Gates of Vienna Mar 2011 Shadow Knows 1-4 coming economic collapse
http://gatesofvienna.blogspot.com/2011/03/shadow-knows-part-one.html
Tuesday, March 15, 2011
The Shadow Knows: Part One
The Discontinuity
There's an elephant in the room, but I rarely write about it.
The primary issues that we cover at Gates of Vienna are Islam, sharia, and the Islamization of the West. In addition we sometimes branch off into closely related topics, such as political correctness, multiculturalism, Socialism, and all the other debilitating ideologies that have weakened Western Culture and allowed Islam to establish such a massive beachhead.
Dymphna and I occasionally range even further into topics that are tangential at best, including the culture wars, social and political history, American party politics, and any number of other topics.
But I hardly ever discuss the elephant. I don't even like to reach out and tug at his tail or touch his trunk, because he's so damned big and overpowering. He's much more significant than anything else I can see, but before long he will flatten our puny little bamboo village, and there's no way to stop him. Any lengthy discussion of the looming pachyderm seems pointless.
I refer, of course, to the elephant of the coming economic collapse.
I make no predictions about when its enormous legs will begin to cut their inexorable swathe of destruction. I read all the doomsday forecasts back in 2008, and they all turned out to be wrong, at least in their predicted time frame. The signs that were predicted back then — the rise of oil and food prices, continuing unemployment, the stagnation in GDP, and the flight to precious metals — have begun, but they are clocking in two years later than predicted.
So the global financial system seems to be a lot more resilient than most people thought. The Powers That Be are adept at jury-rigging, and have patched up the decrepit machine with bailing wire and duct tape — i.e. bailouts and quantitative easing — to help keep it running for a little while longer.
However, the entire structure must eventually come crashing down, and the longer the postponement, the more spectacular will be its fall. The Western welfare state is built out of enormous, unthinkable quantities of debt. It is the greatest Ponzi scheme in history, and its demise is mathematically inevitable. The only question is exactly when the scam starts to unravel in earnest — the outside limit is about a generation from now, when the demographic disaster can no longer be papered over.
Fjordman believes, as do many others, that the party will be over much sooner than that. I tend to agree, but I'm no expert, and I've seen a lot of experts fail in their predictions. So I present no timelines, but the end of the world's current financial regime is coming soon, and there isn't anything that can be done to prevent it.
* * * * * * * * * * * * * * *
El Inglés has referred to a "discontinuity" in the affairs of the West which will change the rules about how we may discuss and deal with the looming crisis. It seems evident now that the discontinuity will take the form of an economic collapse, and the concomitant failure of the welfare state.
The end of the welfare state will act as a high colonic for some of the worst excesses of our culture. The lavish funding of our most absurd and destructive behaviors will come to an end. State support for the able-bodied, and probably even for the aged and disabled, will be drastically curtailed.
Immigration and its attendant problems will in due course become insignificant, because what remains of civil society among the natives will hunker down to protect itself, by whatever means necessary. Yes, I realize that much of California and other parts of the Southwest are already alien territory, and will simply become part of Aztlan or whatever the mestizo majority decides to call it. But at least the new entity will no longer be kept on life support through the beneficence of politicians in Washington D.C.
And much of the Muslim problem in Europe will be solved. When the state is no longer supporting three-quarters of the urban immigrant population, the denizens of the no-go zones will have to figure out some other means of subsistence. One presumes the resolution of the ensuing struggle for resources will not be pretty, but the problem will be resolved.
But what about the rest of civil society?
Forget about the immigrants, the underclass, the drug addicts, and the aged and infirm. What about the rest of us?
The crisis I'm describing will occur relatively soon, and many people who read this will still be alive when it comes.
What will life be like for you then?
What will be your part in it?
This is something for which we are all ill-prepared. Most of us have been trained to be part of global modernity, to be apprentice mechanics whose job it is to help keep the world-machine running. When it finally huffs out its last plume of steam and clatters to a permanent halt, we'll be left standing there, useless monkey wrench in hand, lacking even the ghost of a clue.
What then?
* * * * * * * * * * * * * * *
I've been pondering these matters for the last couple of years, trying to understand what is happening so that I might be able to write about it. Grasping a thread to unravel the whole mess is almost impossible, because it is so complex and so unprecedented. We have no real idea of how the catastrophe will unfold.
For the sake of argument, I'm avoiding the absolute worst-case scenarios. I assume there will be no all-out nuclear war. I won't look at what might happen after a major EMP (electro-magnetic pulse) over the United States or Europe. I assume that the electric grid will still be up, at least in most Western countries, most of the time.
