Assassination War & the Death of Bureaucracy
Will Deshauna Stand and Receive Fire?
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Introduction: Playing with Fire
On August 20, 2022, 29 year old Daria Dugina was killed in a car bombing on the outskirts of Moscow. The bomb, it was widely agreed, had been intended for her father the famed/infamous Russian philosopher Alexander Dugin ( who’s works are now shockingly hard to get in English and appears on my “Real Banned Books List”), and while there were lots of deflections and denials, it was fairly widely agreed the plot had been carried out with US and UK backing by Ukrainian aligned insurgents and agents within Russia.
Indeed many US aligned “Journalists”, “Open Source Intelligence” types, Bellingcat associated influencers, and other CIA aligned carve outs openly CELEBRATED the death of Daria, since she had been involved in Putin aligned political youth organizing.
Of course, the fact political volunteers and door knockers have NEVER been considered legitimate military targets, nor the fact the real target was a PHILOSOPHER and everything he had ever done would have been perfectly legal to do even within the United States under the auspices of the first amendment… that somehow never occured to these commentators. Nor the wider US intellectual class, and somehow neither did the natural logical conclusion.
Russia is by and large NOT run by its political organizers and academics. You could probably kill 1000 Russian university professors and it wouldn’t unbalance the Russian state too extraordinarily. Russia is run by a combination of old Soviet secret policemen, gangsters, and crooked/"reformed" oligarchs all attempting to reorganize themselves into a somewhat respectable upper-class, with a blend of impressive and farcical results.
Before he was killed in an internal power struggle the former head of Wagner PMC Yevgeny Prigozhin embodied this, turning from a St. Petersburg gangster, to a prisoner, to a (definitely money laundering) caterer for the presidential palace, to the head of a PMC mercenary company. Every prominent person in Russia has a career like this Right down to Putin going from a KGB officer, to a gangster/political fixer, to president… Every elite member of russian society is basically leading a life ripped right from Grand Theft Auto IV, complete with the eternal struggles of trying to “go legit” and formalize everything as a normal upper-class elite, to being dragged back into gangsterism or even soviet power struggles by their complex past.
Put simply the actual Russian Elite are not people very intimidated by assassination. They’ve all known people to be killed in power struggles, epianage, and criminal altercations, and are used to the anxiety that death might wait for them around the corner. And the US and Ukraine lashing out at academics who might be intimidated doesn’t really affect them.
However, if the Russian state did the logical tit-for-tat escalation and responded in kind… that would shake America to its knees. America actually IS run by its academics, political organizers, and bureaucrats. And almost none of the people with power have a gangster or KGB agent’s stoic familiarity with death and danger.
Killing a Russian Academics daughter did very little to the Russian state… It’d be a very different story for Russia’s armed agents to do the same in America and kill Chelsea Clinton, daughter of current Columbia professor Hillary Clinton.
It’s be a very different story if Russia assassinated Brookings senior fellow Robert Kagan, husband of former under-secretary of state Victoria Nuland. Or any number of Harvard, Stanford, Yale or Princeton political philosophers or International Relations commentators, or members of their family.
One can imagine the headlines if John Hopkins and RAND fellow Francis Fukuyama was so killed:
“It is the end of Fukuyama”
-History
And again remember, though the various income streams of the US elite may resemble embezzlement, protection rackets, and money laundering… these aren’t gangsters. These are complacent, highly agreeable, shockingly unoriginal and cowardly… Academics and bureaucrats.
Indeed one can imagine Putin weighing the risk of such a reprisal and then deciding against it, not out of ethical concerns, but because the American ruling class is too unpredictable and prone to womanly hysterias.
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Indeed amongst the few senior American and Ukrainian officials who knew of the attack beforehand you can imagine them salivating that Putin might respond in kind and the subsequent freakout might commit the US to joining the war (one of the few scenarios where Ukraine could possible survive against their overwhelming odds).
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And then of course they escalated further with the Moscow Concert Attack on the “Crocus City Hall” Music venue which killed 145 and injured 551, on 22 March 2024.
In this case western media, officials and carve-outs were slightly more circumspect, avoiding openly celebrating the attacks. However, the role of ISIS operatives, who’s connection to Ukraine is entirely an artifact of the US arming them and wielding them against Russia in Syria, as covered by Scott Horton’s excellent reporting at AntiWar.com, and the obvious timing around Russian elections to try and embarrass Putin and draw him into a wider war, AND the very clear US foreknowledge of the attack as betrayed by their legally mandated warnings and advisory to US citizens in Russia… Well basically no one believes the US and Ukraine wasn’t involved.
Now, again like in the Dugina case, Russia has avoided responding in kind…this is a genuinely remarkable restraint given the venue and concert was specifically selected to be a show popular amongst the class of people who support Putin, and who would most be able to pressure him into responding and escalating with their outrage.
The closest analogy… Indeed the most obvious logical response and reprisal, would be to launch a similar attack on a staging of Hamilton the musical… A direct attack on the class of people who most identity with the US regime, and a terror to the entire US elite who’ve been making pilgrimages to such concerts for a decade now.
Mercifully Putin’s geostrategic interests and calculations did not lead him to start the back and forth of state terrorism and assassination, whatever Ukrainian spooks and their immediate US handlers clearly wanted…
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However, Putin isn’t the only actor in the world…
And now that the logic has been so clearly shown, by the global hegemon no less, to be the future go-to lever of geopolitical power that state and non-state actors will reach for…
Well let’s follow that line of thought to its logical conclusion.
