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Saturday Ramble: America has lost its ascendancy and has not yet found a role

Posted in America, Britain, China, European Union, Eurozone, Mark Booth, Politics, Rosicrucians on September 3rd, 2011

In his invaluable book The Secret History of the World, Mark Booth, head of Century publishing (pen-name, Jonathan Black), mentions in passing an old Rosicrucian prophesy that European civilization will collapse, Russia will take over, and the spiritual flame pass to America.

You might think that it has already happened. At the end of the Second World War, European civilization had comprehensively collapsed, while the Soviet Union occupied Eastern Europe. America settled down in Central Europe to halt the march of the Russians, and the Cold War began.

The previous superpower, Great Britain, a major part of European civilisation, sank into the Statist socialism that over the following sixty years would drain its lifeblood and bring the country to its knees time and again.

The nation that in 1800 had more than fifty percent of the world’s warships and “ruled the waves,” as well as a quarter of the planet’s population, would end up in 2011 without a single aircraft carrier.

Is that the end of the story? If Francis Fukuyama’s declaration of “the end of history” were correct, we might think so. As ever, though, history is more vigorous than its historians, and moves on.

Consider the situation now: Russia has recovered rapidly from the obliteration of the sinister Soviet Union, plus a major default, to become one of the BRICs (Brazil, Russia, India and China) the emerging economic superpowers, thanks to its huge reserves of fossil fuels and minerals.

Meanwhile, the US has fallen into an ongoing slump and a deep polarisation of its defining feature, democratic politics.

It’s not that it doesn’t have the strength to act, its will appears to have faltered. It faces a drift back into a folksy past of Appalachian fiddles and Davy Crocketts. America has lost its ascendancy but has not yet found a role.

Could it be that the Rosicrucian prophesy that Russia will be dominant while America will hold the spiritual flame, that is, turn away from power politics, is coming true?

Few commentators doubt that “European civilisation” is steadily collapsing under the absurd deadweight of the EU and the Mr Bean euro currency area. It’s a fair bet that what we now see across the Channel won’t be there in quite the same formation in ten years.

Russia has its problems too including a continuing battle against Islamic militants on its southern flanks, so has interests in common with the West, including the need to sell its gas and commodities. If it had intelligent and flexible leadership the country would have exceptional potential. Once it looks south to China for economic advice — given the authoritarian nature of its society — it could surprise us all later this century.

Russians are the descendants of the Aryans who remained on the Steppes, while their cousins headed south into northern India. These eventually formed the Brahmin sect, which still has great influence in the subcontinent.

Russia is a great nation by any standards, with a long and sometimes successful past. The peaks of its literature: Dostoievsky, Tolstoy, Solzhenitsyn, speak of its intellectual grandeur.

Russia will become more powerful over time as American influence wanes, the UK continues to prefer introspective social engineering to the real thing, or finding markets around the globe, while Continental Europe yet again commits suicide for the third century running.

But will the Russians dominate the northern hemisphere?

However you look at it, the ancient prophesy does have a spooky momentum behind it.

John Evans

… who is the author of The Eternal Quest for Immortality: Is it staring you in the face? Available from Amazon and all good booksellers.

Muscular Mysticism is coming soon.

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Saturday Ramble: An important American visitor comes to our shores

Posted in America, Barack Obama, David Cameron, Parliament, Ralph Waldo Emerson on May 28th, 2011

Ralph Waldo Emerson The minutely choreographed State visit by the American President, Barack Obama, receded as quickly as it had arrived.

It comprised two days of sometimes excruciating fulsomeness, gluey handshakes, back-patting, arm holding, and even that gesture du jour, high-fives.

It was all very jolly, and in the spring sunshine of London the events wrapped themselves in the afterglow of the Royal wedding.

The President’s speech in Westminster Hall was praised to the hammerbeam rafters, although I found it leaden, derivative and in parts boring. Reliable old Ken Clarke fell into a profound slumber, reportedly snoring like a euphonium. It didn’t help that the hall has very echoey accoustics.

As Obama rode around in a tank-like vehicle called The Beast, which wouldn’t be out of place on one of the many battlefields we are currently occupying, there was no doubt who the senior partner was in this now “essential” relationship.

