The Harmattan billows above blotting out the sun, dust coalescing with diluted traces of the acrid garbage fires that warm the ditch beyond the potholed road and the wood smoke from the last trees of the plains burned to cook beans and rice and the occasional dried fish from desiccated and barren lakes. A black plastic bag escapes the flames, parasailing the harsh winds over the ten foot wall crowned with concertina wire to lodge itself on a carefully pruned pine tree. I walk the compound pulling my dog on her leash, imported beer in hand brewed in a place cold and clean and shipped in to be sold for more than the value of a day’s labor. Back and forth and back again in a restless, trying parade. She was a gift to my wife, my dog was, a tiny pretentious little thing, a historical memento from days when European nobles bred ornaments, not animals and when we looked into the future, not the past for the ideas of the “west”.
Outside the compound, gazing through the bullet-proof glass they sit, though we don’t know who they are. Young men, squatting in the dust or selling phone cards and mystery meat, eyes squinting through the grimness, that wary look of both predator and prey; watching, waiting, but for what? Who knows… We fear them, and we build our walls. This is Kabul; and Mogadishu. It is Bamako, Dakar and Abidjan. Accra and Abuja and Dhaka; Caracas and Lima and even these days parts of Phoenix and Chicago and Washington DC. Paris outside the ring; Molenbeek or Schaerbeek in Brussels. “I saw similar young men everywhere – hordes of them. They were like loose molecules in a very unstable social fluid, a fluid that was clearly on the verge of igniting…” Robert Kaplan evocatively writes.
Twenty-five years, that’s how long ago Kaplan warned us of ‘The Coming Anarchy’. Not that we listened – hubris, which is something we are good at in the West. And why not? We won, the commies were crawling back into their holes; walls were falling down – a “New World Order” was upon us. It was “The End of History”, said Fukuyama. Except that it wasn’t. “While a minority of the human population will be, as Francis Fukuyama would put it, sufficiently sheltered so as to enter a ‘post-historical’ realm, living in cities and suburbs in which the environment has been mastered and ethnic animosities have been quelled by bourgeois prosperity, an increasingly large number of people will be stuck in history, living in shantytowns where attempts to rise above poverty, cultural dysfunction, and ethnic strife will be doomed by a lack of water to drink, soil to till, and space to survive in.”
Occasionally in West Africa, in Latin America I encounter somebody from the days before the anarchy. “I once went from Marrakesh to Timbuktu on a camel,” somebody told me. “I rode from Johannesburg to Cairo through Gulu and Juba on a matatu,” said another. “I hitchhiked from Lima to Bogota, then all the way to the Darien Gap.” Days when our ideas reigned supreme and we only had to wait till democracy and law met free markets empowered through education in an upward spiral to universal prosperity. But we don’t take warnings well – like the ones given to us by Kaplan while I was still in High School; before the anarchy came.
I have taken to watching apocalyptic, dystopian movies these days on Netflix. Some about alien invasions; others about the end of the world. “The 100” and “I Am Legend” – most recently it was “Elysium”; where the elites moved off-world, building a pristine station orbiting the overcrowded and degraded world; poor and violent and diseased. But “Elysium” is not science fiction, I know because I have lived there – though they are not orbiting the world. In Caracas, in Goma, in Kampala, in Islamabad they sit; hidden behind walls and concertina wire, broadband internet and bars and sparkling swimming pools while outside little girls walk for hours to fill their yellow jerry cans from the drying river or simply siphon off the cleaner looking water from the puddles that collect after a rainstorm.
Fragility and conflict. Those were the words for the post-cold war period, which is now over. Not democracy, not human rights or ‘world order’ – as we had hoped. It was in fact a world disorder we inherited, we who came after and which we have bequeathed to our own children. “During the 1960s, as is now clear, America began a slow but unmistakable process of transformation. The signs hardly need belaboring: racial polarity, educational dysfunction, social fragmentation of many and various kinds.”
