Has "The Coming Anarchy" arrived On Schedule?

There have been hundreds of doomsday prophecies throughout the centuries, including some that have come partially true, even if the so called prophets didn't predict all the details as many skeptics think they should to be considered paranormal or supernatural. However many of them weren't intended to be paranormal or supernatural in the first place; they were often intended to be rational and scientific, even if they weren't completely rational or scientific!

At least some of these are coming true, although like the ones that are considered magical, they also have their flaws. In at least a few cases the people making these predictions are also making the decisions that create disasters, and instead of trying to avoid them seem to be trying to do it intentionally, although they don't phrase it quite that way. One of the most extreme examples is Samuel Huntington's "Clash of Civilizations," by Samuel Huntington which I covered years ago, explaining that Samuel Huntington ignores the most fundamental principles of Democracy and ignores the fact that many of our past wars have been fought based on lies then goes on to recommend a course of action that's clearly designed to bring about the disasters he's predicting, although, like many other prophecies, he doesn't get specific details right.

Robert Kaplan, author of "The Coming Anarchy" 2000 (A book consisting mostly of articles originally published in the Atlantic or other magazines in the 1990s) was almost as bad, and so are numerous other academics including Zbigniew Brzezinski, who also wrote a similar book predicting a disaster & recommending a course of action that would bring it about, although he wasn't quite as specific as Kaplan or Huntington; or Milton Friedman, who to the best of my knowledge didn't predict disasters, but according to the "The Shock Doctrine" by Naomi Klein he prepared a plan that would enable fanatical "Free Market Capitalists" to use shock tactics in the aftermath of disasters to suppress democratic processes and force an authoritarian economic system that would privatize functions carried out by the government in the hands of for profit oligarchies, that are not "free market" at all, and force suppression of human rights, environmental rights and many other rights supported by the majority of the public for the benefit of wealthy corporations.

At time Robert Kaplan seems to understand the basic principles of Democracy much better than Samuel Huntington; however, he still recommends the same military and espionage efforts to address the problem and doesn't get some of his far-fetched predictions right when they get to specific like the following one about The United States gaining territory from Canada:

This and many other factors will make the United States less of a nation than it is today, even as it gains territory following the peaceful dissolution of Canada. Quebec, based on the bedrock of Roman Catholicism and Francophone ethnicity, could yet turn out to be North America's most cohesive and crime-free nation-state. (It may be a smaller Quebec, though, since aboriginal peoples may lop off northern parts of the province.)

This prediction must have seemed kind of silly when he first made it in his 1994 article and now twenty six years later it's still hard to imagine why he would make a baseless prediction like this that hasn't come true nor does it seem likely to in the future. However, may of his general predictions of coming problems are close to the truth as long as he doesn't get too specific.

He does a far better job citing some of the most important causes of past present and future conflicts than Samuel Huntington does, although he doesn't follow up with them by recommending some of the most obvious solutions like the following excerpt about how education is a major contributing factor:

..... Another woman complained about the schools. Though her children had educational options unavailable in the village, they had to compete with wealthier, secular Turks. "The kids from rich families with connections—they get all the places." More opportunities, more tensions, in other words.

.....

.... Only when people attain a certain economic, educational, and cultural standard is this trait tranquilized. In light of the fact that 95 percent of the earth's population growth will be in the poorest areas of the globe, the question is not whether there will be war (there will be a lot of it) but what kind of war. And who will fight whom?

......

In other words, a nation-state is a place where everyone has been educated along similar lines, where people take their cue from national leaders, and where everyone (every male, at least) has gone through the crucible of military service, making patriotism a simpler issue.

As I explained in the previous article about "The Clash of Civilizations" the fundamental of democracy start with an educated public that understand the issues and has access to accurate news to base their decisions. Kaplan acknowledges that "people take their cue from national leaders" and that males go "through the crucible of military service, making patriotism a simpler issue," but doesn't go into detail about how this also applies to many people in the United States, although military service isn't nearly as high as it used to be. However, the media is still controlled by a fraction of one percent of the wealthiest people in the country and they routinely lie about leading us into war, including omitting reporting about Vietnam's declaration of Independence so support for that war wouldn't be hampered by the knowledge that they wanted to choose their own leaders and we were trying to stop them or the fact that the CIA conducted a coup in Iran in 1953 then supported Saddam Hussein in the Iran Iraq war enabling him to build up the military, or many other wars based on lies both before his article first appeared and after.

Nor does he recommend improving education of challenging the lies of our government, in most cases, although he does make some exception including objecting to the bombing of Cambodia by Nixon and Kissinger. He makes a similar mistake when it comes to the environment in the following excerpt acknowledging the threat it could bring but comes up short when it comes to recommending solutions:

Mention The Environment or "diminishing natural resources" in foreign-policy circles and you meet a brick wall of skepticism or boredom. To conservatives especially, the very terms seem flaky. Public-policy foundations have contributed to the lack of interest, by funding narrowly focused environmental studies replete with technical jargon which foreign-affairs experts just let pile up on their desks.

It is time to understand The Environment for what it is: the national-security issue of the early twenty-first century. The political and strategic impact of surging populations, spreading disease, deforestation and soil erosion, water depletion, air pollution, and, possibly, rising sea levels in critical, overcrowded regions like the Nile Delta and Bangladesh—developments that will prompt mass migrations and, in turn, incite group conflicts—will be the core foreign-policy challenge from which most others will ultimately emanate, arousing the public and uniting assorted interests left over from the Cold War. In the twenty-first century water will be in dangerously short supply in such diverse locales as Saudi Arabia, Central Asia, and the southwestern United States. A war could erupt between Egypt and Ethiopia over Nile River water. Even in Europe tensions have arisen between Hungary and Slovakia over the damming of the Danube, a classic case of how environmental disputes fuse with ethnic and historical ones. The political scientist and erstwhile Clinton adviser Michael Mandelbaum has said, "We have a foreign policy today in the shape of a doughnut—lots of peripheral interests but nothing at the center." The environment, I will argue, is part of a terrifying array of problems that will define a new threat to our security, filling the hole in Mandelbaum's doughnut and allowing a post- Cold War foreign policy to emerge inexorably by need rather than by design.

