Is the US on the path of Balkanization?
Many people, the opinions of whom I greatly respect, have written on the state of politics and society in the US in such a way as to suggest the possibility of the US moving into a period of similar to what was seen in the former Republic of Yugoslavia from the mid 1980’s through to the late 1990’s, referred to by many as Balkanization. I’m certainly in agreement with these bloggers and writers, Matt Bracken being just one example.
The political, sociological, religious, ethnic and racial trajectory in the US is eerily similar to that of the former Yugoslavia in many ways. In the coming years, this will only worsen as we import millions and millions more migrants from third world sectors, nearly all of whom share absolutely nothing in common with the average American, if there is such a thing as an average American anymore.
The similarities between the US Yugoslavia begin where Yugoslavia’s downfall began: With the economy. It’s always the economy. Yugoslavia was totally socialist in their economic model. For you on the left, yes, it was indeed “real” socialism, complete with the never-ending litany of financial band-aid’s designed mainly to keep the rigged carnival game going for as long as possible for whomever was sitting at the top getting rich. The US economy may not appear to be socialist in the same way, for whatever reason many Americans maintain the idea of some bastardization of capitalism corrupted by, well, socialists.
Both Yugoslavia and the US endlessly investigated and studied how best to fix their respective economic woes, and some decent ideas, even some great ideas, were formulated… And then were largely ignored. This was either due to a lack of will to implement those ideas or a lack of ability. Probably, it was mostly down to a political unwillingness, since in both country’s cases, the ideas that would have worked best included laundry lists of major money cuts and reductions of federal power. The politicians in power are simply never going to go for a plan like that. They’d rather drive the train straight off the cliff themselves before letting someone else drive it to safety.
The idea so far is that the economic system in the US is simply not sustainable. The perpetual stop-gaps of borrowing more money from the US public, China, Japan, etc. and periodically raising the debt ceiling to allow it is not going to work forever, and it doesn’t require one to have any advanced understanding of economics to grasp this. You don’t need to be an expert economist to realize that $22 trillion in debt and hundreds of trillions more in unfunded liabilities is virtually insurmountable at this point. The fact that the US dollar is the currency of the world is not going to shield us from the inevitable forever. I am surprised that the dollar still holds that position. The economic problems that Yugoslavia faced in the early 1980’s, and that the US now faces, are like a lit match being held over a barrel of gasoline.
And that leads me to discuss that gasoline.
Yugoslavia had an extremely diverse country racially, ethnically and religiously. The geographic location and the early economic prosperity (or the illusion of it) attracted a lot of people from all sorts of backgrounds. After a while, the government began to show heavy favor toward certain ethnicities at the expense of others. Rigorous controls were put on employment and educational systems, favoring one ethnic group over the other with claims that there was history of abuse that needed to be atoned for. Criminal behavior by members of certain ethnic or racial groups were largely ignored by the media and law enforcement apparatus, while even the most benign actions of other groups were seized upon and used for narrative building against those groups.
Does any of this sound familiar? In the US we have a long list of “protected” groups who are heavily favored with advantages in employment, educational and entitlement systems. Race alone is often used by the media and government, often one and the same, to build a narrative of victimization.
In Yugoslavia circa 1980’s, and in the US today, you’d see a very socially diverse people from numerous ethnic, racial, economic and religious backgrounds. When these diverse groups mingle and mix, everyone has to accept that different cultures will have friction arise when the “negative” aspects of a particular culture become unacceptable to another. In times such as those, it’s necessary for the opposing cultures to have the freedom and ability to separate for a peaceful outcome. Problems arise, always, when incompatible cultures are forced to mix in society with no avenue for voluntary, peaceful separation, and these problems are heavily exacerbated when government, academia and media get involved to force one culture to accept and integrate what they feel are the incompatible aspects of the opposing culture. An obvious and perhaps overly-simplistic example is when white, Christian American citizens are forced to accept and live alongside immigrants who wish to practice Sharia law and are forced to alter their own lives and habits in order to accommodate some of these sensitivities. A very basic example, yes, but I think it makes the point.