But what comes now?
“Europe, at least in the way that we have known it, has begun to vanish. And with it, the West itself…” Again Robert Kaplan writes – bookending the post-cold war period he started, with another opus, ‘The Return of Marco Polo’s World’. “For a long time Europe was lucky in this regard: It could reject power politics and preach human rights precisely because tens of millions of Muslims nearby were being denied human rights, and with them the freedom of movement. But those Muslim prison-states have all but collapsed (either on their own or by outside interference), unleashing a tide of refugees into debt-ridden and economically stagnant European societies. Europe now fractures from within as reactionary populism becomes a relevant dynamic, and new borders go up throughout the continent to prevent the movement of Muslim refugees from one country to another. Meanwhile, Europe dissolves from without, as it is reunited with the destiny of Afro-Eurasia as a whole.”
We had twenty five years to avert the arriving ordeal. A quarter century; not very long, to be sure – but perhaps two generations. Yet we dallied. Europe and increasingly America (who tends to follow Europe despite Jefferson’s best advice) became ‘social democracies’, a soothing term meant to provide succor to people exhausted by two world wars – a welfare state sucking the oxygen out of the workers and their revolutions to stop the advance of ‘Underground Europe’. In the end she became bloated and bored; ever-mounting piles of debt justified by enthroned prophets telling the elites just what they wanted to hear. America too – and Japan.
The future belongs now not to the inhabitants of Elysium; but to the predators who roam the ungoverned spaces beyond. To join criminal networks, jihadi groups – to ride the perilous waters. To cross the barren deserts. Demographics – the fact that West Africa’s populations are doubling every fifteen years. Climate change? A word for parlor houses in Davos, not for the fishermen on Lake Chad where they think less of ‘carbon taxes’ and more about how far their daughters must walk over thug-infested hills to cut another tree for firewood to cook the fish they can no longer find in the barrenness of a once-great lake that has become empty.
What will the future generations do with the world we are giving them? Will they hijack the shuttle and storm Elysium – ravaging her out of rage and impotence (like they have done in Venezuela)? Will they once and for all reject the ideas that defined our years, our parents’ years? “Of course, the West as a civilizational concept has been in crisis for quite some time. The very obvious fact that courses in Western civilization are increasingly rare and controversial on most college campuses in the United States indicates the effect of multiculturalism in a world of intensified cosmopolitan interactions.” And as the West fades into history, like Rome or Greece did into the Dark Ages – preserved in that most perfect image of a priest reciting a dead language to the vacant stares of peasants starving and sick – I ask myself ‘What will the arriving ordeal look like for the world of my son, and grandson?” This will be the great discussion of the 21st Century.
Joel D. Hirst's Blog 
Joel, I have though about this topic so often. Difficult to watch an entire world come apart at the seams. You have articulated it better than anyone I’ve ever known. We have created hell. And payment is fast becoming due.
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Thank you TJ, thats generous. Did you read through Kaplan’s whole articles (both of them)? They are long, but well worth the read. I’m gonna try again, wasn’t completely satisfied with this post – his two articles seem to be book-ends to the “post-communist” period, first one is “watch out cuz the madness is coming” and the second, 25 years later is “too late, its here”. Though what “it” is, nobody yet really knows.
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Oh, we know. The barbarians are inside the gates. And, like the tired and worn-out Western Roman Empire, we’re too afraid to throw our last legions against them because admitting that the enemy is on us is more frightening than quietly accepting defeat.
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Many American who have not been outside the country do not realize how prevalent poverty is. I’ve seen this same picture of shanty towns next to tall business buildings in several countries of Asia, Africa and North America. Abject poverty looking you right in the face. You want to give them something, but the best thing would be a job.
My wife is Filipina, has an engineering degree and just as hard core conservative as me. One thing about the US that shocked her was that we would water our lawns with drinking water.
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Thank you. We certainly have built a bit of an “island” – but such things are temporary, especially if they are maintained at the expense of the poor.