My premise is that there will be remnants of civil society still functioning in a lot of places, where people like us are doing their best to hold communities together using whatever means come to hand.
If this is in fact what we all can expect, then we need to start preparing for it now, even though we don't know exactly what lies ahead. Nor can we count on any of the major elements of the existing system — the government, the media, the educational system, the military, law enforcement, major corporations, etc. — to help us. Ordinary people, acting autonomously and coming together when they can, will have to solve this on their own.
With all this in mind, I propose making conscious a process that has already begun spontaneously over the last decade or so.
I call it THE SHADOW.
The analogy for this concept is a "shadow government": in a parliamentary system, when the opposition party is out of power, it maintains the structure and offices of the government, but in simulacrum within its own ranks, so that it is fully prepared to assume the functions of government as soon as an election returns it to power.
In our case, however, we will need a shadow everything. When the fiat money system breaks down and the currency inflates, the welfare state will fail in its entirety, and there is no backup system waiting to be brought online when that happens. If we don't devise the Shadow, then when the time comes we will be faced with our own white-bread version of Somalia, the War of All Against All within Western culture.
Fortunately, part of the Shadow is already in the process of forming, so I'm not proposing anything new. I simply want to conceptualize the process and make it conscious, in hopes that its formation might thereby be augmented and accelerated.
I divide the Shadow somewhat arbitrarily into the following component functions, which are not really discrete, but may be described separately for the sake of analysis:
| 1. |
| Civil administration |
| 2. |
| Education (primary, secondary, and post-secondary) |
| 3. |
| The media and mass communications |
| 4. |
| Manufacturing and commerce |
| 5. |
| Legislative bodies |
| 6. |
| Law enforcement |
| 7. |
| The military |
If a remnant of civil society still exists, and a Shadow has been formed for each of the above functions, then it may be possible to reconstitute the bare necessities of a viable society while a replacement for the mass welfare state is devised.
* * * * * * * * * * * * * * *
It's important to remember that most of the people who have the competence and grit to be part of the Shadow are not major players in the current power structure. The existing system selects against the most creative, talented, innovative, independent, and intelligent people. Most such people are driven out of the system by its oppressiveness and irrationality, and those who remain never rise very high in it.
Yet brilliant and competent people are all around us — I have encountered plenty of them in my Counterjihad work, both here and in Europe. These are the people who are even now being drawn into the Shadow, and who are preparing themselves — whether they realize it or not — for the grim tasks that lie ahead.
I'll cover each of the above functions in future posts, with the exception of #7, the military — I'm aware that a shadow military is already forming, but I know very little about it, and prudence would militate against a close investigation. So I'll just leave it be.
But the other six are worth examining in depth. Media (#3) is the function whose shadow is the most advanced — we are part of that shadow, which is already running as an effective parallel to the traditional system.
An effective civil administration (#1) is the most crucial element, because without it the rest of the new society's functions will break down. In tandem with legislative bodies (#5) and law enforcement (#6), it will permit the formation and protection of new structures of governance, which with luck will help preserve the remains of our culture.
Reader input will be welcomed in this series. I know no more than you do about these matters, and probably less.
"Who knows what evil lurks in the hearts of men? The Shadow knows..."
Wednesday, March 16, 2011
The Shadow Knows: Part Two
Additional Economic Background
After last night's introductory post, I had originally planned to launch straight into a more detailed analysis of one of the seven shadow functions. However, based on some of the comments that appeared on the post, further background material is necessary to help explain the main thrust of this topic.
Two general areas of explanation need to be covered. One is easy, and I'll tackle that first: a reader named "TequilaKid" left a comment (and a challenge) for me. He posted it on the news feed by mistake, and many readers may not have seen it, so here it is in its entirety:
Dear Baron Bodissey:
I read your note in Gates of Vienna today and was inordinately puzzled by two broad historical claims you formulated:
| 1. |
| "The Western welfare state is built out of enormous, unthinkable quantities of debt. It is the greatest Ponzi scheme in history, and its demise is mathematically inevitable." |
| 2. |
| "… Socialism … weakened Western culture and allowed Islam to establish … a massive beachhead." |
I scoured my head for hours trying to guess what historical events had persuaded you of the accuracy of these peculiar notions. I strongly suspect they are random products of your imagination. I hereby challenge you to produce any sensible argument or fact in defense of these two remarkable theses, which I have no hesitation in qualifying even now as patently fraudulent.
