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.
Great post. All true but we are coming to the next level of bureaucratization. Police, the deliverers of violence, are themselves becoming Woke and bureaucratized. They would rather engage in low-risk enforcement (hate speach, building code enforcement, etc.) than high-risk enforcement (anyone armed and violent). When they do carry out arrests with perceived elevated risk, they often apply para-military swat teams with overwhelming numerical superiority. The next tool will be drones for law enforcement. Soon the DEI hires will be able to implement searches and arrests from the safety of a video screen, with drones designed to search, incapacitate, or kill. Person risk to the police officer will be removed, and their positions will be filled by "untouchable" DEI bureaucrats.
I do think that un-fucking the bureaucratic state will require the imposition of economic friction. A degree of informational friction as well in all likelihood. The best option, in my opinion, is to encourage local bureaucracies at the county level to make bizarre and disparate laws surrounding the shipping of goods. This will effectively rebuild an owner-class rather than the managerial class as every county will become a semi-independent economic fiefdom.
Localization and sound money are required to get out from beneath the boot of ten million regulators.
Interesting...Russia a few years ago demanded ether gold or rubles (which it converted to gold) for it's oil of which it provides a third of the world supply. It is currently experiencing a low cost high standard of living so it seems to have solved the digital problem. Oh, and china's buying up gold. Seems someone knows something...
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.
The regime is, at this point, hated by the majority of the population. They survive only through effective mass-surveillance and coercion. Surveillance can be handled by localizing your organizational focus. "It's better to be feared than loved, but above all else one must strive never to be hated." The current micro-managerial regime is hated by the population at large and only tacitly tolerated.
The modern state-surveillance apparatus is effective, but limited in terms of manpower. Once a critical threshold is reached it'll be impossible for the regime to clamp down on dissenters and violent actors. The primary issue is that there's a lack of funding and the fact that prominent leadership is immediately located, targeted and eliminated. A foreign actor getting involved (Russia, China, literally any state actor) could easily swell the ranks by providing financial support, tools and training. Doing so is itself a huge diplomatic risk, however. As the world further descends into militancy, however, that risk is likely to start becoming worth it.
The way Ottawa bureaucracy totally freaked at the Freedom Convoy. Very fragile COVID Karen/Ken. Imagine if Wrath of the Wendigo insurgency was a viable option.
In retrospect, there was a profound lack of direct action effecting health and safety of public health officials at the city, county, state and national levels during the COVID insanity.
"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." Sounds like any DMV you are forced to enter.
I agree with your premise of how destabilizing it would be, but at the moment, it's difficult to imagine any US substate actor deciding it's worth it to begin assassinating low-level bureaucratic flunkies, simply because, while it is conceptually awful and insulting and terrible for American tax money to be stolen and given to corrupt foreign regimes (Ukraine/Israel), it is viscerally the same as it has been for years--we are used to paying taxes and having politicians be corrupt. However, I think the event that will likely lead to the kind of local "terror" you discuss would be an attempt to re-institute a draft for a foreign war, particularly if the local draft boards decided to immediately (or almost immediately) send out press gangs, er, I mean, local sheriffs to arrest/press young men who were drafted. One may not know who the DC bureaucrat in charge of the draft is, but they'll damn sure know who their local enforcers are, and it won't take too many dead sheriffs deputies or local board members before they conclude it's not worth it. And that is a viscerally much different beast than taxes. Bureaucrats won't stand and receive fire for a policy, but fathers will for their sons and daughters.
You put it very well, how vulnerable the mighty boor-o-crats really are. They think they are untouchable. They are not and it will be a very rude awakening when someone takes advantage of this vulnerability.
The IRS has a job...counting the beans stolen from the serfs. They can't go into super-kill-guy mode; they'd be shit at it anyway. They'd scream for the FBI to DOOOO SUMTHINNN!
Besides being as they say “fedbait” by counseling violence, this article has a bunch of things wrong with it analytically. Despite their issues, societies in the US and much of Europe are essentially prosperous, successful societies where the population would vehemently reject the kind of terror campaign you are discussing. There would be no “sea” of popular sympathy for this kind of crap, of the type Mao said was necessary for revolution.