The obvious follow up should be that we should stop using so much oil, increase conservation, renewable energy and stop obsessively buying things that we don't need; which is what many good environmental activists including Naomi Klein argue that we should do, but Kaplan doesn't go much further than this and his book actually encourages additional military activities which are making things worse. The good researchers get little or no media attention and often can only be found on alternative media outlets; even though Kaplan may seem more liberal than most of the mainstream media pundits, for brief periods of time, he comes up short; then he often pushes blatantly authoritarian pro-war propaganda.



In his second essay in this book he even argues against spreading democracy, as if that's actually what the United States has been trying to do. He also hints at the motive, which is defending our supply of oil instead of trying to develop cleaner energy:

Of course, our post-Cold War mission to spread democracy is partly a pose. In Egypt and Saudi Arabia, America's most important allies in the energy-rich Muslim world, our worst nightmare would be free and fair elections, as it would be elsewhere in the Middle East.

Most of the media establishment, including Robert Kaplan, routinely try to portray Islamic terrorist as religious fanatics that don't have any other motive; however, even though religious fanaticism is a contributing factor our interference in their affairs propping up tyrants to do the will of our corporations is also a major factor. Osama bin Laden was previously supported by the United States when he was part of the mujaheddin fighting the Soviets in Afghanistan, which is routine, Saddam was also our ally before he became our enemy, yet establishment pundits including Kaplan are quick to forget this. Osama bin Laden made it clear that the reason he was against the west was because of their interference in the Middle East and wanted the troops out of Saudi Arabia, which if you accept the mainstream narrative that he carried out the 9/11 attacks was clearly his motive; however the mainstream narrative conveniently ignores this fact.

Kaplan also remains silent about epidemic levels of arms sales around the world even though many of the weapons we sell are routinely turned against us when our former allies turn into enemies or lose control of where the weapons go!

He also ignores the best research about the leading causes of violence both at home and abroad often acting as if people are born evil, without recognizing early childhood education and how it leads to escalating violence when kids are abused or development of critical thinking skills when they're raised well, and abling large reductions in violence where this is recognized. This includes genocide which in WSJ: Robert Kaplan Idealism Won't Stop Mass Murder 11/14/1997 he doesn't seem to recognize the long term cause as indicated in the following excerpts and even seems to accept some genocide for ideological reasons:

In this case, progress in global education: if only Americans spread our values and international community holds spectacular tribunals of war criminals, then genocide might become a thing of the past. Such an approach is both noble and naive.

......

..... In the 1980s, we supported the Khmer Rouge as a wedge against the Soviet Union after they had murdered over a million people, and policy that while despicable was not irrational given the Cold War.

.......

Alas, protection against evil is surest when man is assumed to be wholly unimprovable. That is a dilemma that liberal internationalism, which subscribes to Progress, has never satisfactorily dealt with. The policy that best incorporates such a bleak view of humanity is "balance of power" or more precisely, balance of fear and intimidation. ......

For Israel, after all, is the only nation in history whose state system directly incorporates the lessons of mass murder. And what are those lessons? The need for an advantageous balance of power in the region, and a powerful military, but also for lethal security services that both provide early warning and instill fear of the kind civil societies do not tolerate. In fact, the very intelligence services that we often denigrate and, in some cases, want to dismantle would be precisely what we need to warn us in advance of the threat of genocide.

Remember that for Israeli policymakers, war crimes trials are a weapon held in check for rare occasions only. When they're used, it is as an accessory to the daily actions of the country's military-security machine. And when Israelis say Never Again, they mean never again to Jews: Other people will have to take care of themselves.

But many Americans think that it may be possible to afford some protection to all those other people. If so, I fear that we may have to be very ruthless indeed.

Amazingly he acknowledges that Israel is only interested in protecting themselves from another genocide, not any other people; and he doesn't seem to raise any objection to the oppression of the Palestinian people in a state of apartheid where they're constantly stealing their land, in what could approach another genocide if it escalates even more, and many people already consider it genocide already.

Zionist often refer to all criticism of Israel as Antisemitism; however, many of the strongest critics are other Jews; and even though they had legitimate grievances for thousand of years culminating with the Holocaust, that doesn't give them the right to respond by using the same tactics against the Palestinians, who weren't responsible for Nazi Germany or for evicting the Jewish people almost two thousands years ago from Israel. Apparently Robert Kaplan is Jewish and once fought with the Israeli army and supports their cause, including the occupation of the West Bank, and presumably forcibly stealing land, yet he seems to consider this democratic.

Robert Kaplan, like many, or perhaps most establishment pundits seems to think that man is "wholly unimprovable" and doesn't seem to understand how vicious people become so vicious. For some reason the media is extremely reluctant to report on some of the best research on this subject and on some of the few times where it is mentioned in the mainstream media it's often demonized or misrepresented. It's far easier to find good research in libraries than the mainstream media; alternative media often does a better job; but they focus far more on wars based on lies or corporate corruption, which is a contributing factor to violence, than they do on child abuse and how it leads to escalating violence, which may be even more important.

