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Page added on July 5, 2013
Kunstler: Out On a Limb
There is one supreme and universal law of human relations in all its manifestations, social, political, economic, cultural: people create no end of mischief in the hours when they are not sleeping. Any vision of history-yet-to-come must be predicated on this principle.
A correspondent of mine objected to the idea I floated a couple of times that Japan would be the first advanced industrial nation to “go medieval.” This prompts me to clarify that emphasis should be on the word “first.” The re-set to a much lower scale and intensity of human activity is certain for all nations; the only questions are the time-frame and the quality of the journey and those are sure to vary from one group of people to another.
I picked on Japan because their journey seems to have compressed and accelerated in recent years and also because there’s a lot to admire in their possible destination if history is any guide: a graceful culture of lower energy and high artistry. The transition between that older culture and the point of industrial take-off was also much sharper for Japan than so-called Western societies. They did not look back on the startling episode of Rome and they didn’t experience a thrilling “Renaissance” of rediscovery in its technical achievements — which eventuated in the Western discovery of a “new world” and all its exploitable resources. The Japanese were pestered by Catholic missionaries for a brief time beginning in the 1540s, but tossed them out in 1620s, along with the merchants who accompanied them — and then very consciously barred the door. They even gave up on the guns that the Euro-people had introduced, regarding them as unsportsmanlike. Finally, Commodore Perry from the USA landed in the 1850s, with all the weight of Western technological momentum behind him, and demanded access to trade there and Japan, in effect, surrendered to modernity.
They also thrived on it for a while. For one thing, they had a lot of beautifully-made exotic cultural objects to trade with the west, and their artisan skill level in things like ceramics and metallurgy made the transition to industrial technology of their own easy. In half a century, Japan went from an isolated archipelago of tea ceremonies and silks to building steel battleships and airplanes, and we all know the mischief that led to during the first half of the horrid 20th century: the Rape of Nanking, the Bataan Death March, the bombing of Tokyo, and Hiroshima. Then came Act 2: postwar economic revival, the SONY stereo, Mitsubishi, major league baseball, and really excellent automobiles. That went on for while, too. About 40 years.
There was one insurmountable problem lurking in the background: Japan did not possess any fossil fuels, oil or methane gas, to run all the equipment of modernity that they had ramped up. That didn’t matter so much when imported oil was $11-a-barrel, but it became crucial when the cost quickly rose to $100-a-barrel, as it did in recent years. It also began to matter that Japan’s bigger neighbor and age-old rival (and sometimes victim), China, ramped up its own industrial economy which, of course, consumed a healthy portion of what the world oil market put up for sale. By the early 21st century, China was eating Japan’s lunch (its bento box, shall we say) by manufacturing the same stuff that the Japanese had excelled at making, and all of a sudden the whole project of modernity in Japan hit the skids.
Then came the Tōhoku earthquake of 2011, and the giant wall of water that slammed, among other things, the multiple nuclear reactors at Fukushima. The Japanese industrial confederation had taken a certain amount of comfort in its ability to keep the electricity going by other means than fossil fuels. Now, all of a sudden, a nuclear dragon was loose upon the land, a veritable Godzilla, Japan’s worst nightmare. A year later, all but two of Japan’s nuclear power plants were shut down. By no coincidence, Japan also found itself wallowing in a trade deficit after decades of enjoying trade surpluses, due to the amount of oil and gas the nation had to import to keep the electricity running.
Japan’s energy predicament is expressing itself in a financial crisis, naturally enough, since finance is a set of abstract markers for what is happening in an economy — and the country’s finances are pretty much running amok as its political leaders try desperately to adjust to the new realities of powerdown. They are employing accounting fraud to offset the inescapable failures of capital formation under the circumstances, the same as all the other advanced industrial nations. As a purely financial matter it simply amounts to no longer being able to generate enough new wealth to pay the interest on old credit, or to justify the creation of new credit. Since credit is the lifeblood of industrialism, the sun is setting on that phase of history. Japan finds itself in a dishonorable quandary and in tune with some of its older cultural infrastructure appears to be committing suicide with a sword thrust into the guts of its banking system.
America, in contrast, is driving over the edge of the Grand Canyon, Thelma-and-Louise-style. Europe is drinking a poison cup in sumptuous seclusion. China and India will just look like lemming marches into the increasingly vacant sea.
Financial hara-kiri might be the best outcome for Japan — better, say, than a war with China over some desolate islands — if Japan were to retreat as rapidly back into a traditional artisan economy as it bailed out of in the 1860s. I realize this is a long-shot and includes many knotty elements not under discussion here, such as population reduction and the fate of Fukushima. Also, history is almost never symmetrical. Things don’t retrace the arc they came up. The journey will surely be bumpier. But Japan might get there first and set some interesting precedents for the rest of us.