Further, other countries like Russia and China would certainly avoid involvement in such a terror campaign, as they are perfectly well aware that the U.S./NATO could do many worse things to them than they have already done. Such a campaign would be an irritation and would not cripple state war making capacity for many years if ever, meaning that it would be beyond foolish for an opposing state to be involved in it. Ukraine does this kind of stuff because it is a desperate state trying to provoke Russia to overreact in order to get the US involved. Russia and China are not desperate and they DEFINITELY do not want to provoke the US to overreact.
I do not counsel violence. Only assess rational actions.
And while specifically Russia and China probably wouldn't escalate in this direction, there are hundreds of non-state and substate enemies who would.
Also you misunderstand Mao. Mao was not a democrat, he did not believe "popular sympathy" meant some kind of deep seated sincere belief in a cause... This comes out of a christian worldview where souls and sincere belief matter.
Mao believed "Sympathy" and "support" were functions of material transfers. Ie. extracting them via force and terror was not only legitimate it was optimal.
"The fastest way to gain support is via terrorism". Explicitly he meant terrorizing the peasant population into supporting him, the same way a mafia might increase their "support" amongst a community by brutally murdering snitches to create terror around ratting, so that the locals will "support" the mob via remaining silent, or complying with their demands.
An interesting possibility to consider is that the character of the bureaucracy might change in response to an assassination campaign that sent the risk averse petty tyrants packing. What would it become if those vacant seats were filled with men with a more robust psychology, the kind that lead from the front in Napoleonic warfare?
They can't "lead" from the front, look at modern police officers who have to follow dozens of protocols and stand silently as a crackhead calls them a bitch to their faces over and over
Who says there has to be " a “sea” of popular sympathy for this kind of crap." You do not understand they dynamics of insurrectionary warfare, clearly. Also, you do not understand covert operations...the Chinese and the Russians would certainly be interested in such attacks on Western boor-o-crats...they would have to handle any support very carefully, but they WOULD support it. COSCO has already been found to be supplying Chinese made military arms to gangs in the USA...
You don't understand the dynamics of insurrectionary warfare if you don't think popular support is of the utmost importance. It is taken as a given by every study of such conflicts. You probably don't get the reference to "sea" either.
Statistically, that isn't very relevant. If it was about dollar amount, every nation previous to 1950 or so would have had a revolution every year. It's not about how much $$$ or prosperity, it's about social status, of which $$$ is only one indicator. It's when people fear losing status that shit gets flung. The OG US revolution wasn't about a tea tax, it was about the fact that the colonists weren't able to vote on it like the real Englishmen they identified as. Instead it was imposed on them as if they were one of the darky colonies. That was and almost always is the real issue, status and cultural identity. If status and/or identity are under attack, people respond far more violently than over mere dollars.
Super-bureaucratized yes, but the bureaucracy in China is not turned against large swathes of its own population, and doesn't thrive on the ethnic nor gender divisions within that population.
Ethnically they are 95% homogeneous (Han). It's a country of the Chinese, for the Chinese. Individuals of other ethnicities can come there, and occasionally even prosper, should they fit in well and be useful. But some foreigner's protestations that they are being *discriminated* against, or are having their *basic human rights* violated ("basic" as in "never existed before the 1960s, not even in the W.E.I.R.D. world, let alone outside of it"), or are "lacking equality of outcome at group level", and so on and so forth -- all that jive will not as much fall on deaf ears, as on grinning mouths. It is a sane country.
We can discuss their treatment of Uyghurs, and separation of fact from fiction from propaganda on that topic, until the cows come home. But here's some plain facts that won't bear much discussion. Should a lawful, decent, non-shit-stirring Uyghur get crushed by the bureaucracy for no reason (other than the whim of some local mandarin), he'll find sympathy among the ordinary Chinese. (who may themselves end up crushed by such whims, on occasion, yea, happens, and - some wouldn't believe this - it also happens in the West). But at the same time, there is NO WAY that a heavily-drugged carreer-criminal Uyghur who got too strongly restrained after persistently resisting arrest, would cause one half of the Han to jump at the other half of the Han -- with direct rampage damage going into the billions of dollars, and second-order costs going FAR beyond that -- at the instigation of that bureaucracy, which would then continue publicly idolizing the career criminal for years to come.