Sincerely, TequilaKid
Since #2 is a considered evaluation, and therefore constitutes my personal opinion, I can no more prove it than I can "prove" a statement such as: "This country is going to hell in a handbasket." (Which it is; I just can't prove it.)
#1 is more susceptible to demonstration, since it depends on data which are readily available, although the material is quite complex. The current welfare state is the greatest Ponzi scheme in history, and its demise is mathematically inevitable within about a generation, at the outside.
Let's review the definition of a Ponzi scheme. Bernie Madoff's scam was an enormous Ponzi scheme, but a simpler and smaller model can be found in the standard chain letter. A recipient is asked to add his name to the bottom of a list of names and send an amount of money to the name at the top of the list, which he is instructed to cross off. He is then required to forward a copy of the new list and its instructions to ten more people. After that he sits back to wait for the money to flow in.
The earliest participants in a chain letter really can make a lot of money off the scheme, but as the number of recipients rises exponentially, the pool of potential new suckers rapidly dwindles. Those who are late to the game lose their money as they help enrich the earlier players.
A mathematical formula of moderate complexity — which includes parameters for the total population available, the estimated proportion of recipients who are willing to participate, and the average time it takes to receive and resend each letter — provides a rough guess as to when any given chain letter or other Ponzi scheme will collapse. But the math is not really necessary — common sense and a reasonable native intelligence leads to the intuitive conclusion that any Ponzi scheme must eventually crash. No population is infinite, so the supply of suckers must run out, and the last ones in are the big-time losers.
Bear all that in mind as you examine the graph below:
These figures only take us up to 2009, and we have added two or three trillion dollars to the national debt since then. The last figure I heard was that the debt currently stands at about fourteen trillion dollars — a sum that is scarcely imaginable to an ordinary schmoe like me.
The graph bears a remarkable resemblance to the progression of a typical Ponzi scheme, but instead of an ever-increasing pool of money being sent out by the suckers, it shows the ever-increasing amount of money borrowed by the United States government so that it can continue to give out all the free goodies that its citizens and corporate friends have come to expect.
In other words, instead of voluntary suckers — rubes who, although stupid, surrender their money of their own free will — the feds are forcibly extracting money from future taxpayers. When the scheme collapses, as it inevitably must, the citizens of that era will be de-pocketed of their money, and will receive little or nothing in return.
Congress is even now rearranging the deck chairs on its own fiscal Titanic, tinkering with the trivial edges of the gargantuan deficits that its serial profligacy has created. Defund NPR (national public radio). A pay freeze for federal employees. Cut back on military expenditures.
Those are all eminently worthy goals, but they don't touch the elephant in the room, which consists of three major entitlements: Social Security, Medicare, and Medicaid.
Consider this graph:
The above estimates don't include all the effects of Obamacare, which is expected to increase Medicare costs significantly (even while reducing delivered benefits). I don't know the full methodology behind the figures, but I presume they also don't factor in fully the persistent stagflation which is now expected over the next few years. That will tend to erode the tax base, and will require even further tax increases.
Or the government can borrow even more money — assuming it can still find governments that are foolish enough to lend it to us.
Finally, take a look at this graph:
This is why the other graphs rise so steeply — all those Beautiful People from my generation who are about to enter their Golden Years and cash in on all that retirement "insurance" that they've been paying the feds for the last forty years or so.
This is why the government has to continue its borrowing spree — for all those years it took in all those FICA payments and spent them, "borrowing" the money from itself using accounting tricks to keep the debt off the federal balance sheet and thus conceal the extent of the real deficit. Now the bill is coming due, and it can only increase in size over the next few decades.
And while the Baby Geezers suck their "fair" share out of the system, the missing children — the ones that so many of them didn't have — are not around to pay their sucker's contribution into the scheme. We are near the peak of the Ponzi graph, and it will begin its collapse relatively soon.
Let's be conservative and assume that the national debt is now only $12 trillion.
Let's be hallucinatory, and assume that that Obama will tighten the country's belt far enough to keep the debt from rising any higher.
And let's suppose we'll be able to take a hundred years to pay it off — without taking into account the additional interest that would accrue in the meantime.
This repayment schedule would require us to remit $329 million per day. For a century!
It's glaringly obvious that we will never repay this debt, not ever. It doesn't matter if we start rutting like rabbits tonight and produce a whole new crop of compliant taxpayers — those little rugrats will be unable to contribute their "fair" share for another quarter century.
It doesn't matter how many illiterate mestizos we import from south of the border — they cannot possibly provide enough tax revenue to fill in the gap, even assuming they were somehow able to start contributing more to the system than they take out of it.