At the heart of the matter is this. Industrialism is an entropic project. It accelerates and intensifies entropy, which is to say the drive toward disorder and death. Tradition in human societies is the great moderator of entropy. Of course nothing stays the same forever, but some of us would like to see the human project continue, and to get to place where it can feel comfortable with itself for a while, perhaps even something resembling a new (and completely unfamiliar) golden age, when the people not asleep can be trusted.
10 Comments on "Kunstler: Out On a Limb"
Plantagenet on Fri, 5th Jul 2013 4:44 am
Kunstler gets it right again.
GregT on Fri, 5th Jul 2013 4:57 am
Plantagenet,
Every once in a while, you surprise me.
BillT on Fri, 5th Jul 2013 5:18 am
Best concise picture of the present as I have seen. And the best overall hope for our future.
Arthur on Fri, 5th Jul 2013 11:54 am
Plant, in your brain exist several isolated islands of thought that have no knowledge of each others existence. How on earth can you reconcle appreciation for Kunstler and your professed ‘drill, baby drill’ attitude?
Arthur on Fri, 5th Jul 2013 12:22 pm
“The Japanese were pestered by Catholic missionaries for a brief time beginning in the 1540s, but tossed them out in 1620s, along with the merchants who accompanied them — and then very consciously barred the door.”
Except one.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dejima
(1641-1853)
Then the Dutch were replaced by our American betters.
“postwar economic revival, the SONY stereo, Mitsubishi, major league baseball, and really excellent automobiles. That went on for while, too. About 40 years.”
The Japanese are the Germans of Asia, no wonder they were allies, although the Germans would have won the war had they NOT been allied to the Japanese and the allies from hell: Italy, these operette warriors, who with their silly overtures in Greece, provoked a counter invasion of the British in northern Greece, aimed at the oilfields in Romania, the only source of oil for the Germans, forcing the Germans to invade yet more countries against their will (Yugoslavia + Greece), leading to a decisive postponement of Barbarossa of three valuable months, which made the difference to the tune that the Germans were stuck in the 1941 winter mud, 50 miles from the center of Moscow and failed in achieving their winning objective, the dissollution of the Gulag ‘evil empire’ (Reagan). The alliance with Japan lead to the McCollum memorandum as the method of choice to get into the desired war with Germany after all, Roosy imposed an oil-boycot on Japan and at the same, against warnings from senior officiers, directed a large part of his fleet to a vulnerable position in Pearl Harbor, knowing all too well that the Japs had no choice but to get their oil elsewhere, after eliminating the threat from the American fleet in the flank. Game, and the Japs walked into the trap set by Roosy, who could not care one bit about Japan, but now he had his war against Germany via the Japanese backdoor, thanks to their alliance with Germany. But these are details Kunstler cares less about.lol
“Also, history is almost never symmetrical. Things don’t retrace the arc they came up. The journey will surely be bumpier. But Japan might get there first and set some interesting precedents for the rest of us.”
By and large I agree with the article, as usual with Kunstler. And it remains to be seen if ‘going medieval’ is all that bad. It looks even like that Japanese and white males could relatively benefit from it as they become liberated from their roles as ‘salerymen’, where in future the only thing we bring home will be the bacon.
agramante on Fri, 5th Jul 2013 12:51 pm
Why do you say the Germans would have won without Japan, Arthur–because the US would not have become involved? We were still sending materials to England (though most of them got sunk for a while), the aerial campaign failed without our help, and the Russian winter likewise didn’t need American assistance. The war would have gone very differently, but I’m not sure at all that Germany would have won. Very likely we’d have been looking at a USSR which extended to the English Channel and Gibraltar.
Arthur on Fri, 5th Jul 2013 3:10 pm
“Why do you say the Germans would have won without Japan, Arthur–because the US would not have become involved?”
Exactly. In 1941 Congress was not yet ‘Israeli occupied territory’ (Pat Buchanan) and was adament against intervention, so Roosevelt needed to trick the US into war.
The origins of the Roosevelt-Churchill-Stalin alliance dated from long before September 1, 1939, in fact since 1933 with Roosevelt entering office. The first thing he did was diplomatic recognition of human slaughter house USSR, what no European government had done. The destruction of Germany was decided upon before 1939 and the Germans knew it. Just listen to the Snowden whistleblower of 1940, the American Tyler Kent, who in his capacity of employee of Joseph Kennedy, the US ambassador in London and opponent of the Roosevelt gang, knew precisely what was going on:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FfKdCH0D_Xw
…because he personally typed all the ‘cables’ between the Roosevelt and Churchill conspirators, behind Chamberlains back. Unfortunately for Tyler Kent there was no internet around at the time, so Churchill (the greatest traitor Britain ever had, but what do you expect with a mother from New York) could let get Kent arrested and kick him in the slammer until the end of the war and keep under the carpet what really had happened. Why btw do you think JFK was a Hitler admirer? Because he knew exactly from his father what the dirty game had been.
“and the Russian winter likewise didn’t need American assistance.”