The vast majority of the media establishment acts as if adults are born either good or evil, without acknowledging how early childhood education and upbringing has on how they behave as adults. Occasionally the media, especially on talk shows like Jane Velez Mitchell or Nancy Grace, will bring it up as if it's an excuse for horrible crimes, not an explanation that could help learn how to prevent it. They typically respond to it by shouting "that's no excuse" or saying that"yea but lots of us were abused and we didn't turn out to be murderers," and end the discussion on the subject with that. But in most cases they don't even mention it at all as a contributing factor, at least not on TV.

However a review of some of the biggest mass murderers shows that many of them have been abused much worse than the vast majority of us; and even if many other people have also been abused as well, without turning onto mass murderers, they often have other emotional problems as a result of the abuse. Denial is one of those problems so many people are reluctant to acknowledge the damage it does. early child abuse leads to escalating violence throughout life including increased amount of bullying, hazing, domestic violence as an adult, and even murder. It impairs the development of critical thinking skills and teaches children to blindly believe what they're told and obey their leaders.

I've gone into this in many previous articles including Does child abuse and bullying lead to more violence?; a series of articles that reviewed this as well as other contributing causes of violence and ended with Politicians increase crime; Grass roots efforts reduce crime; Politicians steal the credit which explains that lcoal communities that do a better job learning about the leading causes of violence and addressing the social needs of their own people have less violence and more recently Must We Hate? Must We Beat Children? which points out some effective programs that help reduce violence including the home visitor program. There are nineteen states that still allow corporal punishment in schools and presumably use it more at home as well; and these states provide some strong, straight forward evidence of how much damage it does; for the past ten or eleven years the states still allowing it have had from 22% to just over 32% higher murder rates; the biggest difference was in 2018 which was the last year calculated.

This should be a clear indication that stopping child abuse and banning corporal punishment is a very effective way of reducing all violence; but there's much more evidence where that came from, although the media ignores it.

Some of the good researchers that I've found on this include "For Your Own Good" by Alice Miller (Free complete online copy) and Philip J. Greven: Spare the Child who both provide enormous amount of evidence indicating that early child abuse, including the use of corporal punishment does an enormous amount of harm. Another good researcher and author of Kids Are Worth It! and The Bully, the Bullied, and the Bystander 2008 does much more to advise on early child rearing tactics that are much more effective and helps address many social problems in the long term, although the media and even most of the academic world is reluctant to acknowledge how much damage abuse does and how many problems can be solved by preventing it.

Barbara Coloroso also draws a direct connection from bullying to genocide as part of the escalation of violence desensitizing children to abuse and even making mass murder more likely as indicated in the following excerpt from another of her books:

Barbara Coloroso "Extraordinary Evil—a short walk to genocide" 2007

Rather than give a talk only about school yard bullying, I used the opportunity to demonstrate that the concept of genocide in general, and the Rwandan genocide in particular, are macrocosms of the drama known as bullying—a theme alluded to but not fully addressed or developed in my book on childhood bullying. I suggested in that lecture that genocide is not an unimaginable horror—that, on the contrary, every genocide throughout human history has been thoroughly imagined, meticulously planned, and brutally executed.

That said, I must agree with Claude Lanzmann, the maker of the film Shoah, who is adamant about the “obscenity of the very project of understanding [genocide].” I don’t think it is possible to fully understand such evil, nor would I want to. That should not prevent us from studying it. Genocide is not outside the realm of ordinary human behavior. At the same time it is not normal, natural, or necessary. It is the most extreme form of bullying—a far too common behavior that is learned in childhood and rooted in contempt for another human being who has been deemed to be, by the bully and his or her accomplices, worthless, inferior, and undeserving of respect. The progression from taunting to hacking a child to death is not a great leap but actually a short walk. To begin to examine genocide is to first examine those steps.

The day before I gave that lecture, an administrator at a prestigious girls’ school in Kigali shared with me an incident that occurred at the end of the 2005 school year—eleven years after the genocide. A fifteen-year-old girl had found under her pillow a not from a classmate to the effect that the job of “cutting the trees was not yet completed” and that her long neck would soon have a necklace of machete cuts. Step one.

The pain of the “moral world turned on its head” does not begin with the machete cuts of Hutu Power, the gas chambers of the Nazis, the death marches of the Young Turks. The tragedy of genocide has many rehearsals that weaken moral inhibitions against violence, publicity that spreads bigotry and intolerance, a backdrop that establishes the climate, ominous sounds that signal the beginning and the end, scripts that heighten the tension and fuel the contempt, six scenes that seal the victims’ fate, a slew of character actors, and an international audience that either fails to hinder or actually helps to energize the performance of acts of extraordinary evil by ordinary people. Additional excerpts

For more from Barbara Coloroso see her nineteen minute talk at From school yard bullying to genocide: Barbara Coloroso at TEDxCalgary 02/20/2014

Bullying isn't the only contributing factor to genocide, of course, but it is one of the most important ones especially when combined with other forms of abuse that escalate to mass murder including early child abuse by adults that teach bullying behavior to kids in the first place, which is actually a form of bullying and they typically learned it from their own parents going back generations. I haven't read all of "Extraordinary Evil" but she also addresses other major contributing factors in her previous books, including early child abuse, and teaching development of critical thinking skills which helps address many social problems including constantly fighting one war after another based on lies, some which even include genocide, although she doesn't focus on that.

Alice Miller also made a similar argument in her book "For Your Own Good" (online copy) where she claimed that early child abuse of children was a major contributing factor to the Holocaust, including genocide, although neither Alice Miller or Barbara Coloroso filled in all the details in their books, nor would I expect them to, since most researchers focus on specific fields and they have to be crosschecked against each other; however there's much more additional supporting evidence in the academic world and in libraries. Unfortunately the best academics aren't featured often if at all on mainstream media nor is their work used to base political decisions. Instead supporters of the dominant political faction, which happens to be wealthy multimillionaires and billionaires that are controlling the media and interview process enabling them to give overwhelming preferential treatment to candidates for public office they support.