Assassination War
“Would that all of Rome had just one neck.”
-Caligula
The modern conception of assassination is wrapped up in the famous historical assassinations. Single shots and flashes of the knife that killed Presidents, Kings, Generals, Archdukes, Beatles, etc. have defined the history of the past 200 years, and had a notable track record before that.
When an entire army, nation, kingdom, political faction or musical movement all finds personification and organization in the person of one man, merely ending that one life becomes a major blow to the enemy organism. Sure they’ll try to replace him, but with all that power and ideology and decision making concentrated in one person, the mere act of replacement can mark a radical change. All the moreso when that one man represents a unique, possibly irreplaceable, amount of organizational, intellectual and human capital. Sure If Napoleon Bonaparte had died in one of the many assassination attempts on him they would have tried to replace him… But how do you replace NAPOLEON!? For the decade and a half he was in power, for maybe half of those years his sudden death would have simply resulted in the collapse of the french state, so loadbearing was his genius and organizational acumen.
Though the attempts on Napoleon represents the most extreme possible example, many would argue the assassination of Lincoln or JFK created massive nation changing policy shifts do to the uniqueness of the two personalities. The assassination of Archduke Frans Ferdinand DID start the largest war in human history to that point. The assassination of Tsar Alexander II DID permanently change the policy of the Russian state… and the assassination of his Grandson Tsar Nicholas II and his family was a fairly big deal (though it had few policy implications at that point).
And of course endless bits, books, films, video games, philosophical treatises, school papers and the rest have been written on the various real assassination attempts on Adolf Hitler, and also on the fantastical attempts that thoughtful game designers and equally thoughtless philosophers like to imagine could have occured if only Einstein’s time machine had worked out.
Yet the reality is the rise of the modern bureaucracy has crippled and removed the relevance of so many “Great men” of history. One can see from Trump to countless populist movements across the west, that not only has the rise of the managerial class rendered merely replacing a slain president or prime minister a nigh instantaneous and almost imperceptible matter of course, the managerial class sees it as their job to constrain and render already irrelevant the leaders which might be assassinated.
Whether one believes the conspiracy theories about Shinzo Abe’s assassination, it is certainly the case that his demise did not shake the Japanese state but rather brought it MORE in line with what the international managerial elite wanted to do anyway, with Japanese nationalism, pro-natalism, and anti-immigration policies all being moved to a far and cold backburner with the demise of their main advocate.
Far from depending on great men and leaders to stabilize and maintain the nation, modern bureaucratic states despise them and their demise is everywhere an opportunity for the hive mind of the managerial class to do as they wished anyway.
So is assassination a 19th century anachronism destined for the dustbin of history, which reckless US policy has revived?
No, if anything the opposite.
Assassination now poses a greater threat to state functionality than any point in human history.
The Bureaucratization of Coercion
Modern Man is the most heavily “regulated” being to ever exist, famously even the word “regulate” as late as the US constitution did not have any connotation of state micromanagement, but only that of “making regular”. thus the “Well regulated militia” clause of the US Second Amendment, despite what a naive 21st reading might suggest, conferred no power to the government to create “Regulations” over private firearms ownership.
This is how alien the idea of the vast web of laws and sub-laws and administrative regulatory orders would have been to an 18th century American, that the very word “regulate” or “regulation” was unknown as a word that might even grant state power, let alone be a vehicle for tyranny (Which you 100% would never include in the language of an inalienable freedom today).
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Indeed no one actually knows how many Laws and Regulations are out there, various estimates trying to merely count the pages of law US citizens are subject to always wind up in kafka and logic traps of what does and does not qualify as a law. As countless congressional acts grant government agencies the power to write and rewrite regulations and thousands of pages of legal mandates on the fly, with no oversight, but with the force of generic fines and sentences behind them for “Not Complying”. Is the law merely the 2000 page individual act of congress? Or does the law include the 20,000 extra pages written in regulator back offices which that act of congress states can send a person to jail for 10 years?
Many legal authorities have wrung there hand that there is actually no way to know what it legal and what illegal, or when these things change, because it all occurs buried in agency back offices… Indeed many historical legal standards around things such as mens rea, due notice, and ex post facto criminalization are fraying in the wind of these often illogical and insane regulatory burdens, applied many times not to even large corporations but small businesses and individuals.
Obviously this kafka-esque regime is a function of the 20th century rise of managerialism and modernist state… but there’s also the obvious question: How does such a regime function?
Judging by the legal history of just the United States it’s clear that in the 18th century and well into the 19th century if not ever the Lochner Era of the early 20th century, such a regime was not only impossible it was unthinkable… But why? What changed?
On paper it would seem that nothing would have precluded the 18th and 19th century from possessing just as total a regulatory state as the modern era. They had largely literate populations, and lots of aspiring government employees who’d gladly trade endless hours of boredom for the slightest hit of power and status (as evidenced by the fierce competition for the government jobs that were available) and yet nothing comparable to the modern regulatory state was possible then, nor at really any point in human history outside a few Ancient City states hinted by Tacitus and others as having tyrannized their populations through a multiplicity of laws.
“The more corrupt the state, the more numerous the laws.”
-Tacitus
The missing ingredient, was of course the title of this segment The Bureaucratization of Coercion. As communist leaders like Chairman Mao, are happy to remind us “All political power grows from the barrel of a gun”…
Or put otherwise by Libertarian Sci-Fi Author robert Heinlein,“Force is the supreme authority from which all other authority is derived”.