The welfare state is done for. It's a dead man walking, and it doesn't even realize it. The Ponzi scheme will soon collapse, and the bill will come due for those of us who are left holding the bag.
If the debt cannot be paid, there are only two choices: sovereign default or massive inflation.
The Chinese are rumored to have the hacking capability to take out most of our major computer systems — banking, the defense networks, utility command and control operations, and so on — and China holds a huge portion of America's paper. For this reason (and others), I consider sovereign default very unlikely.
So inflation is the way to go. This may happen gradually or suddenly, and the longer it is postponed, the worse it will be. To drain the debt pond, the dollar will have to lose somewhere between 80% and 95% of its current value. This will deprive the average citizen of most of his wealth. Since the very rich generally have the knack of avoiding the catastrophic effects of inflation, we must presume that the ordinary taxpayer will bear the brunt of the damage. People will effectively lose their savings, their 401(k)s, and the bulk of their pensions. We will become very poor in a relatively short period of time.
This is the easiest way for the government to take care of the problem. It doesn't have to pass a bill and raise taxes. All it has to do is print more money continue with "quantitative easing"[1].
How this catastrophe will play out in detail is anybody's guess. With the inevitable mass discontent it will engender, it seems unlikely that the existing political system can survive in its present form.
Whether it happens slowly or quickly, violently or peacefully, the Ponzi scheme will collapse. The end of the welfare state in its current form is inevitable.
* * * * * * * * * * * * * * *
The cheerful outline above applies to the United States, but the same general process will have to unfold more or less simultaneously in Canada, Europe, Australia, and Japan, all of which have similarly unsustainable Ponzi schemes. The euro and sterling are facing the same bleak future as the dollar.
The rest of the world is heavily dependent on the prosperity of the Western democracies. Trade, foreign aid, military protection, technical assistance — all of these will be hard-hit when the crisis finally arrives. The catastrophe will truly be a global one, and no country will be immune. Those at the margin — impoverished countries like Bangladesh or Haiti — will fare the worst. The consequences are frightening to contemplate.
Despite the fact that various countries have been through massive inflation in the past — Revolutionary France, Weimar Germany, Argentina, Zimbabwe, and others — the coming crisis will be unprecedented. There has never been a global currency collapse before; there have always been nations outside the inflationary economies whose systems were unaffected. In this case, no political entity is likely to escape unscathed.
We have never been down this road before, so no one can do more than guess how events will actually unfold.
This is the full background on the economic situation as it pertains to the Shadow. The next background topic is why this issue is about much more than survivalism. I'll leave that for a later post.
Many thanks to all our commenters and emailers for their input.
Survival Plus
The approaching cultural discontinuity will most likely be ushered in by a period of severe inflation.
This may occur suddenly and catastrophically, as speculators and investors divest themselves of the dollar and other major currencies and flee to precious metals, or it may be phased in slowly and deliberately by the central banks in order to solve the debt crisis using inflation as a "stealth tax".
As mentioned in my previous post, the exact timing and course of these events cannot be known, because the situation is absolutely without historical precedent, and there are too many variables involved. The coming collapse of the global financial system will be chaotic in the mathematical sense of the term — like a crashing ocean wave, it can only be predicted in a general sense, and not in any detail.
We may be facing a total breakdown of society, with burning cities, roving marauders, starvation, epidemics, and all the other elements described in various doomsday scenarios. Or we may experience a more general slide into disorder, poverty, and the social conditions of a Third-World backwater.
It's important to keep the worst-case scenario in mind, so the survivalist preparations recommended by many of our commenters are assuredly the most prudent course. However, survivalist tactics and techniques are not the focus of this series of essays.
In the comments on last night's installment, Peter had this to say about my intention not to concentrate on survivalism.
I would ask that you not dismiss survivalism, which the above quote would seem to suggest. Any community that perseveres, or is founded during the collapse will have at its core survivalists. They're a necessary ingredient, and integrating them into the emerging new reality is vital.
I couldn't agree more. I am not dismissing survivalism in the slightest. If the worst predictions come to pass, the contributions of the survivalists will be absolutely crucial to the preservation of the most important parts of our civilization.
However, the reason why I don't focus on survivalism is that it is covered so thoroughly elsewhere, by writers who are much more knowledgeable about the topic than I am. If someone wants to send me a comprehensive list of survivalist websites, I will gladly post it, because the people who create and maintain such sites are stalwart and selfless patriots, and their information is invaluable.
