Below is an excerpt from my forthcoming book…
© Mahabodhi Burton
7 minute read
This excerpt is taken from the Introduction and follows on from my history.
The New World Order
Having outlined something of my history, I am going to turn now more to the present, and to the increasing chaos, suffering and insecurity that seems to be enveloping much of the world.
Kondratieff Waves
The title of this book—‘The Western Gulag’—inexplicably popped into my head just after 9/11: I had read The Kondratieff Waves[1] sometime in the 1980s and was fascinated by the idea of economic cycles in human history; Nikolai Kondratieff was the Russian economist who had advanced the idea that industrial economies go through ‘long waves’ of growth and decline: the length of cycle is up for debate, but by studying the wholesale prices, interest rates, wages, and production he identified a pattern of 40-60 year-long waves, going back as far as 1790. The West had been in an economic up-cycle since the Second World War and, if Kondratieff was correct, was due for a downturn; I must have spent around twenty years waiting for this downturn to happen.
David Murrin and the American Empire
David Murrin is a global forecaster who wrote a fascinating book Breaking the Code of History[2] in 2010, which expanded on a thesis he had produced in 2002 that all empires go through five phases.
1) Regionalisation
2) Ascension to Empire
3) Maturity
4) Overextension
5) Decline and Legacy.[3]
Read blog post.
He saw 9/11 as a watershed moment and the beginning of the decline phase of the American empire and has made successful predictions[4] about the progress of that decline phase since. I do remember at the time of 9/11 seeing an article that talked about the end of the American Empire.[5]
Read article.
Obviously, the fall of the twin towers was a shock, however, it is instructive to compare the tone of an American news discussion on the day before the attack[6] with a similar one today; the 2001 newscast is conversational and human, whereas today’s newscasts have an air of tightness, desperation–and at times, incoherence–as if news media is no longer clear what its purpose is.
According to Murrin the Maturity phase of the American Empire lasted from 1945 to its peak around 1972,[7] at which there begins the Overextension phase.
‘There is a pause where the empire becomes highly integrative and tolerant, because at the core people have huge amounts of wealth. They are stable, they have probably separated themselves from the environment and food and all the issues that in previous empires created uncertainty. Their religious paradigms start to change, and they are very tolerant. Empires are not dwarfed by another system at their peak, they start ripping themselves apart from the inside. And then they start to move into over-extension, where in effect financially[8] and morally[9] they start to lose traction, but the momentum of the system means that most people are blind to that beginning of decline. And then there is a 9/11 moment, which was for America exactly that. A moment where you never come back; you change your behaviour, and you slide down the process and you decline. … the Bush-Cheney-Rumsfeld Administration was a complete destruction of the American moral imperative; Guantanamo Bay, rendition, all the things about values, was the beginning of the corrosion of the end of the moral right to be an empire and basically project power.’[10]
Formerly disenfranchized citizens such as black Americans gained increasing status, and similarly, during this phase, feminists gained greater parity for women:
‘The social integration that began during the (preceding) maturity stage with the demand for full rights by disenfranchized citizens now progresses rapidly during the overextension stage. The composition of society by the end of this penultimate phase of the empire cycle will have dramatically altered. Formally low-status classes can now gain entry to the empire’s power core. … In the US, black Americans experienced a transition from slavery in the regionalisation phase stage to underclass in maturity. Black soldiers have served in US wars since the American revolution, but, following the Vietnam War—in which they fought in greater numbers and in greater capacity than ever before—they pressed for validation as the civil rights movement intensified, and entered the middle and power classes.’[11]
This is what we have seen: minority groups of all kinds gaining greater parity; with overt discrimination becoming untenable:
‘This increasing degree of social integration is perhaps most effectively symbolized by the 2008 election of the first black US president. … As the former underclass rises, a new wave of people from poorer nations fills the roles they have left behind … mainly Mexican immigrants seeking new lives in the apparently (and certainly relatively) prosperous US, prepared to work on any terms.’[12]