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If you want to see “3rd world” poverty in the United States, visit an Indian Reservation. It’s the closest thing I’ve seen to poverty in Asia. There are a lot of people telling us what’s coming, including you, Joel. Unfortunately, we seem incapable of listening, much less doing anything about it. I don’t mean to sound so pessimistic. Wish I had an answer.
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Yes, I’m from Arizona and so have seen many. Also, incidentally its the closest we have in the USA to pure socialism which is part of the problem (though of course not all of it). I’m reading “The Great Escape” by Angus Deaton about how humanity went from short to long lives and from poverty to prosperity (review forthcoming). My question for Deaton is “long compared to what, Noah lived for 800 years. And is our famed ‘prosperity’ built upon 200,000,000,000,000 in debt really prosperity or it is a big scam – a ponsy scheme – instead of “The Great Escape” should it be “The Great Charade”, of how humanity fooled itself for 50 years? I don’t know.
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Thank you.
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You are welcome – thanks for visiting!
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Mr. Hirst: Good article. I will take you to task on the movie: Elysium. It was a blatant anti-white, love-the-poor-wetbacks movie. Anything connected with the Jodie Foster-Matt Damon, Hillary-worshiping, Hollywood useful-idiot axis should be immediately suspect. Their millions are being used to reduce Deplorables like me to penury and serfdom, if not outright extermination due to my racial heritage.
I was born and raised in SoCal. I saw the Marxist onslaught start in the LA Unified School District in the 1950’s. These Hollywood leftists aided and abetted busing, block-busting, and other leftist social engineering schemes. I really saw it during my 30-year tenure as a Peace Officer and Community College teacher. Josef Goebbels and Leini Riefenstahl(sp?) have nothing on these satanic propagandists.
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I sort of tackle some of the “elite” issues with this one, if you’re interested https://joelhirst.wordpress.com/2018/06/20/while-belshazzar-drinks/
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The coming poverty in the USA is of our own making.
We have spent several trillion dollars (all borrowed from China BTW) on wars in Irag and Afganistan and elsewhere which have brought us nothing… zip, zero benefits. We have spent ourselves into complete oblivion and continue to do so with zero gain.
I look at Japan (which I recently visit once a year) and they too have spent themselves into oblivion but their major cites are beginning to resemble cities out of Star Trek. Though broke like the USA, these people have managed to gain something for their money.
We spent hundreds of billions on a space shuttle (obsolete from it launch FYI) over nearly three decades and all it did was to be a play-toy for scientists in space performing the same experiments over and over again and to act as a rah-rah, sis-boom-bah, hurray Murica symbol for the mindless flag-wavers here. We wast hundreds of billions of dollars on a bloated, inefficient military which has managed to loose track of 1 trillion dollars in the last 2 decades… preparing for wars which will never happen and fighting wars only to protect the global :”dollar tyranny/ponzi system” which we impose on ourselves and the world.
The Japanese on the other hand built a nation wide high-speed railway system that is privately run and turns massive profits–and all the other rail systems, bus lines, subways are also privately run and turn huge profits for its owners… unlike all the systems here in the USA which are run by government and none of which run profitably–all sucking in massive subsidies.
Our major cities are filthy, crime ridden, graffiti scrawled, run corruptly by leftists shite-holes over-run with illegals and other turd-worlders who refuse to assimilate.. I can literally drop my wallet on the street in Japan and someone will pick it up and come running after me with it… or I will find it at the local police box with all of its content intact. Not so in America.
America is on the verge of becoming a turd-world country. On the very edge.
If you want to see poverty and despair veer off any interstate highway into any small town in this country on a weekend and take a look at the hollowed out, empty buildings that once housed businesses. Also stop at the numerous yard sales along the roads where people are selling their belongings to make an extra buck for food and so forth.
This country has lost its way completely.