But there's no point in my reinventing that particular wheel. My goal is somewhat different: I want to bring to awareness a process that is already underway, but may not have been examined yet in a systematic fashion.
If the survivalists' scenario should come about — God forbid — then much of the customary apparatus of civilization, built up so patiently and painstakingly over the last four or five centuries, will be dismantled. Thinking about sheer survival is obviously a necessity, but when the survivors emerge and confront the reality of the aftermath — what then?
Pierre Legrand had the right idea:
One of the first things we all need to do is reach out to our neighbors and develop ties. Nothing is as valuable as friends.
What he says is quite true. And this is what the Shadow is all about.
Consider a couple of imaginary scenarios for the morning after the Big Collapse. You're an expert survivalist, and your preparations have enabled you to survive the initial violence and chaos. You emerge from your shelter, gun in hand, and survey the columns of black smoke in the ravaged landscape around you.
Then you see another armed survivalist emerge from his own shelter. He eyes you with suspicion, and points his gun at you. You manage to shoot him dead, and repeat the process with a number of other survivors until you're standing in a field of corpses.
What then?
A more likely scenario would run like this
You emerge from your shelter, gun in hand, and survey the columns of black smoke in the ravaged landscape around you.
Then you see another armed survivalist emerge from his own shelter. The two of you approach each other with guns pointed at the ground, extend your hands, and shake. He's got a haunch of venison, and you've got a string of fresh-caught bass. The two of you negotiate a little trade, and subsequently establish well-armed but neighborly relations.
What then
Baron Bodissey3/17/2011 11:36:00 PM10 comments 
The focus of these essays will be on the "what then?" of the second scenario described above.
The survivalists don't need any help from me. They know far more than I do, and can express it much better than I ever could. Those of you who follow survivalist affairs may send me links if you like, and I will collect them all together and post them.
My focus is on how to reconstitute civil society and functioning self-governance in the ruins of what went before. We can't do that without the survival necessities — guns, ammo, canned goods, antibiotics, water purification tablets, batteries, seed corn, and all the rest. But we also can't do it without our lungs breathing in air, and our hearts pumping blood, and I'm not going to discuss breathing and circulation, either.
A group of survivors who are substantively prepared to:
- Establish civil administration,
- Educate their children (and each other),
- Communicate efficiently,
- Design a new legal code,
- Produce goods and trade vigorously,
- Enforce their own laws, and
- Defend against invaders and put down disorder
will have a competitive advantage over other survivalists who do not do these things, or do not do them as effectively.
In other words, those who make like Boy Scouts and decide to Be Prepared — not just to survive, but to establish a well-ordered and functioning society — will tend to dominate those who don't.
That's the reason for the seven functions I listed in my original post in this series. They are somewhat arbitrarily delimited, but they cover the necessary ground.
If it all sounds somewhat Darwinian, well, it is. That's the nature of survival.
It seems obvious to me that those groups which function most effectively in the aftermath will be the ones which replicate as far as possible the social structures of white European civilization and its derivatives, as they existed prior to the dawn of Socialism.
Strangely enough, it is the Dead White Males who will provide the best guidance through the murk that lies ahead of us.
Next time, with luck, I will begin discussing one of the seven functions of the Shadow. Reader input is encouraged.
http://gatesofvienna.blogspot.com/2011/03/shadow-knows-part-four.html
The Shadow Knows: Part Four
Civil Administration
As described in the introduction to this series, the concept of the Shadow is an extension of the idea of a "shadow government" to include all the basic functions that are necessary for what is commonly thought of as civilization. For the sake of simplicity, I have divided these functions into seven overlapping categories:
| 1. |
| Civil administration |
| 2. |
| Education (primary, secondary, and post-secondary) |
| 3. |
| The media and mass communications |
| 4. |
| Manufacturing and commerce |
| 5. |
| Legislative bodies |
| 6. |
| Law enforcement |
| 7. |
| The military |
I list civil administration first because it is the most important of these functions. Without it the other six can't be drawn together into an effective society.
The aim of the Shadow is to begin a conscious and coordinated process of preparing for the social and political discontinuity that lies ahead. But how are we to simulate the functions of civil administration? One would think that we have more than enough experienced and skilled raw material available for the purpose, given the omnipresent bloated top-heavy bureaucratic entities that manage the affairs — both public and "private" — of the citizens of Western democracies.
However, the vast majority of the administrators of the existing structures are thoroughly committed to the maintenance of the entrenched system which is even now on the verge of failure. Their participation in the Shadow would require that their minds be violently wrenched from a well-worn groove and set on a new track, one that might allow them to examine the emerging crisis from a different point of view.