The dark secret about Barbarossa is that in reality the Soviets were preparing for an assault against Europe, planned for early July 1941. The Germans knew what was coming and decided that the only (dim) chance they had to escape from destruction and US-UK-USSR strangulation was to attempt to strike the first blow and blitz their way into Moscow and dissolve the evil empire and force the British into peace. And if these Italians fools had not invaded Greece, the Germans would have had three months extra and would have made it Napoleon-style into the Kremlin, dissolve the USSR and hand over Russia to nationalists. The Ukraine, Belorussia and Baltic states were all too willing to escape the Gulag. Both WW1 and WW2 have shown that Germans can beat 3 out of 4 {UK, France, Russia, USA} but not all 4. The only chance for Germany to win was to beat the USSR before the USA could intervene. But the fatefull alliance with Japan + provoked Pearl Harbor event enabled the US to get into the war on time and start a massive support operation for the USSR. Without it Moscow would have fallen, it was a very close call. Unfortunately the Germans lost and the Roosevelt-Stalin alliance, or jews for short, won, and now the multicultural destruction of the European world is in full swing.
Btw this new WW2 interpretation is already under full discussion in Russia on prime time television. Go to youtube:
“Большая политика, эфир от 22 июня 2012”
… and even the US naval institute invited the prime proponent of this interpretation of history, youtube: “Who Started World War II ? by Viktor Suvorov (full version)”
However now new chances for the Euro’s in Europe and North-America have appeared at the horizon to escape multicultural destruction: a) the internet enabling the spread of the revisionist message; b) the fall of communism in Russia and the rise of Putin, thanks to Berezowski.lol; c) the rise of China; d) revival of islam. All not very good for the NWO.
What to do next for all supporters of European civilization both in Europe and NA: exploit the internet to the max and prevent an alliance between a consolidated bolshevized USA and China from happening. Do not dream of starting a Europe-Russia alliance before the situation in the US has been played out (either balkanized or bolshevized) as it could become a death trap for Europe. In the first case Euro-Siberia can ally itself with the Euro-remainder from the US carcass and contain China with ease (preferable solution by far for all Euro’s involved), in the second case the scramble for an alliance with China will begin, where Euro-Siberia will have Australia and the US will have Siberia on offer to buy China into a winning alliance. If the US would prevail in the second case we would have 1939 conditions returned where Greater Europe would be surrounded again by two hostile powers with superior numbers. By not entering an alliance with Russia yet, we in Europe still have the option of joining SCO as a least desirable option, for instance if the US decides to attack Iran after all, but still better than being surrounded by China and USA.
So all we can do is wish Alex Jones, Ron Paul c.s. good luck in their efforts to protect the Constitution and wait for the inevitable Dmitri Orlov predicted disintegration of the US, for instance after massive riots if Zimmermann is ruled innocent, or Asia dropping the dollar or another Lehman crash or whatever reason.
BillT on Fri, 5th Jul 2013 6:01 pm
Or the Euro collapsing … along with most of the banks of Europe. Since the currency wars have now included the BoC and the ECB into the devaluation race … things may not be so clear by Fall. If the Fed starts pulling the trillion back from Europe’s banks, things may go south quickly. We shall see.
RICHARD RALPH ROEHL on Sat, 6th Jul 2013 1:55 am
1OO Earth years from now, everything discussed here will be a moot point.
I predict that faster poo-food Amerika, the capitalist/fascist land of perpetual war mongering, a nation that can’t even manufacture its own shoes anymore, a nation of willfully ignorant corn syrup sheeple that indulge in mindless profligate material consumption, will NOT exist by 2050 or 2060.
And by 2100… the remaining baboonies on Planet Over-birth Earth will be perched at the edge of EXTINCTION. Yesssssssss…Old Coyote Knose!
Dmyers on Sat, 6th Jul 2013 2:45 am
Japan does appear to the the template of industrial civilization going forward. I can remember when “made in japan” was the ultimate insult to any object. I also remember when Japan entered the market with top notch quality cars and electronics and became an economic “miracle” as literally it was described. It looks to me like Japan followed in the steps of the USA, economically and industrially, so that makes it an apropos example for where the rest of us may be headed.
“By the early 21st century, China was eating Japan’s lunch (its bento box, shall we say) by manufacturing the same stuff that the Japanese had excelled at making, and all of a sudden the whole project of modernity in Japan hit the skids.” That says it all, exactly as it happened.
The interesting thing is that Japan returned a lot of its profits to the people in the form of excellent pensions and health care. USA also had returned a lot to the people through union wages and low inflation with rising wages. But China wins economically at this point by utilizing slave labor. The US and Japanese systems can’t compete with that.
China also relies on American consumers because its own workers cannot afford its products. I know this is supposedly changing, and I hope so, but that is how it worked during the transition to China dominance.
It comes down to the consumer issue: how cheaply can it be made and sold? It now appears a very important feature of this paradigm is about to go missing, i.e., the consumer.