David Cameron did his best to hold his end up — he’s good at clowning around and putting on the PR. The best one can say of the visit is that it was a fun event.

For those whose knowledge of history is a little shaky, let’s go back to the mid 1800s and another famous American visitor to our shores. The contrast is as stark as stark gets.

The visitor was the author, speaker and philosopher, Ralph Waldo Emerson. In his book English Traits, published around 1856, he is fulsome in his praise of England. But every word is sincere and without spin. Here’s an extract:

The problem of the traveller landing at Liverpool is, Why England is England? What are the elements of that power which the English hold over other nations? If there be one test of national genius universally accepted, it is success; and if there be one successful country in the universe for the last millennium, that country is England.

A wise traveller will naturally choose to visit the best of actual nations; and an American has more reason than another to draw him to Britain. In all that is done and begun by the Americans towards right thinking or practice, we are met by a civilization already settled and overpowering.

The culture of the day, the thoughts and aims of men, are English thoughts and aims. A nation considerable for a thousand years since Egbert, it has, in the last centuries, obtained the ascendant, and stamped the knowledge, activity, and power of mankind with its impress.

Those who resist it do not feel it or obey it less. The Russian in his snows is aiming to be English. The Turk and Chinese are also making awkward efforts to be English. The practical common-sense of modern society, the utilitarian direction which labour, laws, opinion, religion take, is the natural genius of the British mind.

The influence of France is a constituent of modern civility, but not enough opposed to the English for the most wholesome effect. The American is only the continuation of the English genius into new conditions, more or less propitious.

See what books fill our libraries. Every book we read, every biography, play, romance, in whatever form, is still English history and manners.

That puts last week’s visit into perspective, doesn’t it?

John Evans

John Evans is the author of The Eternal Quest for Immortality: Is it staring you in the face? Available from Amazon and all good booksellers.

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Sensible protectionism is not a sin

Posted in America, Banks, British Government, Business, Credit Crunch, Economics, Globalization, Great Depression, Politics, Psychology on January 27th, 2009

The word “protectionism” is on almost everyone’s lips these days. It’s viewed as a bogey word, depicting the worst that could happen.

The fact is, it’s as inevitable as cold weather in winter. In some senses it’s also necessary.

When danger advances, creatures retract to safety. Think of crabs, snails, hedgehogs, wood lice … humans. The flight to safety, as financiers call it, is as natural as autumn rain. It will happen. It is already.

Globalization is fine in the good times. No-one turns away a good deal when there’s no risk, even if it arrives from a far-off country. When we perceive high risk to be involved, we withdraw to what, and whom, we know, in our own communities.

We can’t buck human psychology. We shouldn’t try. Only socialists do that. It wastes precious energy and resources.

The time has come to rebuild our home infrastructure and rethink the way we are governed. Anyone who believes that is not necessary should consider the mechanics of how we operate a variety of our affairs now: The State of the Union.

Latterday protectionism is happening over trade — think U.S. car subsidies — and also in financial markets. Foreign banks have all but pulled out of Britain, leaving massive holes in our ability to borrow commercially and domestically. That is a major part of the problem we face.

Did anyone in the UK with a Post Office savings account know their money was held by the Bank of Ireland? They do now!

We may be lucky that the situation is “only” as rotten as in 1931, especially as 1933 was when the really bad things began — like Major (later General) Patton leading a sabre charge of the U.S. Cavalry against 25,000 starving war veterans in Washington DC. That sort of thing couldn’t occur now, could it? Don’t count on it.

The fact is we’re set on a trajectory that will bring us close to a 1933 scenario. Let’s do ourselves a favour and accept that. We can then set about putting our individual houses in order by retracting to what matters here and now. When the time arrives, we will be prepared for the economic winter to come.

Bleating on about “global solutions” that are never solutions, even in the good times, but merely sticking plaster pretences to save face, is about as counter-productive as it gets.

This is not pessimism, it’s an acceptance of human psychology and having the guts to face up to it. If the worst catches us by surprise, we have only ourselves to blame.

Britain as a nation has always faced the tempests bravely, with fortitude, stoicism and humour. Our leaders need to start preparing the country for a prolonged period of acute discomfort. When we know the worst, the best in us will emerge.

The good news is that when we hit rock bottom, the only option is to rebound.