If a regulation or law is not ultimately backed with the threat of violence, if no one will turn up to fine you for violating it, arrest you for not paying the fine, and tase or shoot you for resisting arrest… Then it’s not a law or regulation, but a suggestion. Only the threat of FORCE compels those who would not obey the law to do so.
See my previous piece on the matter “The Iron rule” where i summarize the organizing principle of all governance
But the enforcement of this regime of force of course presents a great logistical problem, you have to actually get someone on the scene to actually enforce the law under question.
Ancient roman tax collectors had to travel with armed guards lest the occupied people simply make them disappear in “an accident”. The entire feudal system required knights to be eternally present in the manor houses and estates which were producing the wealth that required taxing, and even the Yeomanry, free cities, and countless other institutions fell outside or otherwise could negotiate very choice deals with the King directly due to their ability to resist direct force. In the age of absolutism this sort of changed in France and a few other places where figures like Cardinal Richelieu could destroy the walls and break the regional power of small cities and lords, but in other places like Germany no such centralization occured until late in the 19th century.
And of course there was the American revolution… Think how strange it is that to protest the government, the American colonists attacked a random ship in port during the Boston Tea party? This wasn’t just them being very literal minded about the tax they were protesting. The ports WERE the seats of imperial financial control.
This was the chokepoint whereby the, by modern standards, obscenely weak British state was able to extract a large percentage of the economic output of the country. They couldn’t assess or tax individuals in the countryside for what would quickly become fear of their safety, so far from civilization and so close to angry rural hill people, their chances would be slim. But at the port they could take a percentage of every cup of tea drunk in the entire colony, or every piece of postage or other import good, merely by taxing them as they came off the ships.
This logistical problem of effectively applying state violence to the wealth of the people defines states… right up until the 20th century.
You see hintings of this with the rise of trains, centralized mail systems, and early conscription in the US civil war and Franco-Prussian War, but the modern bureaucratic state really only becomes possible, not with literacy, or paperwork, or advanced bookkeeping and organization, or even victorian discipline or any of the the things we’d associate with bureaucracy.
No, the backbone of the modern bureaucratic state was Telecommunications and the automobile.
“What?!” You may ask, “Those two have nothing to do with complex bureaucracy! How does the invention of the car relate to the expansion of paperwork!? And Telecommunications should cut DOWN on paperwork, people can just call! You don’t have to be constantly writing-out letters.”
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But this mistakes what the Bureaucratic state is. Remember the Bureaucratic state is not a function of paperwork (of which the Founding Fathers could produce endless reems in all their phamphlets, letters, proclamations, etc.)
No, Bureaucracy is a function of Political Power. Coercion. VIOLENCE.
And what the Car and the Telephone did was allow for the Bureaucratization of Coercion.
If you look at the orders given to British Captains and Admirals during the Napoleonic wars, these orders were often shockingly cursory. Sometimes only 1-2 sentences would be the whole of the Admiralty’s direction to a ship’s Captain for months at a time.
“Proceed to X via the best route and take the fort of Y. Godspeed.” Would not be an usual structure for these orders.
These orders were not so simple because the task was simple, but because it was COMPLEX and skilled British Captains needed the greatest of discretion with which to act. They were weeks if not months out from new orders, and the admiralty weeks if not months away from news of occurrences on the other side of the world.
If the Ship’s captain encountered an enemy ship, or merchantmen, or the fort had been abandoned or Garrisoned extra heavily without theAdmiralty’s knowing, it was on the Captain to make decisions, and answer for those decisions, potentially with his life.
If the Admiralty tried to micromanage the action of captains they’d inevitably steer them to disaster, so the organization of most all military and governance institutions emphasized the incredible skill and god-like power and judgement of the Captain or General or Governor placed in charge of a distant force or town.
Sure the Royal Navy had the Articles of War by which a commander could be very harshly assessed after the fact… See my piece on royal navy culture and accountability:
But in the moment Admirals and Captains were empowered in ways that rivalled kings. Since the only way to have dynamic responses to anything was to have leaders empowered to make those dynamic decisions.
You see this not only in the royal navy, but also on the American frontier, where Marshalls, Sherriffs, Mayors, and US Army Captains often wielded power to rival knights and dukes in the old world, and ran not inconsiderable risk in doing so.
A sheriff might be empowered to deputize all of his friends and lead a posse against an outlaw band real or imagined, in an incredible display of force… but that posse was it.
If they failed or got caught out the nearest backup was often days or weeks away. Thus these military men, lawmen, and local political leaders had to be versatile, competent, and capable of violence: either committing it themselves or its immediate direction.
What the invention of the Automobile and telephone did was it changed all of that. By increasing the speed of reaction times from days to minutes or hours, and by increasing the speed of communications from days or weeks to seconds, the very nature of authority changed.
Before applying something such as the income tax would be an unfeasibly dangerous proposition. A simple modicum of non-compliance would require tax agents to go out, and even if they went out in force, they’d probably be disappeared very quickly, with the only lead being that they disappeared between thursday and sunday and were vaguely going to be present in some area or county. It might take another 4 days after they were noted missing to get someone out there to check on them.
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With the automobile and the telephone not only can they dispatch from their office and return by days' end, not only can they keep in touch every hour or two, not only is backup now immediately contactable from the field and mere minutes away in the form of a nigh endless supply of police in squad cars… Now the Tax collector or low level enforcer doesn’t have to be capable of violence or dynamic decision making of their own… At all.
