor | Political Film Blog

Now that Trump has been defeated and cast into oblivion by the forces of Mordor on the Potomac, those who have some knowledge about generational theory and the course of previous Fourth Turnings have lamented Trump is not the Grey Champion and they were misled by believing he was their hero. How could he be the Grey Champion if he lost? I do not profess to be an expert, as I am just trying to understand the underlying forces driving this Fourth Turning towards its climax, but losing a battle in a long war does not disqualify Trump as a Grey Champion. The Grey Champion character was born from the writings of Nathaniel Hawthorne.

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“Who is this gray patriarch? His hour is one of darkness, and adversity, and peril. That stately form, combining the leader and the saint…could only belong to some old champion of the righteous cause, whom the oppressor’s drum had summoned from his grave.”Nathaniel Hawthorne

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FOURTH TURNING ELECTION YEAR CRISIS

“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 

How a contested election could send the U.S. into a constitutional crisis - MarketWatch It's not the chairman of the Joint Chiefs' job to remove Trump from office if he won't leave.

“There is no darkness but ignorance. The devil can cite Scripture for his purpose.” William Shakespeare

I read The Fourth Turning in 2006, after seeing it described in John Mauldin and Doug Casey’s newsletters as an uncannily accurate assessment of American history based upon generational configurations which recur on eighty-year cycles, a long human life. Strauss and Howe wrote the book in 1997 and used their generational theory to predict the Crisis that would begin in the mid-2000’s and come to an indeterminate climax in the mid-2020’s.

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WEEKS WHERE DECADES HAPPEN

Image result for weeks where decades happen

“There are decades where nothing happens; and there are weeks where decades happen.”Vladimir Ilyich Lenin

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 “A Crisis mood does not guarantee that the new governing policies will be well designed or will work as intended.

To the contrary: Crisis eras are studded with faulty leadership and inept management—from President Lincoln’s poor record of choosing generals to President Roosevelt’s colossal blunders with such alphabet soup agencies as the AAA, NRA, and WPA.

What makes a Crisis special is the public’s willingness to let leaders lead even when they falter and to let authorities be authoritative even when they make mistakes.

Wars become more likely and are fought with efficacy and finality. The risk of revolution is high—as is the risk of civil war, since the community that commands the greatest loyalty does not necessarily coincide with political (or geographic) boundaries. Leaders become more inclined to define enemies in moral terms, to enforce virtue militarily, to refuse all compromise, to commit large forces in that effort, to impose heavy sacrifices on the battlefield and home front, to build the most destructive weapons contemporary minds can imagine, and to deploy those weapons if needed to obtain an enduring victory.” – Strauss & Howe – The Fourth Turning

The quote by Lenin has been reverberating in my conscience for the last few weeks. I believe the quote from Strauss & Howe provides context to what has happened and will happen as this Fourth Turning advances towards its climax. I began a new role in my organization two weeks ago, after only seven months in my previous role. I’ve been in non-stop crisis meetings, as this coronavirus pandemic has flipped everyone’s world upside down. As of Thursday, we were ordered to work from home.

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Rewriting History Of World War II Is Ominous Warning

Via The Strategic Culture Foundation,

It is astounding and deeply disturbing that 75 years after the end of World World Two the history of that event is being re-written before our very eyes.

That war resulted in over 50 million dead with more than half of the victims from the Soviet Union. It incorporated the worst crimes against humanity, including the systematic mass murder of millions carried out by Nazi Germany, known as the Holocaust. The victims included Jews, Slavs, Roma, Soviet prisoners-of-war and others whom the fascist Nazis deemed to be “Untermensch” (“Subhumans”).

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The Fate of post-WWII Germans Deported from their Homes by the Allies

Guest Post by Paul Craig Roberts

Germany’s War, Chapter 6: The German Expellees by John Wear

The Allies’ Crimes Exceed Those of the Third Reich

At the end of World War II in violation of the Atlantic Charter, between 12 and 19 million Germans were expelled from their long-established homes in East Prussia, Pomerania, Brandenburg, Silesia, Memel and the Baltic states, Danzig, Poland, Czechoslovakia (Sudetenland), Hungary, Yugoslavia, and Romania.  This mass expulsion of ethnic Germans from their homes was going on while the Nuremberg trials were prosecuting officials of the German Third Reich for mass deportations of Jews and Gypsies. 

The allied expulsions of Germans exceeds in number the deportations by the Third Reich. Unlike the Israelis, the German government does not demand reparations for the dispossessed Germans. Instead of being compensated for their dispossession, the Germans pay compensation to the Jews, and the amount rises over time.

The number of Germans who died from the crimes inflicted on them during the expulsions rival the number of holocaust victims and is better documented.  Estimates are that 25% of German expellees died in the process.  That could be as many as 4,750,000. While as many as nearly 5 million German expellees were dying from the starvation, exposure, and murder that characterized their deportation, the French chief prosecutor at Nuremberg sanctimoniously declared deportations by the Third Reich to be “one of the horrors of our century.”

During World War II the Americans expelled Japanese-Americans from their homes and businesses and kept them in concentration camps.

The Israelis have been deporting Palestinians from Palestine since 1947. Gaza today is the largest concentration camp in world history.

Stalin deported millions of Russians to the Gulags where they died from over-work, under-nurishment, and exposure.

But only Germans were punished for deportations.

The post-war mass deportations of Germans supports  Hitler’s view that ethnic Germans needed to be gathered into one territory for their protection. Today ethnic Germans are being displaced in their own country by Third World peoples brought into Germany by Germany’s anti-German political leadership. Indeed, all of Europe has anti-ethnic European leadership.  The anti-European leaders of Europe are erasing Europe.  This is the last century of European peoples. By the end of this century, European people and European culture will not exist. A leaderless people cannot survive.

While reading chapter 6, keep in mind that you are not reading John Wear’s opinion.  You are reading facts documented by many historians and published by Harvard University Press, Yale University Press, Basic Books, and Palgrave Macmillan.   

The 6th Chapter of Wear’s book, Germany’s War, is posted here:  https://www.paulcraigroberts.org/2020/01/24/germanys-war-chapter-6-the-german-expellees/  

“The sins of the fathers shall be visited upon the sons.”

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Hitler’s War Crimes vs. Those of Churchill & the Americans

Guest Post by Paul Craig Roberts

Third and Final Installment of Ron Unz’s “Understanding World War II” http://www.unz.com/runz/american-pravda-understanding-world-war-ii/

When we want to demonize someone the worst epithet we can think of is to call him a Nazi or compare the person to Hitler, as Hillary Clinton did when she declared Russia’s President Putin “the new Hitler.” This ingrained habit comes from the influence of the massive anti-German World War II propaganda. Revisionist historians who have actually dug up the buried evidence and examined it have made a case that whatever the Nazi crimes, they were rivaled, if not exceeded, by those of Churchill and the Americans.

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