This wouldn't happen. EVER. Not even after the cows got home. It is hard to find words to express how much this would not happen.
Except, well, that, as I might have mentioned, China is a sane country. Its bureaucracy does not thrive on dividing it and on promoting poisonous ideologies.
(at least not since Mao's Cultural Revolution has become a thing of the past, and the Chinese collected more antibodies to it than the W.E.I.R.D. world will be able to collect after another decade of full-blown wokeness. This starts from the very top: Xi Jinping WAS sent to dig ditches in Mao's "reeducation camps" as a high schooler...)
There is nothing in China that the West would really recognize as feminism. China already has its share of genuinely strong and capable women (which should not be confused with those "girlbosses" who flourish in a society that's relentlessly pushing synthetic narratives). What thing in China might by some feat of translation be called "feminism", is simply about advancing non-divisive goals such as protecting women from actual physical violence. Whereas the acolytes of Butler or Dworkin - to not mention the newer cohorts - would last shorter than a snowball in hell. (tapping the sign again: it is a sane country)
In short, is China heavily bureaucratized? Yes, kinda indisputably, it is. But it's completely beyond compare how the two bureaucracies are structured and how they are operating.
> but the bureaucracy in China is not turned against large swathes of its own population
Well, the one child policy was only applied to the Han.
> There is nothing in China that the West would really recognize as feminism.
Yes, there is. The CCP destroyed China's traditional, extremely patriarchal, culture with the result that the country's birth rate is in free fall even after they got rid of their one child policy.
"Victoria Nuland is not just the destroyer of countless nations she is the Avatar of the late American age."
Victoria Nuland, destroyer of nations and boners.
==
A few historical examples that might be of interest:
1. Whiskey Rebellion- Tarred and feathered a few tax collectors, Pres Washington commands the troops he sends out, and fails to suppress the rebellion. Mainly because no one fought against him, they all just went home and claimed they were patriots. And no one ratted out their neighbors, which is one of the more important things we'd have to work on.
2. OK City bombing- I seem to remember some good arguments were made that this permanently changed the behavior of government operations against groups like the Branch Davidians and the Weavers at Ruby Ridge.
3. French and Indian Wars- Both sides armed injuns to be used as terror troops against the other sides' civilians. I bet all those coloreds outside the beltway would love some heavy gear, especially if Craigs list ads appeared offering 10,000 lbs of weed for the original Constitution, or a chunk off the Lincoln Memorial...
Fantastic piece it does miss something not thought about. The average person doesnt even know where such beauracrats are located and the monent you do a search for them. They are flagged for potential problems, Unless some strange symbiotic network appears to handle this between the foriegner and the native to take out the common foe
Not even that is needed. Several years ago there was an issue on LinkedIn where foreign intelligence services were swarming all over US holders of secret security clearances. Because they networked on a public website. Listed agencies, jobs, references, all in the open.
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.
fix this and most of the other problems of excess government will go away
Great f***ing comment. Huzzah.
Galt's Gulch need not be a physical place - but it does require leaving the fiat system.
The productive will never stop getting fleeced otherwise.
Great post. All true but we are coming to the next level of bureaucratization. Police, the deliverers of violence, are themselves becoming Woke and bureaucratized. They would rather engage in low-risk enforcement (hate speach, building code enforcement, etc.) than high-risk enforcement (anyone armed and violent). When they do carry out arrests with perceived elevated risk, they often apply para-military swat teams with overwhelming numerical superiority. The next tool will be drones for law enforcement. Soon the DEI hires will be able to implement searches and arrests from the safety of a video screen, with drones designed to search, incapacitate, or kill. Person risk to the police officer will be removed, and their positions will be filled by "untouchable" DEI bureaucrats.
I do think that un-fucking the bureaucratic state will require the imposition of economic friction. A degree of informational friction as well in all likelihood. The best option, in my opinion, is to encourage local bureaucracies at the county level to make bizarre and disparate laws surrounding the shipping of goods. This will effectively rebuild an owner-class rather than the managerial class as every county will become a semi-independent economic fiefdom.