Whereas before trustworthy, competent, literate, moral Ethically predictable, men who were capable of distant travel, dynamic decision making, and enforcing their decisions with violence were the major limiting factor in the depths of state control that is possible… And such men were inherently prideful and had class interests around their rights as high status free gentlemen and their places of respect within the communities they administered; Former Colonel Washington LED the rebellion against the Crown… Whereas before you had to deal with all of that, Now you could use Anyone.
Indeed the modern state invariably chooses for it’s regulators and inspectors sexually failed women, the disabled, the sexually isolated or despised, and the racially and ethnically outcast. All explicitly BECAUSE they are of the lowest status without the state (what do you think Diversity, Equity and Inclusion means? It mean selecting people for being low status without the state) and will obey basically anything the state demands because, unlike the violent competent men of discretion who could do anything else or go anywhere and assume a leadership role, the DEI bio-slop who fill the government bureaucracy are complete nobodies without their jobs.
Whereas before the commanding man of discretion, whether an old west Lawman or a British Royal Navy Officer, had to be able to make difficult decisions and deal with any situation that came up in the enforcement of their orders or the law… Now the primary enforcer of all things is low IQ obese menopausal woman whose continued payment and government pension is 100% secure as long as she does not vary from protocol… or better: does nothing at all.
This is why endless hundreds of thousands of pages of regulation can be passed, and yet the economy still limps along not betraying that the number of effective laws have 10x’d in as many years. Outside the money laundering schemes, embezzlement of public funds, and the carving out of regulatory fiefdoms Ie. Killing off small businesses to make room for big politically connected businesses, The real point of regulations isn’t even to control anyone… It is to create more excuses for hiring Menopausal women, “Queer” workers, and mystery ethnicity nobodies to take a salary and justify the increases salaries of the now “Managers” who were already employed in these bureaucracies.
Unlike the earlier generations of lawmen, these infinitely expanding regulators need never actually enforce anything themselves, they need only send messages or “reach out” and if at any point they feel the slightest physical threat, they can call the police who are empowered to make ZERO decisions but are still capable of violence, and of calling in an endless stream of more police officers, tactical teams, and Helicopters should you prove resistant.
The incredible response times made possible by telecommunications and the automobile have enabled the regime to outsource nigh infinite enforcement and harassment of the population to aging menopausal Gladises and Deshaundas, content in the fact that in the 0.01% of cases where any hostility is encountered, they can deploy the police to be there in minutes.
Whereas before it might have taken a Sheriff with a posse of 10 fit men to enforce against even a minor violation or land dispute a remote part of the country… now it takes one overweight irritable multiethnic woman.
This is the modern Bureaucratic Class
Unexceptional, unintelligent, unprincipled, unattractive, and anti-daring.
The successors to Generals Grant and Eisenhower in maintaining US imperial occupation of the peoples of America, the west, and the wider world, are these creatures.
The very opposite of the daring intelligent young men who forged the European and American empire in the 19th and early 20th century.
And whether it be in Russia or the middle east they are obsessed with having their enemies Assassinated… Whether it be drone strikes, car bombs, Seal Team raids, show trials executions like Saddam, or subsidized militias such as killed Gaddafi.
It wasn’t just philosophers like Alexander Dugin or his Daughter that have been targeted. American citizens such as Anwar al-Awlaki and then later his 16 year old American citizen son Abdulrahman al-Awlaki were killed in separate drone strikes on the order of Barack Obama, a mixed race (alleged) closeted homosexual who maybe best embodies the modern Bureaucratic class’s ideals, right down to his resentment for the white grandparents who raised him but whom he could never connect with.
All of the targeted killings which have characterized US foreign policy for at least the last 20-30 years (and maybe back to ‘63 depending on if you think the Kennedy assassination was an inside job) have been at EXTREME odds with the norms of Western European warfare and even counter insurgency going back through the history of the Irish Troubles (where the UK did not set out to kill political opponents, and had great handwringing whenever anything could be construed that way), back through the history of the World Wars when neither side attempted to assassinate each other’s leadership, all the way to the Napoleonic wars, when Wellington FORBID his gunners from attempting to fire on Napoleon himself:
“Generals have better things to do that shoot at each other”
In contrast to the decisive commanding men of the past, the modern bureaucratic class is uniquely infatuated with the idea of assassination, well beyond any demonstrated effect it has or indeed in spite of the intense international blowback it often reaps… Because as a class they feel insulated from it.
The great violent decisive leading men of the past were vulnerable to assassination, you kill Napoleon and who knows what would happen to Napoleonic France, the loss of an entire army might be less devastating. Whereas the hivemind blob of endless mediocre bureaucrats all enacting their little micro-tyrannies, petty obstructions, and orwellian double-speaks in their vanishing few “productive” hours…What does assassination affect them? They’re all too unimportant by design to be worth the effort, and even if you took out the rare prominent bureaucrat amongst them, that power would just devolve down into the hivemind and the decisions and structure of the bureaucracy would just become more crooked, inept, unaccountable, and self similar, just the way the bureaucrats like it.
Assassination it would seem is the perfect weapon of the credentialled egalitarian Bureaucratic regime… A weapon which cannot be used against them, but is endlessly useful against the furious decisive violent intelligent men who become the dictators of rogue regimes, or the leaders of terrorist movements, or nerdy Australian journalists who dare to report on US crimes:
It would seem this is the perfect asymmetrical weapon of bureaucratic regimes everywhere to cut down the tall flowers, hammer down all the nails that stick up, and kill off any movement or enemy faction that might rival the bureaucrats by attracting great men who’d challenge them.