We are meant to swallow the lie that says “diversity is our strength” without question, and without any consideration for merit, performance, ability, intelligence or actual results.
This is not meant to be an indictment on any specific culture or ethnicity, but more of a history lesson, a social observation and a dire prediction.
The history lesson is the continued failure of all socialist based economic models, whether we want to consider them “real” socialism or not. The sort of hard socialism seen in 1980’s Yugoslavia and the crony-capitalist soft socialist version seen in the US today are both examples of that failure system. As I stated earlier, it does not take any level of economic expertise to understand that our current system is insolvent and that we have passed the point of no return on a future crash of our financial system. Now that less than half of the people in the US are net-taxpayers and over half of the people in the US are receiving some sort of government assistance simply to survive, we have become a full-blown welfare state, with only decreasing numbers of producers and increasing numbers of consumers. Mathematically, it is not sustainable. Historically, it is disastrous.
The social observation is that such a mass of diverse peoples must have a voluntary pressure outlet in order to maintain peace. We must accept reality that not all cultures are able to be forced together with peaceful results. Forced proximity, with advantages, disadvantages and blame doled out only to certain peoples, with a lack of opportunity to separate peacefully will always result in strife and eventual violence.
The dire prediction is one that is easy to see coming: An eventual economic failure is the lit match, while the total lack of national cultural identity is the gasoline. The media, academic and governmental apparatchiks stand by to stoke the fires.
We are Yugoslavia, circa 1980’s.
My advice? Stay out of Sarajevo.
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This seems to be a topic hit on a lot more in the last few years.
I suppose a amicable divorce is out of the question?
My best two thoughts are “Live for today while prepping for tomorrow” and”The smalls add up”.
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[…] Is the US on the path of Balkanization? […]
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I was there before the main force went in. There are similarities however the main difference is this: We are comfortable.
Change requires discomfort
As long as folks can sit in their recliner, drink beer, watch the game after they get off their knees, in the climate control of their own place after driving to the store in their own nice vehicle to buy the beer with money that isn’t fluctuating in massive degrees then nothing is going to change or really happen.
Every day the internet commandos type away with death throes of “gonna” I’m gonna do this and that and if they ever do this n that I’ll…
but in reality we all gotta get up and go do what’s really needed. The reason is because we still have it to do. If there wasn’t a job to do, a school to take the kids to, gas to run that vehicle, money that was worth something or food to buy once you got there then there would be change such as the Balkans, Venezuela etc.
Discomfort is relative, but it is coming. My prediction is that within ten years only one party of our two-party system is going to be capable of winning major elections. The demographic shift we all thought was decades away is likely single digit years away now. That demographic shift will allow those in power to inflict the discomfort you’re talking about.
Amen. Consider how the Left speaks of us now, as being sub-human, deserving of the violence they inflict, calling for the death of those who oppose them, even if simply by disagreeing with them, and of being the number of people who must die in order to deal with “climate change”, “peak oil”, “Malthusian famine”.
If they can visualize us in that fashion now, when they are not in a position to fully address their hatred of us in a physical fashion (other than knocking the occasional elderly person to the ground, playing the “Knockout Game”, or having one of us “Swatted” to death), imagine what it will be like if they ever re-gain full control of government, both Houses and the White House (they will ignore a centric or conservative SCOTUS, just as Obama did). Recall what happened in Russia/the Soviet Union, when the bolsheviks ran wild, and in Mao’s China during the time of the “Cultural Revolution” when the Red Guard decided life or death for the common Chinese people.
Excellent point re: comfort. There needs to be a lot of discomfort before those people are motivated to act. That goes for a lot of things as well. We aren’t very good at being proactive.
Yugoslavia was not a “extremely diverse country racially” they are for the most part white. The nonwhites were mostly gypsies. I lived there in the 1980’s and everybody got along fine until the international (((bankers))) decided to dismantle the country stirring up old hatreds.
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