We may pick up a few outliers here and there who defect from the existing system, but most of the raw material for the civil administrative Shadow will tend to come from outside government, academia, the mainstream media, the large philanthropies, and major corporations — these are the entities whose very existence depends on the continuation of what has always gone before, but which cannot continue for much longer.
Fortunately for the Shadow, there is a large pool of talented people who are either outside the existing structure or work in the lowest levels of it. Some of them have had experience running their own businesses, or charitable organizations, or think tanks. Others are simply well-educated people of above-average intelligence, i.e. the brilliant and independent thinkers who have declined to become a part of the machine — or have been rejected by it.
When considering civil administration, most of us think of faceless bureaucrats in an immense hive-like state or other corporate entity. It's hard to conceptualize anything different, since huge bureaucratic entities have been the norm for the last 150 years or so, and they now account for more than half of all paid employment in the Western democracies. Enormous sclerotic bureaucracies are not a modern invention, of course: the Byzantine Empire and the Ottoman Empire were synonymous with intricately corrupt bureaucracies. Ours have simply expanded to the functional limit of such structures.
Civil administration is much more than bureaucracy, however. Effective administration is necessary for all organized forms of human activity that require coordination and cooperation within groups of more than a few people. Administrative systems vary widely according to the cultural background of the participants — clan-based institutions are found in much of the Middle East, while caste and class systems play a large role in other societies.
The meritocratic administrative state is a relatively recent invention by European civilization and its descendants. Today's crop of administrators — who are even now running the ship onto the rocks — are supposedly the cream that rose to the top of our societies based on their intelligence and training. However, several generations ago meritocracy gave way to rule by a clique, even in the most democratic and secular Western states. The meritocratic ideal is now only a pretense — any intelligent person who is not part of the system has only to examine it closely to realize that it is no longer run by the best and the brightest, if indeed it ever was.
The failure of the current trans-national financial regime may be attributed in large part to its insular nature and the mediocre intelligence of those who direct it and benefit from it. The job of the Shadow is to form a base of more capable administrators who are skilled enough to usher in an alternative model when the welfare state finally collapses.
* * * * * * * * * * * * * * *
Suppose we were to launch a Shadow Civil Administration in earnest — what traits would we be looking at? What sort of skills will be useful and necessary to help restore civil society after the end of the modern bureaucratic welfare state?
Assuming that functionaries in all the existing gigantic bureaucracies will not be well-represented among our volunteers, we should expect most of our skilled Shadow administrators to come from small businesses and minor non-profit organizations. The latter group is the most interesting to me, because it is the milieu I currently inhabit.
For the past four years my primary occupation — in addition to writing blog posts — has involved working with various groups of Counterjihad volunteers, both in the United States and Europe. These dedicated people can be divided into two main groups: those who work (either for pay or as volunteers) for non-profit groups that actually receive some sort of funding, and those whose work is generally underwritten solely by themselves. Obviously these two groups overlap, but their organizational characteristics are quite distinct.
If you are an administrator in a non-profit organization, much of your time and effort is consumed with fund-raising — it's the nature of the beast. In order to keep the organization up and running, someone has to find and court potential donors, while involving them in the activities of the group they donate to.
This both empowers and limits the actions of a non-profit. Obviously, the organization would be ill-advised to venture outside the comfort zone of its major donors. On the other hand, within those constraints its funding enables it to take effective action.
In contrast, to function almost entirely without funding necessitates a different sort of organization. Most of the people I work with have day jobs or live hand to mouth while they spend all their spare time working to oppose the Islamization of the West. A few of them do double duty, working for non-profit activist groups while moonlighting in the unpaid sector of the Counterjihad. But the majority of the contributors, translators, and video people familiar to regular Gates of Vienna readers — Vlad, Kitman, Gaia, Aeneas, El Inglés, Fjordman, Paul Weston, Seneca III, Henrik, Elisabeth, Steen, Nilk, Anne-Kit, TB, KGS, JLH, VH, and many others — are unpaid volunteers who shoulder this burden because they believe it to be the most important job they will ever undertake.
I have described from time to time the organizational structure that emerges under these conditions. We form a decentralized distributed network, which is non-hierarchical by necessity, since there is no one who pays to call the shots. Unfunded Counterjihad groups are resilient, flexible, and unconstrained by externally-imposed ideology. We collaborate to put together what seem to be the best course of action within our severely limited means.