Thus why their most cynical operatives seem so intent on baiting their rivals into assassination wars.
Except when you stop and think for a second that’s not how it would play out at all.
Deshauna Won’t Stand and Receive Fire
The defining trait of the old decisive men of violent leadership was not even their skill at committing violence or making decisions, but their willingness to endure violence and suffer the consequences of their decisions.
Officers of the Napoleonic Age up through even world war 1 (where officers had a much higher casualty rate than their men) lead largely from the front. Many of the wealthiest most important leaders in their age were in the thick of it, prey to any random musket or cannon ball the same as their men. Indeed over the course of a career, on average, they’d face much greater risk to life than a random private (at least in combat, disease was another matter).
Many of Napoleon’s Marshalls endured countless wounds and (by many account’s his closest friend and confidant) Marshal Lannes died of a random cannonball, though he would not be the last Marshal to die brutally. Horatio Nelson likewise died gloriously at Trafalgar of a random wound, and the annals of war are full of men great and modest who faced similar ends with stoic resolve.
Indeed the dueling and trials of manhood of the era replicated this experience of war, expecting duelists to stand stoically and receive the largely random fire of their opponent so as to prove themselves not a coward.
By contrast the defining characteristic of the modern Bureaucrat is cowardice and avoidance of responsibility.
Whilst the Bureaucratic regime is VERY keen to merely assassinate it’s enemies, and all the individual bureaucrats believe they are safe in their obscurity, there remains the fly in the ointment that “Safety” is a matter of perception and will.
Sure Israel and the US would love nothing more than to assassinate Mohammed Deif the Military commander of Hamas and mastermind of the Oct 7th attack and the entire tunnel war in Gaza… And indeed Israel’s attempts and airstrikes have already killed his wife and 2 of his 4 children, and there is probably some Israeli officer deniably plotting to add his two other sons to that grim story…
But it hasn’t deterred him. He may sleep in a different bed every night and may not see the sun for months on end buried in his tunnel fortress, but he’s still fighting. It is extraordinarily likely he’ll be killed at some point in this war (if he hasn’t been already, many of these secretive leaders see their names lead lives beyond their demise) yet the mere threat and unsuccessful attempts at assassination haven’t broken his will. Much like Napoleon’s Marshals or the commanders of Union and Confederate armies before him, he’s standing and receiving fire.
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The same will not be said of the bureaucratic class when people finally realize the logical conclusion to the assassination game. Indeed the amount of risk the modern western bureaucrat would find intolerable is laughable by comparison.
“Intolerable” Risk
In the past 60 years the US has run an endless experiment of just how high a murder rate the average bored uncommitted US worker will put up with. You’d think risk to life and limb and the psychic effect it has on behaviour would be something relative intangible, A matter of resolve and will. But, whereas that might have been the case for Napoleon’s Marshals or Viscount Nelson, the modern American seems to intuitively and subconsciously respond to statistical reality with an uncanny precision. Like a migratory bird which always knows the direction of north, or an unfortunate dog or wife that can tell when its master might beat it.
Even post-Covid, with a murder rate of a mere 3.39 per 100,000 New York City remain a desirable and, given it’s economic output, supremely expensive American city. Washington DC is radically more dangerous: with a homicide rate of 16.72 you are nearly 5x as like to be killed in DC as New York. This, of course, is a function of the city’s demographics, which resemble those of the American south in exactly the way northern liberals do not like to talk about. Then as you get to the bottom of the list of Large cities: Detroit and New Orleans have homicide rates that hover around 39.5, and perennial nightmare cities Baltimore and St Louis have homicide rates of 55 and 66.
However, if you want, you can look at America’s most depressed and nightmarish small cities, there you find places like Gary, Indiana 64 per 100k, or East St Louis, Illinois 87 per 100k, or Birmingham, Alabama 138 per 100k, giving someone a average 6.9 PERCENT chance of being murdered if they’re born in the city and stay there until their 50th birthday. 1 in 15. If you live to 75 you’ll have survived the equivalent of a Roman decimation. 1 in 10.
(they don’t tell you that part about WHY southern whites were so harsh to Dr. King or why they were so draconian in their enforcement of separation ordinances)
I had the opportunity to visit a microcosm of this dark side of American Life: Johnstown, Pennsylvania. Which Bruce Springsteen fans might recognize from the song “The River”, hockey fans the film “Slapshot”, and history fans from the multiple horrific floods to strike the city.
with a peak population of 60,000, but now reduced to a mere 18,000, Johnstown in the year 2022 had suffered 12 homicides by August (when the person correlating the statistics mysteriously disappeared never to update the wiki) extrapolated across the remaining 4 months of 2022, that would be ~18 homocides for the entire year.
18 per 18,000. 100 per 100,000. Not quite as bad as Birmingham. But still, live there 75 years and you’ll have a 7.5% chance of being killed. 1 in 13.
Johnstown is the closest thing I’ve encounter to Silent Hill in real life. And I visited at 9am in the morning…
When I arrived there was nary a shop open in the city. It had an entire downtown sized for what would have struck my Canadian mind as closer to 150,000 people than the 60k it supposedly had it it’s peak, and yet after driving a dozen blocks I only encountered the zombified remains of its residents, wheelchair bound elderly from a nursing home being “walked” and further up the street younger but more unfortunate souls in the same condition, from what I assume was a rehab clinic.