Localization and sound money are required to get out from beneath the boot of ten million regulators.
Interesting...Russia a few years ago demanded ether gold or rubles (which it converted to gold) for it's oil of which it provides a third of the world supply. It is currently experiencing a low cost high standard of living so it seems to have solved the digital problem. Oh, and china's buying up gold. Seems someone knows something...
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.
The regime is, at this point, hated by the majority of the population. They survive only through effective mass-surveillance and coercion. Surveillance can be handled by localizing your organizational focus. "It's better to be feared than loved, but above all else one must strive never to be hated." The current micro-managerial regime is hated by the population at large and only tacitly tolerated.
The modern state-surveillance apparatus is effective, but limited in terms of manpower. Once a critical threshold is reached it'll be impossible for the regime to clamp down on dissenters and violent actors. The primary issue is that there's a lack of funding and the fact that prominent leadership is immediately located, targeted and eliminated. A foreign actor getting involved (Russia, China, literally any state actor) could easily swell the ranks by providing financial support, tools and training. Doing so is itself a huge diplomatic risk, however. As the world further descends into militancy, however, that risk is likely to start becoming worth it.
The way Ottawa bureaucracy totally freaked at the Freedom Convoy. Very fragile COVID Karen/Ken. Imagine if Wrath of the Wendigo insurgency was a viable option.
In retrospect, there was a profound lack of direct action effecting health and safety of public health officials at the city, county, state and national levels during the COVID insanity.
Still is.
"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." Sounds like any DMV you are forced to enter.
Or Post Office.
I agree with your premise of how destabilizing it would be, but at the moment, it's difficult to imagine any US substate actor deciding it's worth it to begin assassinating low-level bureaucratic flunkies, simply because, while it is conceptually awful and insulting and terrible for American tax money to be stolen and given to corrupt foreign regimes (Ukraine/Israel), it is viscerally the same as it has been for years--we are used to paying taxes and having politicians be corrupt. However, I think the event that will likely lead to the kind of local "terror" you discuss would be an attempt to re-institute a draft for a foreign war, particularly if the local draft boards decided to immediately (or almost immediately) send out press gangs, er, I mean, local sheriffs to arrest/press young men who were drafted. One may not know who the DC bureaucrat in charge of the draft is, but they'll damn sure know who their local enforcers are, and it won't take too many dead sheriffs deputies or local board members before they conclude it's not worth it. And that is a viscerally much different beast than taxes. Bureaucrats won't stand and receive fire for a policy, but fathers will for their sons and daughters.
You put it very well, how vulnerable the mighty boor-o-crats really are. They think they are untouchable. They are not and it will be a very rude awakening when someone takes advantage of this vulnerability.
cannot help but use the old turnip; "Harsh, but Fair"
Wouldn’t they just deputize the IRS making it like any other 3 letter agency? They’d just hand out guns and select for more extreme types.
IRS dwarfs all other 3 letter agencies. Every other letter agency combined + the coast guard, is only 140k people.
The IRS has a job...counting the beans stolen from the serfs. They can't go into super-kill-guy mode; they'd be shit at it anyway. They'd scream for the FBI to DOOOO SUMTHINNN!
Maybe they wouldn’t make good auditors.
'bout a decade ago the u.s. personnel files of omb were totally hacked by les chinoise . crickets.
Besides being as they say “fedbait” by counseling violence, this article has a bunch of things wrong with it analytically. Despite their issues, societies in the US and much of Europe are essentially prosperous, successful societies where the population would vehemently reject the kind of terror campaign you are discussing. There would be no “sea” of popular sympathy for this kind of crap, of the type Mao said was necessary for revolution.
Further, other countries like Russia and China would certainly avoid involvement in such a terror campaign, as they are perfectly well aware that the U.S./NATO could do many worse things to them than they have already done. Such a campaign would be an irritation and would not cripple state war making capacity for many years if ever, meaning that it would be beyond foolish for an opposing state to be involved in it. Ukraine does this kind of stuff because it is a desperate state trying to provoke Russia to overreact in order to get the US involved. Russia and China are not desperate and they DEFINITELY do not want to provoke the US to overreact.