Working groups are self-organized by skilled people who have the cooperative temperament required for group work. People who like to be in charge and want to give orders are quickly weeded out — such characteristics are suitable, and even invaluable, in a funded organization, but are counterproductive in an environment where nobody gets paid.
When we undertake a project — a Rosetta Stone subtitling effort in multiple languages would be a typical example — everything has to be done by persuasion. People with the necessary skills and resources have to give up their spare time to take part, so scrupulous care must be taken to accommodate their schedules and credit them for their efforts, since no other reward can be offered to them. Putting together the resources for such projects can take a long time, but once a seasoned team is in place — which is what we now have in the Rosetta Stone group — a new project can be executed with extraordinary rapidity.
One of the best administrative models to arise out of this work is the symbiosis between funded non-profits and the independent unpaid networks. From time to time one of our groups may be approached by someone from a foundation or think tank who needs help accomplishing a specific Counterjihad task. If the consensus of the group is that the job is worthwhile, then the network can be mobilized for the task. The non-profit organization can supply resources that we would otherwise lack, such as expensive server space on a site protected from DDOS attacks, or access to the best video equipment.
The flexibility and speed of the distributed network is thus harnessed temporarily to the needs of a hierarchical organization that shares similar ends. This kind of coordinated effort is the most effective use of our pooled resources.
* * * * * * * * * * * * * * *
The description above serves as an example of administrative skills and techniques that may prove useful after the old centralized paradigm breaks down.
Whenever we think of centralized command-and-control structures, the old Soviet Union comes to mind. Western democracies supposedly operate according to a different model, yet political control is still exerted by the center.
Because our countries have no slave labor camps or firing squads, we think of ourselves as free. Yet an unexpected letter from the Internal Revenue Service tends to loosen one's bowels, because the recipient knows the IRS can arbitrarily destroy his prosperity and ruin his life without any recourse to due process. How can this be reconciled with an ostensibly "free" country?
The West has perfected a system of control using financial means — call it "Totalitarian Money". Those who play according to the rules and never rock the boat get the goodies, and those who might otherwise cause trouble are kept in line by the implicit threat of financial ruin. Whether it involves the denial of state benefits, legal action requiring expensive lawyers, or direct expropriation through asset forfeiture laws, the state has the power to restrain political dissent through the omnipresent but subliminal threat of financial ruin.
The flip side, of course, is that compliant citizens are showered with benefits — "free" medical care, a short work week, mandatory extensive paid vacations, generous pensions, etc.
The nature of the system requires that the beneficence lavished on the population must be constantly increased, in order that the same old rascals can be repeatedly voted into office. Hence the gargantuan load of government debt, and the enormous Ponzi scheme which is now on the verge of collapse.
The administrative functionaries in today's system organize their activities around the distribution of government largesse. Even in the United States — which is theoretically decentralized and composed of plural institutions — state and local governments and non-government organizations depend heavily on the flow of federal dollars. Local school boards toe the federal line to make sure that "No Child Left Behind" cash keeps flowing in. Private non-profits depend on grant-writers who can pull in those generous federal grants. Church organizations are now hooked up to the "faith-based" gravy pipeline.
The concentration of fiscal assets in Washington D.C. has enfeoffed the rest of the country, with the exception of a few brave organizations who decline the money and thus escape the attached strings.
A similar situation exists in Europe, which is even more centralized, where governments often fund almost all political and social organizations — political parties, charitable foundations, media outfits, art galleries, social clubs, etc. When someone gets out of line — as Vlaams Blok[2] did in Belgium back in the 1990s — the Powers That Be simply pull the plug.
We have become so accustomed to this form of control that we can hardly grasp how powerful and all-encompassing it is. When the fiat-money system finally breaks down — as it must, within a generation — what will all those millions of people do, who depend on the money-machine for their occupations and their prosperity?
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The ubiquity of Totalitarian Money has made it difficult to think of future scenarios that don't involve some sort of apocalyptic collapse. But suppose the apocalypse doesn't arrive? Suppose the system breaks down gradually in a piecemeal fashion, ushering us by stages into a less affluent and more repressive society?
Just for the sake of argument, let's assume that we have a few years' warning of what lies ahead. Let's also assume that there is a pool of intelligent people who are aware of the problem and are interested in volunteering to save the best of what we have inherited.
These people comprise what I call the Shadow, and they are obviously quite numerous already. Suppose there were some concerted attempt to form the nucleus of a new civil society. How might we mimic the civil administration that will become so crucial when the day arrives?
