Review of The Coming Anarchy
Today we shall begin a discussion of alternative futures. This discussion is not intended to predict the future or to lead you to believe in one inevitable future scenario. The purpose of this discussion is to range widely over contemporary thinking about the future to widen your perspective so that you can make intelligent decisions for yourself. We shall consider scenarios that are wildly improbable as well as likely, and from a wide variety of worldviews.
Armed with knowledge of the hidden history from The Hidden Masters, you can now avoid single-worldview thinking and move among worldviews with fluidity. This skill alone puts you above 99 percent of the population. It’s time to exercise your fluid intelligence in shaping your own future.
We begin this exploration with a review of The Coming Anarchy by Robert Kaplan. We hasten to explain that Kaplan’s view of anarchy is social and cultural and future-oriented and has nothing to do with nineteenth-century anarchism as a political philosophy. Nineteenth-century anarchism was merely the leading edge of Communist revolution. Anarchism seeks to create disorder through terrorism to prepare for Communist takeover. Kaplan’s observations are instead devoted to describing conditions of extreme poverty and crime resulting from dysfunctional economies and weak governments.
Robert D. Kaplan, The Coming Anarchy, New York: Random House, 2000.
“Peace is usually not defined as truce between different parties but a universal similarity and an end to competing points of view.”
Kaplan published an essay titled The Coming Anarchy in The Atlantic in 1994. Kaplan’s observations regarding West Africa are terrible enough, but the implication that such conditions could spread to the West gives his analysis a particular compelling urgency for students of the New World Order. Could Kaplan’s vivid descriptions of crime- and disease-ridden shantytowns become a future reality in the West under conditions of economic failure?
Kaplan emphasizes environmental degradation and population pressures leading to an unstoppable migrations to cities, then perhaps out of cities as urban life becomes intolerable. Kaplan believes that scarcity will lead to migration and war. He endorses the idea that future scarcity of water will lead to national conflicts. Kaplan endorses the “rising sea levels” hypothesis of global warming, which is unfortunate, but his environmental concerns also extend to soil degradation, deforestation, scarcity of resources, and population pressures, which are real.
“Any rapid social and political transformation leads to violence, which is an argument for conservatism. Moreover, fast social transformation is always accompanied by a claim for universalism.”
One of Kaplan’s most important hypotheses is that global economic development does not necessarily end cultural and religious conflicts but exacerbates them in some places. Moreover, he transcends mindless multiculturalism on the Left with the observation that changing economic circumstances lead to revised group identities, which can switch from religious to ethnic to cultural in particular ways in particular places. The identities and aspirations of today’s migrant slum-dwellers has nothing to do with democracy, national identity, or the global identity being pushed by New World Order theorists. These newly forming cultural identities may resist the U.S. military’s global control grid in unexpected ways. Migrant populations have the ability to destabilize top-down technological control systems. Kaplan brings into focus the young Third World population as a potential force for shaping control over geographical areas and even resources that could defy the plans of liberal elites.
“Outside the stretch limo would be a rundown, crowded planet of skinhead Cossacks and juju warriors, influenced by the worst refuse of Western pop culture and ancient tribal hatreds, and battling over scraps of overused earth in guerrilla conflicts that ripple across continents and intersect in no discernible pattern.”
Kaplan’s vision of “shanty-state regionalism” is not necessarily a worst-case scenario of degradation. He describes shanty-towns that are also relatively crime-free and peaceful. Cultural and racial differences are not always cause for conflict.
Kaplan believes that future wars will have less to do with national armies and more to do with local, youthful ethnic gangs who have never been tranquilized by prosperity into handing over violence to the state. Kaplan defines this new dynamic as the disappearance of politics. Certainly it has nothing to do with any political issues currently being discussed in Western democracies. Kaplan expects local struggles to throw human differences into high relief, in contrast to the New World Order program of homogenizing a universal mass man under the sign of “equality.” Kaplan forecasts the dissolution of states such as India and Pakistan, to be replaced by coexisting unpacified multicultural groups, each made more desperate by a sinking economy. Kaplan forecasts a dynamic future as peoples are forced to migrate, re-form, and struggle against each other for survival.
“It is not clear that the United States will survive the next century in exactly its present form. Because America is a multi-ethnic society, the nation-state has always been more fragile here than it is in more homogeneous societies like Germany and Japan.”
New America Foundation reviews Kaplan.
Mark Wegierski reviews Kaplan for The Social Contract Press.
Reviewers of Kaplan tend to be New World Order apologists who have put their faith in global democracy, socialism, and global economic development under state socialism. They view Kaplan’s work as, at best, a warning of what might happen if their global program does not succeed. They are usually unable to recognize that the New World Order machine produces victims, at home and abroad. These victims are not necessarily going to sit still and be controlled.
“Those peoples whose cultures can harbor extensive slum life without decomposing will be, relatively speaking, the future’s winners. Those whose cultures cannot will be the future’s victims.”
We take a different view as we are rooting for the failure of the planned global tyranny. Kaplan is not merely describing the present “anarchical primitivism” as a sore of festering problems, he is potentially offering us strategies for resistance, even if he doesn’t realize it.
Two points stand out for us: The present concerns of cosmopolitan intellectuals really add up to nothing more than debates in the house of global takeover. To put ourselves outside the grid of global control and avoid supporting the New World Order tyranny, we must form culturally and racially based societies that are aimed at survival in a multi-ethnic world that will compete for resources. This “jump” into social anarchy seems completely undesirable for those accustomed to the ease of the modern economy. Is fear of New World Order tyranny and the vacuous culture it spreads around the globe enough to make you jump? Or is the possibiilty of being squeezed out of the system in a declining economy enough to make you want to jump? Is it simply enough to recognize intellectually that “Shifting coalitions and power struggles are to be preferred to a single ruling party maintaining total power,” in Kaplan’s words, or is disgust with the corruption of the present ruling coalition of elites enough, or do you need a systems collapse to nudge you toward a real life based on a real identity instead of working for corporations and government bureaucracies that give you no real input into their goals and objectives?
“The unified global elite running the UN is to be feared, and not only for corruption and inefficiency, but for the many crackpot ideas expressed by their leaders, whether utopian or Third World.”
We recommend Kaplan’s The Coming Anarchy, not because we agree completely with his analysis, and not because we believe that anarchy is coming, but as an orientation to competing groups and competing forces forming from the failure of New World Order takeovers. The New World Order machine produces victims, and sometimes these victims show a cultural intelligence that we can learn from.
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