I do not counsel violence. Only assess rational actions.
And while specifically Russia and China probably wouldn't escalate in this direction, there are hundreds of non-state and substate enemies who would.
Also you misunderstand Mao. Mao was not a democrat, he did not believe "popular sympathy" meant some kind of deep seated sincere belief in a cause... This comes out of a christian worldview where souls and sincere belief matter.
Mao believed "Sympathy" and "support" were functions of material transfers. Ie. extracting them via force and terror was not only legitimate it was optimal.
"The fastest way to gain support is via terrorism". Explicitly he meant terrorizing the peasant population into supporting him, the same way a mafia might increase their "support" amongst a community by brutally murdering snitches to create terror around ratting, so that the locals will "support" the mob via remaining silent, or complying with their demands.
An interesting possibility to consider is that the character of the bureaucracy might change in response to an assassination campaign that sent the risk averse petty tyrants packing. What would it become if those vacant seats were filled with men with a more robust psychology, the kind that lead from the front in Napoleonic warfare?
They can't "lead" from the front, look at modern police officers who have to follow dozens of protocols and stand silently as a crackhead calls them a bitch to their faces over and over
Who says there has to be " a “sea” of popular sympathy for this kind of crap." You do not understand they dynamics of insurrectionary warfare, clearly. Also, you do not understand covert operations...the Chinese and the Russians would certainly be interested in such attacks on Western boor-o-crats...they would have to handle any support very carefully, but they WOULD support it. COSCO has already been found to be supplying Chinese made military arms to gangs in the USA...
You don't understand the dynamics of insurrectionary warfare if you don't think popular support is of the utmost importance. It is taken as a given by every study of such conflicts. You probably don't get the reference to "sea" either.
" essentially prosperous, successful societies "
Statistically, that isn't very relevant. If it was about dollar amount, every nation previous to 1950 or so would have had a revolution every year. It's not about how much $$$ or prosperity, it's about social status, of which $$$ is only one indicator. It's when people fear losing status that shit gets flung. The OG US revolution wasn't about a tea tax, it was about the fact that the colonists weren't able to vote on it like the real Englishmen they identified as. Instead it was imposed on them as if they were one of the darky colonies. That was and almost always is the real issue, status and cultural identity. If status and/or identity are under attack, people respond far more violently than over mere dollars.
Also quite frankly China is more bureaucratic than the US.
https://theupheaval.substack.com/p/the-china-convergence
Super-bureaucratized yes, but the bureaucracy in China is not turned against large swathes of its own population, and doesn't thrive on the ethnic nor gender divisions within that population.
Ethnically they are 95% homogeneous (Han). It's a country of the Chinese, for the Chinese. Individuals of other ethnicities can come there, and occasionally even prosper, should they fit in well and be useful. But some foreigner's protestations that they are being *discriminated* against, or are having their *basic human rights* violated ("basic" as in "never existed before the 1960s, not even in the W.E.I.R.D. world, let alone outside of it"), or are "lacking equality of outcome at group level", and so on and so forth -- all that jive will not as much fall on deaf ears, as on grinning mouths. It is a sane country.
We can discuss their treatment of Uyghurs, and separation of fact from fiction from propaganda on that topic, until the cows come home. But here's some plain facts that won't bear much discussion. Should a lawful, decent, non-shit-stirring Uyghur get crushed by the bureaucracy for no reason (other than the whim of some local mandarin), he'll find sympathy among the ordinary Chinese. (who may themselves end up crushed by such whims, on occasion, yea, happens, and - some wouldn't believe this - it also happens in the West). But at the same time, there is NO WAY that a heavily-drugged carreer-criminal Uyghur who got too strongly restrained after persistently resisting arrest, would cause one half of the Han to jump at the other half of the Han -- with direct rampage damage going into the billions of dollars, and second-order costs going FAR beyond that -- at the instigation of that bureaucracy, which would then continue publicly idolizing the career criminal for years to come.
This wouldn't happen. EVER. Not even after the cows got home. It is hard to find words to express how much this would not happen.