Most good academics that study this subject make very similar arguments, and I assume they would agree with most of what she writes; however there are at least a couple of critical reviews of her book, although I'm skeptical of them especially this one, Calling the Holocaust "Bullying" Is Offensive 05/18/2016, which appears to be an appeal to emotion and doesn't seem to address the content of Barbara Coloroso's book. After making what appears to me to be an emotional argument he says "In fact, it’s more accurate to say, 'The anti-bully movement is a short walk to genocide.'” without seeming to make a credible case for this conclusion; it sounds more like a childish version of someone throwing back an accusation at someone reversing it without addressing the issue. at this point I noticed that he doesn't even mention the name of her book, which was odd since that is how I found the article by Googling it, instead citing this article, 'Nazis were the biggest bullies in history' (retrieved from Wayback Machine) which although I don't disagree with the conclusion it doesn't provide as much content as Barbara Coloroso to back it up.

I also found the following reply which was apparently submitted by Barbara Coloroso:

Submitted by Barbara Coloroso on June 13, 2018 - 5:21pm

Dear Izzy, you appear not to have not read my work, Extraordinary Evil (or did not understand it) and I know you have a distaste for my book The Bully, The bullied, and The Not-So-Innocent Bystander. I have never said genocide is a form of bullying. I have stated that is a short walk from the hateful rhetorical of verbal bullying to hate crimes to crimes against humanity--the gravest being genocide. I have studied genocide for thirty years and have worked in Rwanda in the aftermath of the genocide there.

Once someone begins to treat another (or a group of "others") with contempt, that person can do anything to them without shame or compassion because those they treat with contempt become to the perpetrator an "it," "vermin", "cockroaches," "animals" or in the case of the Rohingya--"fleas." We only have to look around our country today to see this dehumanization process happening. The "Trap of Comradeship" that Sebastion Haffner wrote about in "Defying Hitler" explains how others get caught in the trap and begin to work in consort with the perpetrators.

When asked by Senator Markley if they were concerned about the impact that family separation would have on children at a detention center where young children are being separated from their parent at our border, people working there answered: "We simply follow orders from above." (From Michelle Goldberg, First They Came For The Migrants, NYT June 12, 2018) In no way do I make a comparison of bullying to genocide as if they were equal--they are not, but I will not deny the short walk, as we have seen these steps in history and are seeing them in motion today.

Apparently he provided a long reply where he acknowledges that he didn't read her book saying the following:

Thanks so much for taking the time to comment. Though I disagree with you on fundamental matters regarding bullying, because you are presenting the view of the anti-bullying field that I criticize as fundamentally flawed, I have great respect for your abilities and accomplishments, and am honored to have you correspond with me.

No, I haven’t read your book on genocide, as I can’t possibly read all books. I've only articles about that book. I have read your book on bullying and on parenting. They are both extremely well written, and the content of the latter I consider to be very good. Have you read any of my books? If not, I will be happy to send you complimentary copies.

....... As I documented thoroughly in the article, Hitler killed my relatives not because he felt like bullying them but because he believed that they were the bullies and needed to be eradicated. He was the ultimate an anti-bully activist. .......

Almost all of us are capable of engaging in genocide under the "right" circumstances. All it takes is for our leaders to convince us that we are victims.

To read his full reply see go to the top of the article click on the blurb next to E-mail notification listing at least 20 and scroll about four or five down. Apparently not only didn't Izzy read her book but he doesn't seem familiar with a lot of the other background on the subject. Otherwise he might have understood that abused children are much more likely to become paranoid and assume others are out to get them whether they are or not. this is one of the characteristics that both Alice Miller and Philip Greven point out in their books. They often can't blame their abusers, who are often their own parents or caretakers so they blame others often irrationally.

I have no doubt that we're not all capable of engaging in genocide under the right circumstances, as Izzy claims, and Alice Miller has pointed out that some people did stand up to the Germans, although they were often killed, concluding that these are the people that were raised in a much more compassionate manner without abuse. Furthermore, claiming that the anti-bullying movement, including academics like Barbara Coloroso, who are trying to prevent child abuse and bullying before they escalate, a potential contributing cause for future genocide is mind boggling, to put it mildly, especially from someone that is supposedly a "Nationally Certified School Psychologist."

Another Review of Extraordinary Evil: by Elizabeth Yeoman is partly critical of her although it's much more reasonable, agreeing with some of it, saying: Calling genocide "the most extreme form of bullying", she describes the latter as "a far too common system of behaviors that is learned in childhood and rooted in contempt for another human being who has been deemed by the bully and his or her accomplices to be worthless, inferior, and undeserving of respect" (Coloroso, undated). ..... "The more one does good, the easier it becomes to do more good [and] the more one acts cruelly, the easier it is to be cruel again" (p.141),

Elizabeth Yeoman doesn't seem to be optimistic about preventing genocide as an "attainable goal;" however, I have little doubt that it is an attainable goal as long as all the contributing causes are addressed including early child abuse bullying and improved democratic process with a media that covers the best research so that we can elect politicians that will look out for our best interests instead of maintaining a permanent state of war which our politicians and Robert Kaplan seem to want as long as they're not the target of that war. Not that actually carrying out all the related tasks to educate the public about reducing violence is easy or quick.