But will we have rebuilt our public domain by then, so that we can be first onto those bright sunlit uplands?

John Evans

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The State of the Union

Posted in 2009, America, Barack Obama, Britain, Conservative Party, Gordon Brown, Politics on January 14th, 2009

Big Ben With a new American President due next week, it’s a bit early to ask the famous question: “How goes the Union, Mr President?”

However, the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland is in a different position. We have a government that has been nearly 12 years in power. So,

How goes the Union, Mr Prime Minister?

Gordon Brown never answers questions, even at PMQs, therefore I will answer for him:

At the close of the first decade of the 21st century, Britain has a two-tier system of economic organization.

First and definitely foremost, the Public Realm, as New Labour likes to call it, is a Command economy. It commands a massive £650billion income from the non-State economy that creates Britain’s prosperity. By common consent much of this money is wasted. It has a tendency to drop off the radar as if it were dumped into landfill sites. No trace of it is ever found again.

One man, Gordon Brown, presides with an iron fist over the Command economy of Britain and has done so for 12 years. He determines its work practices by a mind-numbing system of targets and procedures.

In return, the workforce, some 25 per cent of the overall labour market, gets job security, high salaries, and gold-plated, index-linked pensions paid six or seven years earlier than those of the toilers at the wealth-creating coalface.

The inferior, or private sector, is the milch cow of the Brownian system. It comprises those who work for themselves, for partnerships or joint-stock companies. Latterly, it has seen its much-admired pension funds rifled and ruthlessly downgraded by the Prime Minister personally. Allegedly, like Robert Maxwell before him, he has freely taken from the private pension pots to fund his own agendas and client state.

To make matters worse, the private national prosperity generator has been driven at the pace of a high-performance racing car for almost a decade to feed the lust for money (“resources” as it’s coyly described) of the favoured multitude in the Command economy.

With the private sector now in a state of collapse, the tribe within the Command economy is doubly protected by job security covenants and salaries paid for by massive State borrowings against the future wages and assets of the wealth creators. The children of such folk are already indebted by government to the tune of £17,000 ($25,500) each. The burden will take a generation or more to pay off.

With the UK in economic freefall, the future of both sectors is in doubt. The public sector now needs a milch cow and a golden goose to continue its extravagant destruction of wealth. Only debt and printed money can keep it inflated. These processes show no sign of slowing down, indeed such activity is on the increase.

There’s a great deal more I could tell you about the social state of the country, its sink estates peopled by a primordial underclass, its rubble of an education system, the tattered remnants of its once proud Armed Forces, its broken-beyond-repair Constitution, and its enforced membership of the alien European Union.

But there is only so much bad news we can take, or impart, in one sitting. The nation will take its nuclear revenge when next it is permitted to enter a polling station for a General Election.

And that is the state of the British nation.

John Evans

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Obama should drop Messiah act if elected

Posted in America, Barack Obama, John Evans, John McCain, Politics on November 1st, 2008

USA 08 Candidates One sentence of Barack Obama’s, in a recent speech to cheering supporters, stopped me short in my tracks.

The passage was: “With your support I will win this election, and together we will save the world.”

I can’t guarantee that it’s a verbatim version, but the phase, “we will save the world,” is.

Let’s hope that, if he wins, a more practical and realistic character emerges. The last thing the world needs now is another messianic, emotion-driven President in the White House.

Another James Monroe* — described as a “quiet President,” despite his clear achievements — would do very nicely in the current reduced circumstances.

* James Monroe Facts, from MSN Encarta:
Fifth President of the United States
Birth: April 28, 1758
Death July 4, 1831
Home State: Virginia
Party: Democratic-Republican
Terms In Office: 1817-1821, 1821-1825
Vice President: Daniel D. Tompkins
Significant Acts:
* Ordered the suppression of Seminole uprisings in Florida in 1817.
* Purchased Florida from Spain for the settlement of $5 million in Spanish debt.
* Signed the Missouri Compromise of 1820, which set limits on the expansion of slavery into newly-acquired territories.
* Adopted the policy of setting aside land for Native Americans in the Great Plains.
* Signed a treaty with Russia establishing a boundary to Russian territory in North America.
* Proclaimed the Monroe Doctrine, opposing European intervention in the affairs of nations in the Western Hemisphere.