The only two shops that were open, out of hundreds of storefronts, after circling a half dozen blocks were a pizzeria that seemed to survive off deliveries, and coffeeshop whose sign said “open” but who’s decor had not changed and who’s windows appeared to have not been cleaned since the 70s.
The only sign that normal civilization continued and I had indeed not entered another dimension, was the parking meters on every inch of roadway as the last surviving remnants of the city government struggled to pay for its continued upkeep.
The only other sign of life and the only “event” seemingly occuring in the town, was a funeral outside one of the surviving churches.
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This is what happens when American cities start going in the US, a industry closes or downsizes, the economically productive move, and then the evaporative cooling effect takes place such that only the most criminal, degenerate, and demographically destructive remains… and nothing else can ever move back.
But because of this we have a very effectively demonstrated range of just how much violence people will put up with on an ongoing basis before places and institutions death spiral… And contrary to what the bureaucracy thinks, they and their institutions are MORE vulnerable to assassination than the great violent decisive men of the past.
Assassination War: The Terror of Marginal Risk
kill one, terrify ten thousand.
-Sun Tzu
The Modern IRS has fewer than 100,000 employees. They are also the true backbone of the American state, without them all the infrastructure, aircraft carriers, and nuclear deterrent die for want of money to pay people to man them.
If Vladimir Putin responded to the killing of Russian officials by arming Cartel gunmen or radical American militants to go after them, and merely 50 of them were killed a year that would very quickly have the sociological effect upon them currently experienced by the residents of St Louis, if 100 were killed a year… well Johnstown.
Remember these are not the stoic line-infantrymen and gentleman officers of the 19th century, indeed the hiring policy of the IRS is like other parts of the American government in that they actively select for demographics who lack the stoic endurance and loyalty to their institutions of teenage white male conscripts.
Like most government agents and bureaucrats they picked the job because they thought it would pay well, wouldn’t be too much work, and would afford them higher status than other jobs. That calculation goes out the window with even a moderate assumption of risk… And unlike the line-infantry men of the napoleonic age, they aren’t forced to be there… You can’t stop them from quitting, you certainly can’t shoot the deserters amongst them for cowardice to encourage the others.
If merely 100 IRS agents were assassinated by a foreign or non-state actor annually, 100 per <100,000, (or a greater than 2% chance of death over a 20 year career) that alone would cause a Johnstown style 2/3 flight from the profession, not to mention that this politically motivated actor’s ability to commit such violence is tied to their political goals, not IRS numbers… so as that number declines that 100 per annum would now represent a 300 per 100,000 fatality rate, furthering the exodus. And with 2/3rds of the IRS gone, tax compliance and receipts would crater… and with in the entire financial viability of the American empire.
This is not the best example, merely the most obvious one. As one looks at the roles in the modern bureaucracy one quickly finds roles and agencies even MORE immediately important to the functioning of the modern western state (it takes years for even cascading tax receipts to cause a state financial crisis) and who’s body of personnel number a mere 20,000, or 10,000, or less. There are departments or categories of state workers which number in the low thousands who’s failure to operate would throw a modern state into permanent chaos. Remember each multiple below 100,000 magnifies any violence committed against them for the purposes of getting to that threshold of professional flight.
And the thing is: because the modern bureaucracy has seemingly “secured” itself from assassination by so dividing it’s decision making and organizational apparatus, there’s no way to secure it.
Sure in age of Napoleon you just had to kill one man, Napoleon, to cripple the French state and maybe cause collapse. But Napoleon KNEW that was the case and invested heavily in his personal security having a intensive personal guard.
By contrast a department of 30,000 cannot dedicate 60,000 bodyguards to guard it’s employees at every hour of the day.
![An IRA Volunteer armed with a sniper rifle in a training camp in Ravensdale, Co. Louth, Ireland in early 1970's. [960x540][OS] : r/HistoryPorn](https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2F508bdf42-357a-4525-8f51-cf21ad0b168f_960x520.jpeg "An IRA Volunteer armed with a sniper rifle in a training camp in Ravensdale, Co. Louth, Ireland in early 1970's. [960x540][OS] : r/HistoryPorn")
The only limiting factor which has prevented this from already collapsing western states is the ill discipline and grandiosity of the movements which have employed assassination. The IRA deadicated extraordinary resources to killing Margaret Thatcher… meanwhile there were only a few hundred ordinary members of parliament, who were all still going out to the pub, with hardly any security whatsoever.
On the other hand their campaign of terror and blood against the North Ireland Prison Service which killed 30 prison officials over the ~30 years of the troubles against a force of a mere 1,500. Or 66 murders per 100,000.
This grew to ten in one year in 1979 or ~670 per 100,000. Coinciding with the dirty protest begun in 1978 and the subsequent hunger strike in 1981. By 1983 all 5 of the IRA’s famous “5 demands” had been officially or defacto granted to the IRA prisoner. Though Thatcher insisted she and the government had not caved, in effect they’d given up everything.
It is this focus on specific institutions and subsets of government employees that grants such campaigns their power. Divided across the whole body of an enemy government or unrecognized governing force (think the mafia or taliban), this many killings would not affect operations, or create any extraordinary feeling of risk in employees, and thus no subsequent pressure to quit and flee, but concentrated in even very small numbers it quickly pushes institutions to the brink of failure as seen in the North Irish prison service.