Yeoman points out that Barbara Coloroso's book was removed from the curriculum by the Toronto Board of Education after a complaint from the Turkish community "on the grounds that Coloroso was not a historian" as if that's the only criteria that is applicable. However, she has much more background on applicable fields than most historians, with the possible exception of Philip Greven, who is a historian and focuses on early child rearing tactics by Protestants and is one of Coloroso's sources for some of her work. This includes Samantha Power, author of "A Problem from Hell: America and the Age of Genocide" 2002 who also appears to have some historical background and is recognized as a specialists in genocide; however, even though she's familiar with the history of genocide as indicated in her book, she doesn't appear to benefit from Alice Miller or Barbara Coloroso's background at recognizing the root causes of violence, including genocide.

Like Robert Kaplan, Samantha Power only seems to address military solutions to stop genocide without recognizing long term factors that might make this unnecessary; in all fairness, in many cases, when those concerns are not addressed in time then the only possible solution may be military, or to allow it to happen. One example is the Rwandan genocide, which Samantha Power and numerous other academics claim that it could have been prevented if there were only a few thousand troops to serve as a deterrent.

There's some indication that all the people were willing to blindly obey orders in most if not all of these genocides, including the Holocaust and the Balkans; Samantha Power points out that when Tito was in power and maintained an authoritarian regime they weren't killing each other, but their hated appears to have been suppressed; and again when they were in the custody of the U.N., according to Samantha Power they were able to live together without fighting each other. There was more problem with Serbs fighting each other to pressure their own people to remain silent about the atrocities so they wouldn't provide evidence.

When they were under the control of an authoritarian power they were apparently taught to obey orders, and that's what they did. Some of the same abusive child rearing tactics teach escalating violence also teach blind obedience as I pointed out in Philip Zimbardo, Lucifer Effect, Stanford Prison Experiment and Stanley Milgram's Obedience to Authority experiment. This is another major contributing cause of mass murder and teaching the masses to trust incredibly corrupt politicians. The same states that I previously pointed out that allow corporal punishment in schools and have higher murder rates, on average, also have higher problems with corruption and many other social issues because they blindly believe their leaders.

The Balkan genocide, which Samantha Power also writes about would have been much tougher since they were much better armed; Samantha Power seems to think that the air war for that was satisfactory way of solving the problem, although it did an enormous amount of damage, often referred to as "collateral;" however, I get the impression that most military experts believe that they could have saved many more lives without killing innocent people with air bombing if they had used troops on the ground, but some of those would inevitably have been killed. I don't know how many would have died perhaps one military troop for every dozen to a hundred lives that might have been saved, but this wasn't considered politically worthy to Bill Clinton or the rest of the political establishment.

However, this is based on the assumption that we don't address the long term causes of violence before it becomes necessary to use military force. Neither Samantha Power or Robert Kaplan seem to acknowledge this; and Robert Kaplan goes even further arguing for increased use of espionage which he refers to as "intelligence" and even defending a permanent state of war warning against "The Dangers of Peace."

In Robert Kaplan "Special Intelligence" February 1998 Kaplan argues:

....... But media criticism of the CIA is so constant and blistering that it suggests a hatred of the intelligence profession itself -- or at least a feeling that spy agencies are obsolete in a post-Cold War information age. That is ironic, because the intelligence industry is sure to become even more necessary for our well-being, and therefore more powerful within government.

........

For an army that will have to act secretly, unconventionally, and in advance of crises rather than during them, intelligence is critical. Indeed, the growth of Special Forces might be a crude indication of the collapse of any distinction between our military and intelligence services. Yes, the CIA itself might be done away with. What the CIA does, however, will not only grow in importance but also have the support of armed troops within the same bureaucratic framework.

......

Ever since the ancient soothsayers of the Delphic oracle there have been intelligence agencies of one sort or another. Spying is as old as war itself. Moses sent spies into Canaan. an important factor that led to Pearl Harbor was lack of enough good intelligence: The CIA, in its current form, may eventually pass out of existence, but in a world in which borders are dissolving and bad guys conceal bombs in their pockets or steal millions by means of computers, the intelligence business is set for a golden age.

However, he ignores the long term causes of violence that could address this all along, and he also ignores the incredibly long history of espionage agencies leading us into war, including the Vietnam War, coups in Iran, Guatemala, Chile and many other countries, as well as arming of both sides of Iran/Iraq war; these were even major contributing factors to the 9/11 attacks which was at least partially in retaliation for our own foreign policy practices. After the 9/11 attacks apparently Kaplan was an adviser to the Bush administration, and strongly supported the attack against Iraq which he later admitted turned out to be a disaster and it was partly a result of fake espionage information, which they refer to as "intelligence," that was exposed by Scott Ritter and Mohamed ElBaradei before the Iraq War. If they wanted to know that this war was based on lies ahead of time they would have and could have prevented it.

In the conclusion of his book he adds a new essay which I assume was not previously published titled "The Dangers of Peace" 2000 where he seems to claim that war is necessary for human progress and that it's "noble" assuming your not the one being killed or tortured, and that you accept the "just war" hypothesis, without acknowledging the research that can solve many social problems without resorting to war:

Until World War I, war was a respectable endeavor, even a noble one, for war as well as peace meant progress. What would humanity have become without rebellions! World War I delegitimized war. Its horror was too vast to be justified by any result, especially one so meager. .......

Peace enlarges the scope and intensity of such phenomenon, because with nothing of truly life-and-death importance at stake, the media requires less accountability. And because the media increasingly lack both irony and a sense of the past, they concentrate on public scandal, unaware that a system with little or no corruption would likely be tyrannical: Hitler's Germany, Mengistu ... Corruption, infidelity, and stupidity in moderate doses are, like occasional wars, evidence of humanity.

.......

.... Therefore, a reduced standing army will likely result in an increase in gang activity and other forms of violent behavior. for example, militias were far less popular during the age of conscription because when everybody had to serve, khaki ........

