"Bang-and-Whimper"
By Jim Kunstler
"Whoever doesn’t miss the Soviet Union doesn’t have a heart.
Whoever wants it back doesn’t have a brain.”
- VV Putin
"Have you checked if your hair is on fire today? Here comes an eclipse of the sun. Our moon will cast a totality of its shadow in a path about 100 miles wide arcing from Del Rio Texas to Bangor Maine, with lesser effects outward on each side of the path so that night will seem to fall at mid-day over most of America east of the Big Muddy. This event typically freaks out primitive peoples, and brings out the latent archaic terror even in supposedly civilized minds, reminding us in a powerfully spooky way that the cosmos runs things, not us puny humans.
You might ask: Are we hostages to cycles, Astronomical, Kondratieff, the Maunder Minimum, Fourth Turning, the Great Wave...? Considering the feckless doings of our own society, we seem to be yielding to some final act of cosmic punishment. What is not falling apart? Our livelihoods? Our politics? Our money system? Our morals? Our common sense, our families, our relations with other societies, our infrastructure, our culture, our business models, our education, our medicine? Alas, our government still lurches along, gone mad-dog on its citizens as it desperately sucks all power and resources unto its inner engine like a red giant star preparing for death.
Today is also the end of Ramadan, the Islamic holy month of fasting, prayer, atonement, and reflection. What follows this pause in the troubled Middle East, a.k.a. Armageddonville? I daresay most adult citizens of sore-beset America actually don’t care...can’t care, because they have trouble enough of their own keeping a roof overhead, a car on the road, and food on the table. The Woke-Marxist college kids are wailing over the actions of Israel in Gaza - as they will for anyone within their dumb-ass equation of victims-and-oppressors, especially involving brown and white people. It is a brutal operation in Gaza, for sure, but so was the Hamas act-of-war on October 7 that many want to forget about now. They still hold hostages, you know.
I doubt that Israel wants to exterminate the Gazans, but at this point they would probably like to export them to other nations that share their Arab culture. Those other Arab nations are not eager to take in the Gazans. The fractious minority in the USA who militate against Israel because, you know, the Jews, never ask if the Palestinians have some other plan, some other position other than From the river to the sea, Palestine will be free! - meaning Death to Israel. Can you name any alternate proposal they have proffered? No, because there is none.
Not only have they no intention of getting along somehow with Israel, but they give every sign that they prefer to continue making war on her one way or another: rocket attacks, café bombings, rape and murder ops. Because they’re oppressed. They might have turned their 40 kilometers of Mediterranean beach-front into a world-beating resort, but instead they spent billions in international aid building a tunnel network and purchasing arms to wage war against Israel. And with October 7, they got war.
So, the rest of the world is very concerned now that this will lead to World War Three, world wars being the grand prize at the end of many historical cycles. Of course, the Iranians have been chanting Death to Israel in so many words for decades, so no one can mistake Iran’s intentions. And Iran has funded and deployed Hezbollah military bases on Israel’s northern frontier with Lebanon. They are said to have thousands of high-tech rockets capable of decimating Tel Aviv. Everybody knows that launching such an operation could result, ten minutes later, in Tehran becoming an ashtray.
And what if Mr. Netanyahu launches a peremptory attack against southern Lebanon to destroy those bases? Does Iran ride to the rescue? And does Russia ride to Iran’s rescue? And does China rush in to secure the sea lanes in the Persian Gulf and the oil refineries of Iran that Israel doesn’t manage to blow up? And what does the USA do? Or Europe (watching much of its oil supply go off-line)? Looks World War Three-ish, a little bit.
There is also, lest we forget, the mess in Ukraine, another world war flashpoint. There, the stark reality is that Russia is in control of the tactical situation on the ground. The WEF syndicate’s project - fronted by NATO - to weaken Russia and eventually loot its resources is a flop. The indignities heaped on Russia in sanctions and foolish objurgations will not be forgotten. There will be a Great Reset for Europe, but not the one it ordered. Not the nirvana of transhumanism and social control; rather a cold plunge into neo-medieval poverty, the breakup of large states, and a shocking simplification of daily life.
Everything that the USA and NATO are doing these days is pretense: pretending that they have the military mojo to directly enter the Ukraine War; pretending to continue pouring money into the hopeless and unnecessary conflict; pretending that the ill-conceived project even matters. The hidden truth now is that the USA war blob needs to cut its losses in Ukraine and wants to bug out. The trouble is: how to do that in a way that does not amount to another gross American strategic humiliation? That’s Russia’s problem, too: how to adroitly work the conclusion of this fiasco in a way that doesn’t humiliate the USA to the degree that we resort to some new act of geopolitical insanity in compensation. Do you remember the half century when Ukraine was indisputably within Russia’s sphere-of-influence and was not a problem for the world? I assure you this was so, and will have to be again. It will be all right.
So, if you are among those who believe that the cosmos seeks to convey an occult message in this eclipse that will supernaturally darken half our country today, maybe it’s this one: just stop it, America! Stop meddling in every flashpoint across the planet. Look to yourself and your own monstrous problems: your jive-tragic government, your fake economy, your breached borders, your sick-and-depressed population, your racketeering corporations, your broken banks, your buggered election methods, your faithless news media, your political mental illness. Or else, get ready for bang-and-whimper."
"This is the way the world ends
This is the way the world ends
This is the way the world ends
Not with a bang but with a whimper."
Download "The Hollow Men", by T.S. Eliot here:
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