Chapter 7: The Dialectic, History, and Climate Change: Part V

By being more interested in having the best navy, and by being in a geographically fragmented place like Europe that encouraged warfare and therefore constant technological improvement, Britain was able to colonize one-fourth of the earth's surface at some point or another. Some places became settler-colonial, child societies like Canada and America, Australia and New Zealand, built on the ashes of native societies and filled with European descendants with roughly the same money and rights as Brits themselves.

The rest of the wet, settled countries of Europe had colonial empires (or were the subjects thereof), but the British Empire was the largest because the Royal Navy was the strongest. Only when these colonial empires were faced with a democratic socialist American-Soviet consensus against them during the Suez crisis did they abandon them. But under the guise of formal independence for former colonies, and under the terms and conditions of the US Navy that permits and protects global shipping, the former colonial powers now jointly exploit the whole world. The "United States of Europe" Lenin so feared came true in a functional sense after 1945, and this is because World War II represented a transition from the settled wet societies holding global power, to the desert wet societies holding global power.

"Desert wet" is a weird term, so let me explain. These are fertile places with forests, swamps, and other such wilderness. They could be turned into farms and ranches, and often are adjacent to areas with such things, but have not been. They are "desert" in the sense that they are deserted, devoid of people, for one of a number of reasons. And they assumed global power because the people who were driven to dwell in them, or their children and grandchildren, ended up beating all the other global powers in World War II.

I just described the land that Britain's settler-colonial child societies, including America, are built on. I also described the parts of the USSR and China that gave communist partisans refuge as they carried on relentless war against fascism. Both types of society involved a working class taking power for itself and using that power to become petties and bougies. In America's case, by devolving from a conservative Puritan course to a nazbol pioneer one to a social democratic one when the Dust Bowl hit. In the Soviet Union, the protofascist tsar was overthrown by Bolsheviks, who were social democrats in practice before Lenin arrived. Lenin pushed the revolution towards full socialism, and Stalin continued the practice. But years of war and a growing industrial base required more petty academics and specialists, and the Soviet workers lost power to the Soviet middle class in practice, if not in name, after Stalin's death, and the Soviet Union devolved from a fully socialist society to a social democratic one like its American opponent.

In all these cases, as the olds say, someone had to die for your freedom. Social democracy was purchased at the point of a gun, and even if the American version came early thanks to old fashioned settler-colonialism, it was defended in a social democratic context in World War II. You enjoy whatever prosperity you have because our ancestors killed the Axis for it seventy years ago, and they did it by exercising military power mostly in guerrilla-style warfare in thick vegetation.

As in the other environmental eras, there is a driving ideology and an alternate that it shares power with. The era of the desert dries had conservatives and nazbols, and in the era of the settled wets the nazbols flipped across the nihilistic lumpen void to become liberals while the conservative religious systems remained in place. The main ideology of this era is social democracy, as the bougies bribe their labor aristocracy in the homelands and borderlands of capital with "free shit" to stay loyal to the capitalist system. But that tells us the other operative ideology of this era: fascism.

Yes kids, in this era, organized money isn't playing around anymore. Sure, the proles in America got treated well, but that's because there has to be some sort of reservoir of millions of people willing to break skulls for capital. And the proles in Europe and East Asia got treated well, but that's because the capitalist states bordering communist ones must also be bribed to stay loyal. But that's a whole lot of bribes to go around, and the CIA will be good goddamned if any pesky pinkos in the Third World cut off the stream of alienated labor paying for it.

As an American, it pains me to admit that this phenomenon is no different in essence to the Nazi slave factories and concentration camps in occupied Europe. The legal mechanisms are different, because a society as thoroughly liberal as America's will want only the most ethically-sourced, free range slave labor. But in the end, if either's workers stopped delivering everyday low prices to the fatherland, the reaction was the same: the CIA or Gestapo got involved, thousands of workers died violently, and the factory lines kept humming unabated. As far as the Third World was concerned, World War II only determined whether their ultimate oppressors would speak English or German. Whether their labor would be stolen to pay for Nazi militarism or the American welfare state, it would be stolen at gunpoint all the same.

Continue reading Part VI