Of course, we can lower our crime rates (as we have) by making potential victims less vulnerable -- through more prisons, electronic surveillance, and gated communities. One can see the pattern, though: true peace, of the kind many imagine, is obtainable only through a form of tyranny, however subtle and mild.

.......

And because morality is unachievable without amoral force, the re-authorization of assassination by the U.S. Congress might do much more to contain evil than enlarging the Security Council to include nations such as India and Brazil .......

The U.S. should pay its dues and, in essence, without declaring it, take over the U.N. in order to make it a transparent multiplier of American and Western power. That, of course, may not lead to peace, since others might resent it and fight as a result; but such ......... against Saddam Hussein, the U.N. has always been most credible when it was an accomplice of U.S. foreign-policy goals.

It's hard to imagine where to begin with this; for starters, there were plenty of atrocities long before World War I; if he wants to check history he can find out about them and there are also plenty more disasters as a result of each war, often setting stage for future wars or plagues and riots that often follow wars like the McCarthy era following World War II, and the mostly forgotten American Protection League and other riots that followed World War I and more riots following the Civil war as well as many other similar incidents throughout history.

There's also the simple fact pointed out by Eugene Debs a hundred years again "The master class has always declared the wars; the subject class has always fought the battles. The master class has had all to gain and nothing to lose, while the subject class has had nothing to gain and all to lose—especially their lives." This was true when he said it; and it's still true today.

His claim that a reduced standing army will result in increased gang activity is seriously flawed, since, for starters, many gangs have encouraged some of their younger members without a record to join the military so they could come back and teach them their tactics and as I pointed out in Teach a soldier to kill and he just might there have been many veterans that have gone on mass murdering sprees. Furthermore, the parts of the country with the least amount of violence aren't the parts of the country with lowest recruitment rates; they're the parts of the country that do the best job addressing social problems that leas up to escalating violence at the local level.

His plan to lower crime with "more prisons, electronic surveillance, and gated communities" has already been taken to a bizarre extreme; and if you check the crime rates you'll find that there are places around the country with much higher rates of murder surrounded by wealthier communities with much lower rates of violence. He's not arguing for reduced crime for everyone equally, instead he's arguing in favor of increased apartheid tactics that enable a small group of people to make the political decisions that ignore the best research on any given subject and to push policies that enrich themselves at everyone else's expense.

His call to reauthorize assassinations is equally reprehensible as we recently saw with Donald Trump ordering the assassination of Iranian General Soleimani who was previously an ally against ISIS, although the media didn't remind us of that unless you checked alternative sources that retrieved old media stories about it. His recommending that we should pay our U.N. dues solely so that we can take it over and ensure that it does our bidding is equally undemocratic and reprehensible.

The bottom line is that the academic world has plenty of good research to show how to prevent these wars base don lies and solve many other social problems; yet the entire political establishment isn't willing to listen to the most credible academics. Instead they only listen to academics that support their ideology which seems to be surrounded by the quest for "Power For The Sake Of Power" as George Orwell wrote in 1984; but they have enough research available to themselves so that they should know that this will inevitably even destroy themselves, especially with climate change leading to escalating conflicts and as Robert Kaplan and many of their own academics acknowledge it will lead to the destruction of their own power; yet instead of listening to the academics that have much more effective solutions they dig in their heals knowing it will b\ring about their own destruction.

there's little or no doubt that most wars base don lies are knowingly and intentionally started and that even the ones that weren't were also a result of past incompetence like arming dangerous tyrants that inevitably turnout to be future enemies, including Manuel Noriega, and Saddam Hussein, who April Glaspie was telling that they had no position on his border dispute with Kuwait just a few weeks before he invaded and also recommending that he hire public relations people to help improve his image. Then just a few months later they were trying to rewrite history forgetting about their former support and demonize him!

There's no doubt that something insane is going on but just how insane? Are they willing to self destruct just to hold onto power for a little longer? or do they have something much more bizarre in mind?

Robert Kaplan has expressed outrage at Donald Trump like many other mainstream media pundits; however, his own policies aren't much if any less fanatical than Trump's and by ignoring research that can address many social problems and refusing to educate the public about this; the political and media establishment have enabled him to be come president one way or another just as they've set the stage for one war after another that could have been avoided.

We go into a panic when he brings us to the verge of war repeatedly and then nothing happens like when he threatened North Korea with "Fire and Fury" like they've never seen before; then did nothing before eventually arranging a clownish summit to declare peace to some degree, then again when they threatened Iran repeatedly, and nothing happened as I went into in "Wars and rumors of Wars" Are Here Today for One Reason Or Another which even speculates about the possibility that this could be part of some bizarre long term ancient aliens conspiracy, which sounds insane; and the version presented by the History Channel certainly is insane. However, even though I try to be a rational skeptic and advise others to do so as well, they should keep an open mind, especially when evidence does come up to show that something big and unexplained is happening.

One of the strongest pieces of evidence that there has been something major going on for thousands of years is the ancient megaliths weighing well over fifty tons, some over seven-hundred tons, moved over four-hundred miles, allegedly with ancient technology, despite fact that experiments using that same technology failed miserably to move anything above ten tons without cheating, those between ten and forty tone cheated to get the megaliths on a sledge then moved them very short distances, at best, breaking many ropes, and having many other problems, with an enormous number of people, and they didn't even try any experiments over forty tons.