President Trump is only a stop-gap before what is probably an inevitable implosion. He is attempting to stop the economic strip-mining that has victimized this country by the financial movers and shakers/global-corporations… but I don’t hold out much hope for success.
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Thanks for your comments. We certainly do need some tender loving care, don’t we. Here’s something I recently wrote sort of touching on some of this stuff (not just about US, but sort of as a species we’re not really making very good decisions). https://joelhirst.wordpress.com/2018/06/20/while-belshazzar-drinks/
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Saw a link from Matt Bracken, nice blog. Having spent the 1990s as a carpetbagger capitalist in Eastern Europe and the FSU, I saw many Balkan Ghosts and the places Kaplan covered. While he tends to romanticize the greatness/goodness of many of the low places and shattered peoples he does get most of the analysis correct. Tyranny, abuse of power, horror, and hatred are the standard of care for most of the world’s governments. Tyrants and their petty minions abuse their countrymen simply because they can, it shows they themselves are powerful and allows them to gather more resources for themselves. E.g. the tribal council leaders on most reservations live much better than the regular folks like all socialist societies. One question you might explore is how western elites are willfully encouraging the third world to overrun their own countries in order to rule over the entire globe….if all countries are third world shitholes, the elite can have their Elysium. There is a push-pull effect at work here.
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Thanks Thomas. I sent this a while back to a friend of mine in the US who said “you need to spend more time in the suburbs”. Bingo, I guess 🙂 – On your final point, check this one out https://joelhirst.wordpress.com/2018/06/20/while-belshazzar-drinks/
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Reblogged this on Joel D. Hirst's Blog and commented:
Our arriving ordeal is now upon us: “It was in fact a world disorder we inherited, we who came after and which we have bequeathed to our own children. “During the 1960s, as is now clear, America began a slow but unmistakable process of transformation. The signs hardly need belaboring: racial polarity, educational dysfunction, social fragmentation of many and various kinds.”
But what comes now?
“Europe, at least in the way that we have known it, has begun to vanish. And with it, the West itself…” Again Robert Kaplan writes – bookending the post-cold war period…”
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So many ills that will become exponentially worse. I worry about the water most. And the way we are so dismissive of nature as if she were here to do our bidding. But I’ve never lived in a war zone or walked for miles with a jerry can on my head so probably have no real idea of what I’m talking about. The problems of the day are not much in comparison, yet I can’t help thinking that if we end the extreme partisan divide we just may be able to get a finger it two in the dike. To say I’m terrified for my children is an understatement. If the people in power now had to live through some of the dystopian possibilities you write about, do you think they’d take it more seriously, maybe give a shit about more than just money? Short of that, I’ve no idea how to stop such an impending and precipitous fall.
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Totally agree. Its funny, I get told sometimes I’m being overly pessimistic. I even tried for a while to shrug off this sensation that we’re living on borrowed time. I chocked it up to too much time in war zones. But the reality is that the norm is the people with Jerry cans – the exception to the rule are those in suburban Virginia. And we live at the expense of them. While economics are not zero sum, natural resources are. But even that is catching up to us. I see it in our politics but also basic stuff like our power grid collapsing off and on and school grades decreasing and life expectancy shrinking. And if that is happening here, in the empire, what is in store for Nigeria? (I liked in Nigeria for 4 years, for example) or Uganda (I lived there for 3) or Congo (I lived there for 2).
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I think it would be hard not to be pessimistic if you lived for so long in developing countries and perhaps even then saw the disparity between what you could afford and what 90% of the rest could, although if you live in Syria, for example, a county that has had the crap bombed out if their infrastructure, it’s hard to imagine anyone is making their existence there work.
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BTW my most recent novel is about this, about where I see this going. You might enjoy: https://www.barnesandnoble.com/w/the-unraveling-joel-hirst/1137474758?ean=9781663548498
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I’ll check it out, thanks. 🙏
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I wrote it while living in Armenia during a pandemic
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Just read the overview. Looks intriguing!
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Thanks.
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