Now is the time of monsters
“The old world is dying, and the new world struggles to be born; now is the time of monsters.” -Antonio Gramsci
The Italian political philosopher Gramsci wrote the above line in 1929, a decade before the beginning of World War II, and it is apt for our times as well.
Then it was financial ruin in Germany following World War I caused by the harsh terms of the Treaty of Versailles, which forced Germany to accept full blame for the war, pay large reparations, cede significant territory, and drastically reduce its military. The Treaty of Versailles humiliated Germany without resolving the underlying issues that had led to the war. Economic distress and seething resentment of the treaty ultimately contributed to the rise of the Nazis and the outbreak of World War II.
Now is the malaise accompanying the economic decline of the West. Out of the fear for the future and the tear in the fabric of human consciousness by technology and social media emerged the ideology of wokeism, which is nothing more than rebranded cultural Marxism of which Antonio Gramsci was a founding father. The wokes use identity politics and social justice, with slogans such as white privilege and they seek reparations for slavery and colonialism. They believe their position is the moral high ground and it gives them them the right to be intolerant of those who oppose their views.
Western globalist elites are fearful of losing economic and political power to the nation states of Asia. They are also concerned about the shrinking of population in Europe, Americas, and Asia due to the collapse of the TFR (total fertility rate that needs to be 2.1 for population to remain stable). The war with Russia is a result of using old and misplaced ideas to deal with a unique and unprecedented moment in history.
As Russia is being pushed out of the European political arrangement by the West, and its larger landmass is in Asia, let us count it as an Asian country. We see that out of the world’s top eight economies currently (in PPP dollars which is more accurate than nominal dollars), five are from Asia, and one each from Europe, South America, and North America. This is proof of how much the world has changed in the last couple of decades and why the elites want to replace the current system.
Wokeism arrived at the right time for deep state elites of the American Empire who have used the wokes to maintain their hegemonic domination of education, industry, media, and other institutions.
Since the Western nations are not going to be the largest economies as nation-states, the globalists have declared the idea of nationalism as regressive and anachronistic. They wish to maintain hegemony through a bureaucracy-controlled system as in the European Union, and for this they are playing the wokes.
As seen in the graph below, the TFR situation is dire in Europe. Within the next few decades, the original European population will become a minority, and the non-European immigrants will be dominant in many regions and a powerful influence on the polity. In some places, the newly formed Islamic majority may choose a new direction for their society or simply break away.
The projected population collapse is equally bad in the Americas and Asia, but unlike Europe, they don’t face the same challenge of unassimilated migrant population.
Some see the recent American election as a referendum on wokeism, which the Democratic Party embraced as it morphed into an alliance of liberals and neocons, advancing victimhood narratives to galvanize women and racial and ethnic minorities. The left believed that an alliance with focus on racial injustice, sexism, and LGBT rights was a sure way to permanent electoral supremacy. The extreme amongst them wish to go beyond a classless society to a genderless one.
But if Kamala Devi lost the election, it was not because the voters were necessarily conscious of the larger philosophical issues although they had an intuition about it. They were voting for several reasons related to their lives such as inflation, uncontrolled immigration, and woke madness. Here’s a detailed list:
1. An unnecessary and tragic war in Ukraine, with profound implications for world peace and stability.
2. Letting in millions of unvetted, illegal migrants, and increase in crime.
3. Unprecedented and unacceptable treatment of dissent.
4. Creeping cancel culture in academia and media.
5. Wokeism in industry and schools.
6. Financial profligacy with $3 trillion deficits that has increased corruption and inflation.
7. The disastrous and ultra-expensive healthcare system which is a hostage to the pharma lobby; US has the lowest longevity of all the developed countries.
The left also doesn’t want strict identification checks for voting in the United States and it claims that is fair for it occupies higher moral ground. It is an amazing coincidence that Kamala Harris won in the states with lax ID rules.
Clearly, the time has come for the overhaul of the system. European countries cannot do it for they have traded their freedoms for the economic security of the European Union, which is also under threat. The wokes in Europe have used censorship even more strongly than the US, and people have been imprisoned in the UK for voicing their opinions, and in Germany there was a recent case in which a German pensioner had his house raided by police for the crime of calling the Green Minister of Economic Affairs a moron.
Europe is compromised and it cannot do fundamental reform. People voted Trump because they believe he is the only one with the courage to make real change. He became a mythic figure with his bravery when he was shot.