On top of that there are many other major unsolved mysteries, most of which aren't nearly as clear cut, so reasonable discretion is advised; however they are worth a close look at and in many cases the close I've looked the clearer it is that we don't have a full explanation. Perhaps the most important example is claims by Philip Corso best selling author of "The Day After Roswell" which claims that he shared technology retrieved from alien craft with corporations for decades after the Roswell crash and numerous other incidents where they allegedly retrieved additional technology. I'm not recommending people believe this without checking facts, however there is enough evidence to show that either there's some truth to it or there's a massive effort to make it seem true, even when it's not.

If there's something to this theory then one potential motive for aliens might be research into Climate change & geoengineering and into many other things including medical issues, as I pointed out in Hurricane Apocalypse Coming With or Without Fringe Conspiracy Theory and Spectacular Heart Transplant for Sophia But at What Cost. Theories about Geoengineering are becoming increasingly more credible with additional mainstream academics claiming it's possible, one example is U.S. geoengineering research gets a lift with $4 million from Congress 01/23/2020; and there have been many more stories like this, some from credible sources like this one which should be taken seriously, and many more from questionable sources which should be looked at skeptically.

This includes attempts that go as far back as the sixties when Lyndon Johnson made a speech to Congress about the subject, as I pointed out in the previous article about this. you would think that at that time they wouldn't have been close to considering such a possibility, and most reports seem to indicate that their attempts were incredibly incompetent and not much better than rain dances; however, if they had made contact with aliens they would have access to some of their educational background. Furthermore, as I've explained previously, if this theory turns out to be viable they're almost certainly intentionally putting out an enormous amount of disinformation to confuse the issue, and encourage people to stereotype the subject, instead of looking at it scientifically, which would explain why both high profile supporters of this theory and skeptics make an enormous volume of mistakes so obvious that they should have caught them.

If on the other hand, there's nothing to this theory, as no doubt many people will believe then there has to be another explanation for the major unsolved mysteries, and they shouldn't have to spin, distort or censor to distract from them. More important, the vast majority of important research that is being done in the academic world to reduce violence or prevent environmental disaster, sin't being done by advocates, either for or against this theory, that I know of, and I suspect most of them would be skeptical. So these solutions will work whether or not the Ancient Aliens theory is true or not.

You don't have to take my word for this at all, if you haven't been reading good non-fiction books about these subjects yet start doing so and compare them to the educational material that is presented on mainstream media. One people start seeing what they're missing they're much more likely to recognize how incredibly incompetent the media is; and there are many more people that have come to the same conclusion, some that came to this conclusion decades if not over a hundred years ago like Mark Twain who said, "If you don't read the newspapers you're uninformed. If you do read them you're misinformed."



For additional sources or some more select excerpts from Robert Kaplan's book see the following:

Wikipedia: Robert D. Kaplan

Why John J. Mearsheimer Is Right (About Some Things) Jan./Feb. 2012 Kaplan admits that he was wrong about Iraq in this article but he doesn't retract the vast majority of his war mongering recommendations and beliefs.

Robert Kaplan "The Coming Anarchy" February 1994

Robert Kaplan Was Democracy Just a Moment? December 1997 My point, hard as it may be for Americans to accept, is that Russia may be failing in part because it is a democracy and China may be succeeding in part because it is not. .......

The very fact that we retreat to moral arguments—and often moral arguments only—to justify democracy indicates that for many parts of the world the historical and social arguments supporting democracy are just not there. Realism has come not from us but from, for example, Uganda's President Yoweri Museveni, an enlightened Hobbesian despot whose country has posted impressive annual economic growth rates—10 percent recently—despite tribal struggles in the country's north. ........ A coup in Azerbaijan was necessary to restore peace and, by developing Azerbaijan's enormous oil resources, foster economic growth. Without the coup Western oil companies would not have gained their current foothold, which has allowed the United States to increase pressure on neighboring Iran at the same time that we attempt to normalize relations with Iran "on our terms."

.....

Foreign correspondents in sub-Saharan Africa who equate democracy with progress miss this point, ignoring both history and centuries of political philosophy. They seem to think that the choice is between dictators and democrats. But for many places the only choice is between bad dictators and slightly better ones. To force elections on such places may give us some instant gratification. But after a few months or years a bunch of soldiers with grenades will get bored and greedy, and will easily topple their fledgling democracy. As likely as not, the democratic government will be composed of corrupt, bickering, ineffectual politicians whose weak rule never had an institutional base to start with: modern bureaucracies generally require high literacy rates over several generations. .......

......

According to Hobbes, ...... Enlightened despotism is thus preferable to democracy: the masses require protection from themselves.

......

I believe that Pakistan must find its way back to a hybrid regime like the one that worked so well in 1993; the other options are democratic anarchy and military tyranny. ......

Peru offers another version of subtle authoritarianism. In 1990 Peruvian voters elected Alberto Fujimori to dismantle parts of their democracy. He did, and as a consequence he restored a measure of civil society to Peru. Fujimori disbanded Congress and took power increasingly into his own hands, using it to weaken the Shining Path guerrilla movement, reduce inflation from 7,500 percent to 10 percent, and bring investment and jobs back to Peru.

......

The world's most efficient peacemaking force belongs not to the UN or even to the great powers but to a South African corporate mercenary force called Executive Outcomes, which restored relative stability to Sierra Leone in late 1995. (This is reminiscent of the British East India Company, which raised armies transparently for economic interests.) Not long after Executive Outcomes left Sierra Leone, where only 20.7 percent of adults can read, that country's so-called model democracy crumbled into military anarchy, as Sudan's model democracy had done in the late 1980s. ......

Of the world's hundred largest economies, fifty-one are not countries but corporations. While the 200 largest corporations employ less than three fourths of one percent of the world's work force, they account for 28 percent of world economic activity. The 500 largest corporations account for 70 percent of world trade. Corporations are like the feudal domains that evolved into nation-states; they are nothing less than the vanguard of a new Darwinian organization of politics.