In the previous installment of this series, M. Stirner left a comment with some thoughtful suggestions that we can use as a jumping-off point:
It might be best for your shadow organization to hide in plain site until the day of reckoning comes. Secretive organizations tend to attract all sorts of negative attention from the powers that be.
However there is one type of secretive organization that seems to fly under the radar for the most part: fraternal organizations like the Masons, the Elks, the Knights of Columbus, (add Broederbond[3]) etc.
Casting a shadow organization as a fraternal organization could take advantage of the pre-existing legal framework that accommodates them, so during the decline phase they blend into the woodwork. Fraternal organizations also have things like secret symbols and handshakes (helpful to identify allies post-collapse), internal degree systems (helpful to differentiate the outer face from the long term organization goals), and cellular organizational structures (a system of privately networked lodges would be very powerful post-collapse).
Call it the Society for Civilization, and dedicate the organization towards the study and practice of the arts of civilization. Recruit members by making the Society as home for lots of disconnected people who are exploring these arts on their own.
In the long run, you could have seminars in permaculture and organic gardening, beekeeping, home brewing, handicrafts, blacksmithing, etc. Tap into the maker movement by building DIY machine shops in the lodge basements and teach welding, fabrication, backyard casting, etc. Teach basic self defense, archery, handgun and long arm marksmanship. Get the kids involved with a shadow scout system, or provide homeschooling and afterschooling curriculum's in phonics, grammar, math, history, science, etc. That would be for a mature organization. More immediately the Society could simply tap into existing community activities in these areas in an organized fashion.
That would be the very useful public face. Just a bunch of hobbyists, nothing to see here! We'll all be cleaning up the local stream on Saturday, so come and pitch in!
Inner circles of the group would have more of a focus on the long term view and the ultimate goal of the organization. By casting a wide net with a mainstream public face, you can both build a large network of allies, and have a large pool of potential recruits to bring into the inner circle, where there would be more of a focus on the longer term goals of group survival and the restoration of order.
This is exactly the sort of thing I was thinking of, and the "fraternal lodge" paradigm could provide the required framework.
I haven't worried too much about secrecy up until now, because everything I do is still quite legal and aboveboard, at least here in the USA. But we can't count on the situation remaining the same for much longer — most of our American readers are already criminal suspects under the new DOJ ()Dept. of Justice) guidelines describing dangerous "right-wing extremists" and "potential domestic terrorists". Flying under the radar is definitely a good long-term plan.
Europe is another matter. What is routinely discussed here may actually be prosecutable under the EU's existing incitement and hate speech laws.
So there's no help for it: we are increasingly being channeled into samizdat[4] communications, and our actions will become more and more clandestine, even though they remain entirely peaceful.
So how do we proceed from here? How can people become well-informed and trained to rebuild if so much of the work has to be done underground?
The next two posts will examine these issues. Function #2 concerns education, and specifically what I call the Virtual Open University.
Previous posts about the Shadow:
[1] Quantitative easing (QE) is an unconventional monetary policy used by some central banks to stimulate their economy. The central bank creates money which it uses to buy government bonds and other financial assets, in order to increase the money supply and the excess reserves of the banking system; this also raises the prices of the financial assets bought (which lowers their yield). http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quantitative_easing
[2] The Vlaams Blok (English: Flemish Bloc(k), VB) was a Belgian far-right and secessionist political party with an anti-immigration platform.[3] Its ideologies embraced Flemish nationalism, calling for the independence of Flanders. From its creation in 1978, it was the most notable militant right wing of the Flemish movement. Vlaams Blok's track record in the Flemish and Belgian parliament elections was strong. The election campaigns consisted mainly of the immigration and law-and-order theme, combined with the desire for Flemish autonomy. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vlaams_Blok
[3] Between 1918[1] and 1994 the Afrikaner Broederbond (AB) (meaning Afrikaner Brotherhood) or Broederbond was a secret, exclusively male and white Protestant organization in South Africa dedicated to the advancement of Afrikaner interests. Founded by HJ Klopper, HW van der Merwe, DHC du Plessis and Rev. Jozua Naudé[2] in 1918, the organization was known as Jong Zuid Afrika (Young South Africa) until 1920, when it formally became the Afrikaner Broederbond. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Afrikaner_Broederbond
[4] Samizdat (Russian: самиздат; Russian pronunciation: [səmʲɪˈzdat]) was a key form of dissident activity across the Soviet bloc in which individuals reproduced censored publications by hand and passed the documents from reader to reader. This grassroots practice to evade officially-imposed censorship was fraught with danger as harsh punishments were meted out to people caught possessing or copying censored materials. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Samizdat
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