A good piece for its time, but I highly recommend a slightly earlier one, “Millenarian Mobs” by Angelo Codevilla in the Summer 2020 Claremont Review of Books. It gives a deeper historical perspective on these absolutist moral uprisings and where they lead. there were many more than the Flagellants and spanned centuries not only the Black Death. It is even more sobering.
Richard Nixons staff admitted after the fact that the drug war was created to allow the destruction of their political enemies: Black's demanding civil rights. Liberal White youth demanding an end to the Viet Nam war and a re-thinking of American values and politics. Finance wasn't having any of it. Sixty years later the resulting exploitation of the manufactured crisis, the across the board human damage, the on-going criminalization of the American citizen, and the disintegration of American life on all fronts is in our faces. Capital with the help of Bush/Cheney, the Clinton horror and Hopium gutted American industry while looting and destroying the economy. They rigged and destroyed the greatest economy in he world. And they walked. The joblessness, homelessness and the failing American infrastructure is proof that Capital has abandoned the United States for those bright green CCP ever cheaper labor pastures.
Gang culture is industrial prison culture and it is sustained primarily by incarceration and the illegal drugs industry. The rite of passage necessary for full membership is proven loyalty to the party line, and murder. Hollywood lionized gang culture. Revolving door corporate bureaucrats built the prison industrial complex and made billions from it. The C.I.A./F.B.I. used the drug war to assault civil liberties, militarize the police and, joining hands with Big Tech, built the American surveillance state. Now, our "we're trained Marxist's" friends have conflated criminality with revolution and made themselves a bundle. Meanwhile Americans died and continued to die of drug overdoses.
The psychological cultural "blowback" of prison culture can be experienced daily in encounters with ring in the nose tatted jailhouse "sleeves", the prison slang used by our uneducated futureless youth and the T.V. violence of the school to prison pipeline. The hypocrisy and moral vacuum of the entire self-serving boondoggle was glimpsed when Bank of America and other major financial players were busted laundering cartel cash going so far as to build special teller windows to handle the boxes of illegal cash being laundered. The poor black kid gets twenty five to life and the Wall Street executive walks. Again and again. The clear message:If you can get away with it it's O.K.!! What does it take to get away with it? A K-Street lawyer and cash. How do you get a K-Street lawyer and cash? Crime. (Lets not delude ourselves that illegal cash doesn't flow upward and the line between organized crime and international finance isn't razor thin. Rumors of the Ukrainian money laundering business are everywhere. Didn't Scranton Joe run the Ukraine? While we're at it, the syphoning of American tax dollars by those mysterious special interests and the transfer of debt to the American people happens daily. Does anyone believe this isn't evident to the American people and has no effect on the society?) Of course, it has been convenient to bureau propagandist, to expand the two minutes of hate and blame corporatized bureaucratic black hat narrative from "those bad druggies" to those "white supremacist terrorist bigot mothers". The psyop was already in place, why not? Psyop being the word for a leviathan sized lie.
What's this got to do with the 14th Century, the Black Death and the missing moral high ground necessary for the elevation of a civil and sane society? The 14th Century clerics and aristocracy sold themselves the lie that they ruled by divine decree as they exploited and profited from an all enslaving feudalism. Their "..we'll burn your ass at the stake heretic.." M.O. is only moderately less brutal than the rendition, torture policy and the object lesson touting of the Julian Assange captivity today. Totalitarian Lords of Finance of the CCP/WEF/Davos persuasion now funding and using the Marxist commissariat to install a new world feudalism are, in America, able to so so because the moral center of the nations founding document, the Constitution, has been subverted, assaulted and abandoned, at a profit, by the people elected and appointed to defend it. It's not something else. The Washington D.C. elite wrap themselves in the flag, concertina wire and private security because the transparent to American reality corruption they represent now stands in the spotlight of the new electronic age. The monsters Stalin, Mao, Hitler and host of others are testament to what happens if propaganda, lies and mass repression don't work.
The "successor ideology" is just another reptilian infection of the wounded American psyche. The well funded devil's smile on the face of the fascist hope for a new world feudalism. The final victory of venal Capital. World dominion. Subsistence indebted labor and total for profit exploitation of all resources. It doesn't educate it indoctrinates. It destroys lives at will. It is the deaths head on our night stands. If the attempt at recapturing and revitalizing our American national dialogue with truthful reality now underway on SUBSTACK will make a difference is anybody's guess. The betrayal of the human moral lines of demarcation outlined in the American Constitution by American political leadership will inevitably lead to more bloodshed. The American psyche can no longer heal itself or contain the disintegration and chaos being injected into it. Crime, senseless violence and murder rates are exploding. Increasingly, there are reports of criminals engaging the police in firefights over what often amounts to petty crime. This is prelude to the "law and order strongman". Then the re-education camps for wrong think. Then the ovens. Or, twenty five to life in the super max gulag.---How low have we fallen that monsters like Charles Schwab and Bill Gates opine about the American future? To quote little Greta: "How dare they."
You get what you pay for. Was an open air prison always the intent? American political leadership saw a profit in prisons, drugs and financial apocalypse. It decided that a stable society with an educated populace was secondary to lining its pockets. As six decades of revolving door hypocrisy and graft grew it needed an ever bigger surveillance state to run cover for its criminality and a fearful lie large enough to block out the truth. That's not working anymore.
Astute. The discussion of the internal state of the elite American classes is very interesting. If Mr. Gurri is correct, then these classes are more decadent than I understood.