Much like the human body, the body of a governing regime can take surprising amounts of damage and keep functioning. Men have been shot 10 times and survived without even lifelong limitations… likewise regimes have had the entire western half of their empire violently ripped from them by foreign invaders… only to win in the end and conquer that enemy.
Yet if you add up the weight and energy of those bullets, the same man could have been killed by microscopic fraction of their weight in rare poisons. Rather than hitting random flesh, the deadliest poisons specifically damage the smallest and yet most necessary parts of the body. Sure the total chemical reaction and energy transformation is vastly less, but poisons which specifically target the nerve endings regulating breathing, or the acid proof lining of the stomach, do not need that much energy to do their damage.
Cyanide specifically blocks the ability of the cells of your central nervous system and heart from respirating, causing their damage and death and a cascade to cardiac arrest, which of course prevents every other cell in the body from ever receiving oxygen again.
Ricin causes a failure of cells in the gastrointestinal system to generate proteins, this causes failure of those cells to function, this causes organ failure in the adrenal glands, kidneys, and liver… This failure of those organs to function prevents the clearing of normal toxic byproducts from the bloodstream, causing toxic shock.
Like the human body, the modern state is a series of overlapping dependent systems, the collapse of a few small organs of which would cause a cascade and kill the system.
What happens if someone doesn’t go after Congressmen and senators… just their aids such that the leaders of washington become as deaf dumb and blind as the individuals filling those roles? What if member of a prominent lobby group are targeted?
I use DC as an example (largely because it’s not my country and thus I’m kinda legally insulated to speculate about it) but this applies to all countries in the west that follow the US model. What if the IRA had started specifically targeting the centralized payroll office of the UK government? They DID start targeting the City of London financial district specifically, and the UK was forced to accept the VERY Generous term of the Good Friday Agreement (including release of hundreds of Convicted Murderers serving life) as a result.
Sure any modern western regime would react in horror and lash out if any opponent did this to them… but then that lashing out would be likely to damage it in other ways, or provoke more assailants the exact same way Thatcher’s strick line on the hunger protestors and renewed troop deployments to North Ireland drove IRA recruiting in the era.
In Conclusion: Of Shoes On Other Foots
Western Governments have enjoyed the most desirable conditions for imposing occupations and fighting Guerilla warfare in history.
From Vietnam to Iraq, western governments could fight terrorists and insurgents, airstrike their organizers and leaders in their villages, raid their homes, assassinate their financiers and propagandists, target their tax collectors and enforcers as they went about their jobs intimidating the local population.
And nothing equivalent could be done in turn.
All the bureaucracy, all the actual political leaders of the west, all the financial figures who make the modern western state possible… All of them were safe continents away in leafy neighborhoods and air conditioned offices. Vietnam was a place on the globe none of them would ever visits, they just filled out paperwork making it possible to send conscripted teenagers there.
Gung-ho Military types talk about “the tip of the spear”, the fighting men who actually engage with the enemy, and officers and self important logistics types like to talk about “The shaft of the spear”, and how getting the fighters where they need to be with all their stuff is actually what decides battles, … but almost all modern military thinkers forget that the spear is just the inert weapon, everything that maintains it, everything that decides what it does, how it’s wielded, everything that provides it any energy (money, manpower, manufactured goods, organization)… Well at the end of the long shaft of the spear is a person, or in our metaphor the “civilian” world of government employees and “private” or “NGO” entities that exist to advance western regimes… A squishy organism that is soft, vulnerable, and relatively immobile in all the ways the spear is hardened, impervious, and fast.
Counter insurgency officers who talk about “targeting” financiers, bomb makers, administrators, leaders, and propagandists of “terror”… forgetting that they have all those figures as well. And whereas the Taliban’s financial administrator is a scarred battle hardened veteran of the Soviet-Afghan war named Abdul who’s ready to die rather than give in to the infidel… The financial administrator the COIN Officer depends upon is a Middle-Aged CPA name Glenda who won’t stay after 3 on friday and considers an Inappropriate joke a “hostile work environment” for which she needs paid leave, meanwhile Abdul’s response to surviving a drone strike is to stay late and get work done because he realized his replacement wouldn’t have been able to sort out his files on the Kandahar district.
America and the wider west has fought the last half dozen wars in its history “Spear” in hand against a caged enemy who could not strike back, merely swat against the “spear”… and America lost every war that wasn’t against Central America or Saddam.
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That’s changed now, partly because of globalization and the spread of radical ideologies… Even more so because Western regime’s have simultaneous allowed millions of foreigners in where they can have access to all those squishy vulnerable bits, all the while alienating and turning hostile the loyal national populations who’d historically defended them.
What happens when America’s enemies realize they can target America’s financiers and administrators as well?
What happens if one of America’s enemies targets IRS agents the same way America might drone-strike taliban tax collectors?
What happens when Putin or the Next dictator doesn’t just accept the daughter of his most prominent philosopher being killed in a car-bomb, but starts having his agents kill harvard professors? What happens when a regime doesn’t accept their most loyal supporters being killed at a concert but instead decides to organize their own attack against the next big musical production all the right sort of people need to see?
What happens when there’s a massacre at Angels in America 2: Hamilton’s Boogaloo?