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We are entering a troubling transition, and the irony is that while we preach our version of democracy abroad, it slips away from us at home.

Google Books: Robert Kaplan Idealism Won't Stop Mass Murder

WSJ: Robert Kaplan Idealism Won't Stop Mass Murder 11/14/1997

Robert Kaplan Special Intelligence February 1998

Robert Kaplan And Now for the News: The disturbing freshness of Gibbon's Decline and Fall. March 1997

Robert Kaplan Proportionalism: What should the United States do in the Third World, where there's too much to do and too much that can't be done? August 1996 Or A Realist Approach to Foreign Policy as titled in his book.

Robert Kaplan Kissinger, Metternich, and Realism June 1999 TIME changes reputations. The current favorable reconsideration of Henry Kissinger may have less to do with the recent publication of his final volume of memoirs than with the lackluster quality of his successors at the State Department.

Robert Kaplan Conrad's Nostromo and the Third World 03/01/1998

Robert Kaplan "The Dangers of Peace" 2000

"The golden age of intelligence is before us" 09/21/2001 Robert Kaplan says fighting terrorism will require new rules for spying, but he predicts that fighting an "almost comic book evil" will lead to a revival.

.......

You have written about Islamic fundamentalism as a challenge to regimes in Egypt, in Pakistan. To people who say the U.S. got attacked because of its policies, particularly toward the Middle East, what do you say?

First of all, that's not why we got attacked. But that doesn't mean we're not going to have to make certain concessions in order to appease Arab moderates in order to help us in our struggle. We'll get help from a regime, and they'll ask us to put pressure on Israel over settlements, for instance.

The real cause of the attacks is that the terrorists have an existential hatred of the modern technological world, even though they use its toys. And that hatred exists because they see our world as the real challenge to Islam in a way that communism never was. Because communism was a failure, it was never seen as a challenge to them.

.......

You have traveled around the U.S. trying to understand where the country is headed. How do you think the attacks will change us as a country? What strengths and vulnerabilities have you observed?

Because we have had the dumb luck of geographical circumstance, until now we have been able to indulge ourselves in freedoms that other countries have not. We don't have to carry identity cards with us, like most Europeans. But we also tend to confuse convenience with liberty. And because of these freedoms, we tend to be that much more exposed. Historically, we have tended to denigrate the very parts of the bureaucracy like the intelligence services that have historically prevented these kinds of attacks.

The CIA functions badly because it's not been respected for decades. And when something's not respected, the best people are not attracted to join. What I see coming out of this is a kind of reform and resurgence of the CIA, like we saw in the U.S. military in the decade culminating in the Gulf War.

But there were umpteen television shows glorifying the CIA already set to air on the TV networks in the fall, before these attacks.

It's like pissing in an ocean. First of all, the Vietnam syndrome is over. The '60s are over. Assassinations will come back. Because there are no military targets. Yugoslavia's Slobodan Milosevic had water and electricity grids to bomb. I mean, once we kept Belgrade out of running water and power for a week, Milosevic surrendered. We are dealing with an enemy now where there is nothing to bomb. You have to kill people.

As I said in the Atlantic, the next war is going to be all about intelligence. The great golden age of intelligence is before us, and the greatest spies are just being born now. Future wars are going to be based on the size and quality of the intelligence services. Because in a world of complex, variegated cultures, understanding intent is more important than satellite photos. We need people who can melt into societies.

.......

What's your prediction for the coming days? Are you optimistic?

I'm very optimistic. If you look historically at America, America was coming apart into partisanship and hatred in the '30s -- Huey Long, Father Coughlin, all that. And then Hitler and Tojo came along, and it saved us. After World War II, the U.S. has experienced 50 years of dynamism. Out of World War II came the GI Bill, civil rights, the erosion of anti-Semitism -- all of this came out of World War II.

Without it, America would have rolled into decadence. But we have been a very lucky country. Every few decades, we are faced with almost comic-book evil. You are going to see: A lot will change.

I was not surprised by the tremendous civil spirit in New York for two reasons. The little reason is because New York has happened to have a very good mayor for the last eight years, not just for the last eight days. Rudolph Giuliani has spent the previous eight years restoring a sense of civil spirit in New York.

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Kaplan is right about some of the advances after World War II; however, he's wrong about his belief that it couldn't have happened without the war. The reason why it didn't happen until then was because a small fraction of the public controlled the entire economic, media and political system and was using this to rig it for their own benefit. when these improvements did happen it was as much if not more as a result of grassroots activism and some of the better aspects of socialism, which our government demonizes could have accomplished this without war by having government subsidize research and social programs instead of war. this would require getting the details right, of course; many version of socialism have been as disastrous as capitalists claim they are, including corporate socialism, which is what we have now despite their propaganda, where the risk is routinely adopted by tax payers while profits are given to the wealthy with political connections.

"Clash of Civilizations," Samuel Huntington

Second part of review on the "Clash of Civilizations"

Conclusion of review on the "Clash of Civilizations"

Alberto Fujimori

Review of Extraordinary Evil: by Elizabeth Yeoman "The more one does good, the easier it becomes to do more good [and] the more one acts cruelly, the easier it is to be cruel again" (p.141),

Calling the Holocaust "Bullying" Is Offensive 05/18/2016 In fact, it’s more accurate to say, “The anti-bully movement is a short walk to genocide.”

Wikipedia: Robert D. Kaplan

Why John J. Mearsheimer Is Right (About Some Things) Jan./Feb. 2012

Small Genocides By Justin Podur 08/14/2014

Coloroso changes the subject: Extraordinary Evil: A Short Walk to Genocide