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    The USSR didn't intend to collapse in the '90s either. It's gerontocracy thought that they were Archived Message

    Posted by Rhisiart Gwilym on February 14, 2019, 10:03 am, in reply to "Maybe Orlov is massively overstating the likelihood of the US's imminent collapse"

    doing what was necessary to keep it going too. Yet in less than a decade it had gone - and without a world war, despite being one of the two major nuclear powers. The parallels with the currently-tottering US are so striking that they're difficult to miss. Dmitry saw, and sees, them through constantly visiting Russia, whilst living and working in the US. (And by being a native Russian-speaker - and reader - who just doesn't buy at all into the West's Permanent Bullshit Blizzard about his homeland.)

    I'd say that, like the ruling 'elite' in the USSR in the 90s, the Swampies are equally clueless now about what simply-unthinkable - for them - policy-shifts might ease their precarious situation back to some degree of stability. Like their then-counterparts in Russia, the Swampies are mostly pushing lines of policy which simply hasten the moment when something crucial - the electrical grid for example, or the US-dominated tinpot global financial system - breaks down in some sudden, not immediately-remediable way, leading to a widespread cascade of other socio-economic/political failures that - as in the Russian empire in the '90s - made the state simply incapable of pursuing global imperial realpolitik. They became fully immersed in just struggling with their domestic catastrophe - in the Catastrophe-Theory sense of a sudden, large state-change in an inherently-unstable system, triggered by some small, wholly unpredictable-in-detail, flap of a butterfly's wings. That's all we're waiting for in the US right now, so multitudinous are its intractable, unaddressed problems. And as Dmitry points out repeatedly, the citizenry of the USSR were - quite accidentally - much better prepared to weather the collapse of their state than are the USAmericans. Their experience of state-collapse is likely to be quite a lot worse than the Russians endured.

    Fortunately for Russia - and for the world - came the time, came the man... Putin succeeded the traitorous drunk Yeltsin, with Yeltsin's belated connivance, at the turn of the century; a coterie of sane, patriotic, competent statecrafters coalesced around him; and millions of common Russians saw leaders whom they could support with enthusiasm, because they were doing what was necessary to haul their country out of its big mess - which they did with diligent effectiveness for the next two decades, and continuing, leading to the current utterly reversed situation.

    By the time the area of the world currently configured as the United States of America has pulled itself into some kind of - drastically-reduced - stability, I imagine that the new normal for the world will be astonishingly different from the current shambles. The briefly-continuing momentum of global unsustainable-growth-obsessed economic activity will pull the Northern and the Eastern empires into a short period of dominance over the eclipsed successor of the USA, whatever that will turn out to be like; and then they two will succumb to the already-begun Long Descent away from hitech, over-demanding industrial 'civilisation', which no state in the world is able presently to resist effectively (though Russia currently carries the best odds for doing something like that, which I imagine is why Dmitry, as he ages, is gravitating back there; that and wanting to rear his children as citizens of his ancestral home, and the new rising empire to boot).

    With a bit of luck, I might live to see at least the next step in this ongoing process: the collapse of the US empire, and the rapid dissolution of its global military-base-octopus - also already in its early stages, as more and more formerly-submissive vassal states, seeing with increasing confidence which way the wind is blowing, become increasingly uppity...

    Who'd have predicted a few years ago SKorea unilaterally making peace overtures to their northern half, and to Russia and China, flatly against the preferred policies of their failing imperial overlord, for example.

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