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I’ll tell you what will happen: the bureaucratic regime hivemind will freakout in exactly the way their opponent expects them to, double or triple down on something insane, probably try to start a war with whatever internal or minor enemy might not be even responcible for the original attack to begin with (imagine a false flag Islamic attack feigning to be Trump supporters) and then it will probably cause the cascading death of the empire.
Because when the organism is sickly enough or malformed, it doesn’t even take a lethal dose of the poison to kill it. When it’s poorly calibrated, unhealthy, and is already over sensitive and haywire you don’t need a sufficient dose of poison to cause organ failure and a resultant toxic shock… Mere exposure will set off its immune response and it can die of anaphylactic shock.
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Excellent insight in bringing out how the combination of transport and telecommunications enabled the growth of a bureaucratic totalitarian system. I'd add one additional factor that I think has been huge, and relates directly to the telecommunications revolution.
The bureaucrats and government goons they control don't work for free. They take those jobs because they pay well.
Before the telegraph, money was (and could be) gold. You could send gold by any method you could ship goods, at the same speed. So gold could meet the needs of commerce. After the invention of the telegraph, commerce could happen at the speed of light. Gold can't move that fast. The only way to match the speed of money to the new speed of commerce was to centralize the gold in banks and transact with bank credit. The centralization of gold led to more fractional reserved banking, more bank failures, a central bank to "solve" bank failures, and eventually complete loss of the gold standard and a shift to the pure fiat money system we have today.
When gold was money, getting money to pay the bureaucrats and goons meant physically collecting it from the productive citizens, a difficult and dangerous task as you pointed out. But today, violently taking money from a citizen is as simple as placing a request to his bank to seize his account. No one is immune to this bureaucratic theft, not even a sovereign nuclear power like Russia. And your soft, effeminate bureaucrats can easily do it from the comfort of their climate controlled office.
That's bad enough, but as is obvious in the case of Russia, there's a limit to how much of even that low-risk theft the state can do before people take steps to protect themselves. So even worse, they also steal money in an even more devious and hidden way; by printing it. Trillions of dollars of the federal budget annually aren't even taken from the productive class by taxes and seizure, they're just printed out of thin air. Massive budget deficits every year. The insidious thing is, most people have no idea how badly they're being robbed. Again, the bureaucrats can commit this theft without even leaving their office, or sending a goon to do the dirty work for them. And every single person holding dollar savings or working for a dollar denominated wage is getting robbed, and they have no idea. So there's no pushback, no uproar.
And as long as the productive class keeps saving banker scrip, and exchanging our valuable goods and for worthless banker scrip, there will always be enough money to pay the bureaucrats and their goons.
We must move to a sound money that the bankers can't create out of thin air. We must stop exchanging our valuable goods and services for fiat money. When we as the productive class make that shift, the government no longer has the unlimited access to our wealth to pay their managerial and enforcement class. At that point the bureaucrats starve, and the goons go home to take care of their own family some other way.
I'd long considered something similar, from a different angle. The terror arm of the regime - the people who do things like attack random MAGA grannies or execute old disabled men for fedposting - seems as if it's inevitably going to run into a situation where it underestimates the danger posed by one of its targets, and trigger a cascade failure, where anti-regime actors are increasingly motivated and pro-regime personnel are increasingly afraid to deploy.
The freakout over Rittenhouse splashing a nonce, a home-invader, and an abuser was brought about by precisely this fear. The people who attacked him were incredibly unsympathetic, and there was quite a bit of celebration surrounding their deaths. The unprecedented level of lawfare against him was an attempt to discourage the notion that defending oneself against the regime's pet freaks was allowed, but was moreso an attempt to assuage said freaks' concern that Rittenhouse was going to become more than a one-time thing.
One can imagine, as the FBI becomes increasingly hated by the better half of the population, and its personnel become fatter and less competent, that they'll eventually manage to botch one of their increasingly frequent raids on random old people, and take a casualty or two. Suddenly, a number of things change significantly:
> Membership in the regime's terror arm (antifa freaks, FBI personnel, etcetera - anyone whose job description is using indiscriminate violence against normal Americans for the explicit purpose of instilling fear in the general public) becomes predicated on willingness to die for the regime, rather than willingness (eagerness) to feel powerful by hurting people on its behalf.
> Resistance against terror by these groups goes from a futile endeavor to something tractable, in the eyes of everyday discontents. Opposition-sympathetic law enforcement find reasons to take the day off rather than carrying out orders to intervene or to protect people they dislike, now that they see it as participation in a conflict rather than doing a job that would get done either way. Other people are more willing to act if they think they'll accomplish something, and an expected k/d greater than or equal to one provides a very outsized shift in attitudes.
> Previously, the regime was able to hand-pick the faces of extremist opposition, and it picked them well. Fat losers in ill-fitting black T-shirts chanting slogans at disinterested normies, speds groomed into committing shootings on highly-sympathetic targets with no conceivable strategic value, and other refuse. It was and is an effective deterrent - normal people found them viscerally disgusting, and took to heart the idea that picking up a weapon would mean you accomplish nothing, get denounced by everyone, and serve as an embarrassment to your side. If the face of "violent extremism" instead becomes a run-of-the-mill normie who took a lucky shot at a shared enemy as it was trying to attack him, and was martyred for it, a lot of psychological barriers disappear.
Lastly, I don't see them responding to a body bag and a cheering public with de-escalation, and it seems like that could result in a feedback loop, as larger numbers of targets are chosen more and more poorly. Eventually, affected segments of the public would start targeting people involved in directing the attacks in the manner you describe.