Except, well, that, as I might have mentioned, China is a sane country. Its bureaucracy does not thrive on dividing it and on promoting poisonous ideologies.
(at least not since Mao's Cultural Revolution has become a thing of the past, and the Chinese collected more antibodies to it than the W.E.I.R.D. world will be able to collect after another decade of full-blown wokeness. This starts from the very top: Xi Jinping WAS sent to dig ditches in Mao's "reeducation camps" as a high schooler...)
There is nothing in China that the West would really recognize as feminism. China already has its share of genuinely strong and capable women (which should not be confused with those "girlbosses" who flourish in a society that's relentlessly pushing synthetic narratives). What thing in China might by some feat of translation be called "feminism", is simply about advancing non-divisive goals such as protecting women from actual physical violence. Whereas the acolytes of Butler or Dworkin - to not mention the newer cohorts - would last shorter than a snowball in hell. (tapping the sign again: it is a sane country)
In short, is China heavily bureaucratized? Yes, kinda indisputably, it is. But it's completely beyond compare how the two bureaucracies are structured and how they are operating.
> but the bureaucracy in China is not turned against large swathes of its own population
Well, the one child policy was only applied to the Han.
> There is nothing in China that the West would really recognize as feminism.
Yes, there is. The CCP destroyed China's traditional, extremely patriarchal, culture with the result that the country's birth rate is in free fall even after they got rid of their one child policy.
In any case, that wasn't what the OP was about.
"Victoria Nuland is not just the destroyer of countless nations she is the Avatar of the late American age."
Victoria Nuland, destroyer of nations and boners.
==
A few historical examples that might be of interest:
1. Whiskey Rebellion- Tarred and feathered a few tax collectors, Pres Washington commands the troops he sends out, and fails to suppress the rebellion. Mainly because no one fought against him, they all just went home and claimed they were patriots. And no one ratted out their neighbors, which is one of the more important things we'd have to work on.
2. OK City bombing- I seem to remember some good arguments were made that this permanently changed the behavior of government operations against groups like the Branch Davidians and the Weavers at Ruby Ridge.
3. French and Indian Wars- Both sides armed injuns to be used as terror troops against the other sides' civilians. I bet all those coloreds outside the beltway would love some heavy gear, especially if Craigs list ads appeared offering 10,000 lbs of weed for the original Constitution, or a chunk off the Lincoln Memorial...
"Victoria Nuland, destroyer of nations and boners." LOL
> "Victoria Nuland, destroyer of nations and boners."
Ironically, she actually used to be pretty hot.
Stop laughing. STOP LAUGHING!
No, seriously. Gollum wasn't insanely hideous before he got the ring either.
https://www.nato.int/docu/review/files/1853.jpg
This is what "hitting the wall" on a Hayabusa looks like.
“At 50, everyone has the face he deserves.”
--George Orwell
*looks in the mirror*
"GODSDAMNIT!"
My face ain't pretty either, but at least it doesn't cause people to spontaneously want to join Hamas like hers.
Love the Whiskey Rebellion. I fly a few tiny American flags in the garden, but the Whiskey Rebellion flag towers above them all.
There is no such thing as "ripping off the government".
There is only Graft and avoiding extortion.
Parasites and pissed off producers.
Fantastic piece it does miss something not thought about. The average person doesnt even know where such beauracrats are located and the monent you do a search for them. They are flagged for potential problems, Unless some strange symbiotic network appears to handle this between the foriegner and the native to take out the common foe
You realize you can buy used laptops and cellphones for like 50-80 bucks ?
I don't want to give a how to guide... But first thing you do any illegal operation is buy a burner laptop, phone, and printer.
Not even that is needed. Several years ago there was an issue on LinkedIn where foreign intelligence services were swarming all over US holders of secret security clearances. Because they networked on a public website. Listed agencies, jobs, references, all in the open.
Fair enough. Im only slightly stupid
I am a trained US Army intelligence agent; I know insurrectionary warfare pretty well. Mao says otherwise. He was a successful insurgent. Are you?
Should the economy become truly horrendous, unlivable, I see this scenario beginning at state level in US. Good post, appreciate the perspective.