A good piece for its time, but I highly recommend a slightly earlier one, “Millenarian Mobs” by Angelo Codevilla in the Summer 2020 Claremont Review of Books. It gives a deeper historical perspective on these absolutist moral uprisings and where they lead. there were many more than the Flagellants and spanned centuries not only the Black Death. It is even more sobering.
Richard Nixons staff admitted after the fact that the drug war was created to allow the destruction of their political enemies: Black's demanding civil rights. Liberal White youth demanding an end to the Viet Nam war and a re-thinking of American values and politics. Finance wasn't having any of it. Sixty years later the resulting exploitation of the manufactured crisis, the across the board human damage, the on-going criminalization of the American citizen, and the disintegration of American life on all fronts is in our faces. Capital with the help of Bush/Cheney, the Clinton horror and Hopium gutted American industry while looting and destroying the economy. They rigged and destroyed the greatest economy in he world. And they walked. The joblessness, homelessness and the failing American infrastructure is proof that Capital has abandoned the United States for those bright green CCP ever cheaper labor pastures.
Gang culture is industrial prison culture and it is sustained primarily by incarceration and the illegal drugs industry. The rite of passage necessary for full membership is proven loyalty to the party line, and murder. Hollywood lionized gang culture. Revolving door corporate bureaucrats built the prison industrial complex and made billions from it. The C.I.A./F.B.I. used the drug war to assault civil liberties, militarize the police and, joining hands with Big Tech, built the American surveillance state. Now, our "we're trained Marxist's" friends have conflated criminality with revolution and made themselves a bundle. Meanwhile Americans died and continued to die of drug overdoses.
The psychological cultural "blowback" of prison culture can be experienced daily in encounters with ring in the nose tatted jailhouse "sleeves", the prison slang used by our uneducated futureless youth and the T.V. violence of the school to prison pipeline. The hypocrisy and moral vacuum of the entire self-serving boondoggle was glimpsed when Bank of America and other major financial players were busted laundering cartel cash going so far as to build special teller windows to handle the boxes of illegal cash being laundered. The poor black kid gets twenty five to life and the Wall Street executive walks. Again and again. The clear message:If you can get away with it it's O.K.!! What does it take to get away with it? A K-Street lawyer and cash. How do you get a K-Street lawyer and cash? Crime. (Lets not delude ourselves that illegal cash doesn't flow upward and the line between organized crime and international finance isn't razor thin. Rumors of the Ukrainian money laundering business are everywhere. Didn't Scranton Joe run the Ukraine? While we're at it, the syphoning of American tax dollars by those mysterious special interests and the transfer of debt to the American people happens daily. Does anyone believe this isn't evident to the American people and has no effect on the society?) Of course, it has been convenient to bureau propagandist, to expand the two minutes of hate and blame corporatized bureaucratic black hat narrative from "those bad druggies" to those "white supremacist terrorist bigot mothers". The psyop was already in place, why not? Psyop being the word for a leviathan sized lie.
What's this got to do with the 14th Century, the Black Death and the missing moral high ground necessary for the elevation of a civil and sane society? The 14th Century clerics and aristocracy sold themselves the lie that they ruled by divine decree as they exploited and profited from an all enslaving feudalism. Their "..we'll burn your ass at the stake heretic.." M.O. is only moderately less brutal than the rendition, torture policy and the object lesson touting of the Julian Assange captivity today. Totalitarian Lords of Finance of the CCP/WEF/Davos persuasion now funding and using the Marxist commissariat to install a new world feudalism are, in America, able to so so because the moral center of the nations founding document, the Constitution, has been subverted, assaulted and abandoned, at a profit, by the people elected and appointed to defend it. It's not something else. The Washington D.C. elite wrap themselves in the flag, concertina wire and private security because the transparent to American reality corruption they represent now stands in the spotlight of the new electronic age. The monsters Stalin, Mao, Hitler and host of others are testament to what happens if propaganda, lies and mass repression don't work.
The "successor ideology" is just another reptilian infection of the wounded American psyche. The well funded devil's smile on the face of the fascist hope for a new world feudalism. The final victory of venal Capital. World dominion. Subsistence indebted labor and total for profit exploitation of all resources. It doesn't educate it indoctrinates. It destroys lives at will. It is the deaths head on our night stands. If the attempt at recapturing and revitalizing our American national dialogue with truthful reality now underway on SUBSTACK will make a difference is anybody's guess. The betrayal of the human moral lines of demarcation outlined in the American Constitution by American political leadership will inevitably lead to more bloodshed. The American psyche can no longer heal itself or contain the disintegration and chaos being injected into it. Crime, senseless violence and murder rates are exploding. Increasingly, there are reports of criminals engaging the police in firefights over what often amounts to petty crime. This is prelude to the "law and order strongman". Then the re-education camps for wrong think. Then the ovens. Or, twenty five to life in the super max gulag.---How low have we fallen that monsters like Charles Schwab and Bill Gates opine about the American future? To quote little Greta: "How dare they."
You get what you pay for. Was an open air prison always the intent? American political leadership saw a profit in prisons, drugs and financial apocalypse. It decided that a stable society with an educated populace was secondary to lining its pockets. As six decades of revolving door hypocrisy and graft grew it needed an ever bigger surveillance state to run cover for its criminality and a fearful lie large enough to block out the truth. That's not working anymore.
Astute. The discussion of the internal state of the elite American classes is very interesting. If Mr. Gurri is correct, then these classes are more decadent than I understood.
This is outstanding.
If Desantis wins in 2024 is that essentially 2nd term of Trump presidency?
Fantastic piece
Good essay. Another comparison with 14th century Europe is that we also have two living popes.
Wesley, are you sure this essay was written in 2021 and not 2020 ?
2020 -- has been corrected on the website but not in the emails