America in decline
However, the financial cost of maintaining American as ‘the global policeman’ eventually led to its empire’s collapse:
For an empire in the final throes of extension, the cost of power vastly outweighs its economic benefit. Imperial sustainability becomes increasingly unfeasible, and the system rapidly begins to disintegrate. Although the signs would have been present during the overextension stage, other great powers would, for the most part, not have begun to recognize the waning empire’s vulnerability until the final stage of decline and legacy, when external and internal dynamics deteriorate at an alarming rate. … The rate of decline surprises the world as a formerly iconic empire collapses.[13]
Denial
A phase characterized by collective denial:
‘The stage of decline and legacy can be described as the evolution of multi-polarity. The uni-polar world dilutes as the hegemon grows feebler, and challenging nations grow stronger and begin to exert a newfound influence. Characteristic of this stage is the empire’s collective denial that it is declining, expressed by the body politic and by the people themselves, who ask, ‘How can that which we have brought up to be so splendid, so powerful, which appeared so invincible, simply be erased?’[14]
Even the widely hailed election of Barack Obama is, according to Murrin, symptomatic of the phase of decline and legacy:
‘The illusion of the status quo, clung to during the overextension stage, now shatters. Often the catalyst is a key event, like the attacks on the US of 11 September 2001. The response by the leadership is to attempt to more deeply embody the perceived ‘original’ values of the empire. When their actions fail, the path is open to new leadership, reflecting the new social order—and often the descendants of the former underclass, now risen, come to power. This process can appear as though hope has been renewed; yet, it is, in effect, the beginning of the end of the empire. The election of Barack Obama, widely hailed by Americans and others around the globe as heralding a new age, may nevertheless be seen as conforming precisely to this model.’ [15]
As if a bell has been struck by that momentous symbolic event, since 9/11 the American presidency has been oscillating between hawkish and dovelike poles; the Bush-Cheney administration gave way in 2008 to Obama, who gave way to Trump in 2016, who gave way to Biden in 2020. Financial institutions being seen as ‘too big to fail’ led to the financial crash of 2008, and in the financial stimulation of the economy that followed (euphemistically called ‘quantitative easing’) that denial of decline continued. President Obama continued to put off the financial reality,[16] as he turned his attention towards internal policies, such as Obamacare. And Biden has carried on where Obama left off with ever more socialist policies aimed at wealth distribution, and an increasing meddling of the state with personal freedoms.
Murrin predicted that the USA would default on its debt after the crash of 2008, it being a declining empire that would soon cede its world leader status to China.[17] He thinks that there will be a commodity price spike around 2025 which may trigger a war between the US and China.
Watch video.
Over the next five years he thinks commodity price inflation is going to be exponential. He believes wars are usually about resources, and he links previous commodity price peaks with them; for instance, there was a commodity price peak in 1914—which correlated with the start of the First World War; the next one was in 1975—which correlated with a Cold War paradigm where a consumer society in the West went head-to-head with a commodity producing society: Russia, which Murrin thinks the West lost psychologically in 1975. There you had a producer matched off against a consumer, and the commodity price spike wasn’t as big as 1914 on a relative basis.
But with the next peak in 2025 you will have two consumer societies head-to-head with Russia on the side deciding which way it goes.[18]
Watch video.
The chapter goes on to explore Polarization.
[1] Nathan H. Mager. (1986) The Kondratieff Waves. Praeger.
[2] David Murrin. (2010) Breaking the Code of History. Apollo Analysis Limited.
[3] ‘5 Phase Life Cycle.’ David Murrin; Global Forecaster.
https://www.davidmurrin.co.uk/article/5-phase-life-cycle See also ‘The Five Stages of Empire.’ Breaking the Code of History. Chapter 3; and ‘The 5 Stages of Empire with David Murrin.’ David Murrin. YouTube. 30 June 2021.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=I0Xcqv_snW0
[4] ‘Past and Present Predictions.’ David Murrin: Global Forecaster.
https://www.davidmurrin.co.uk/past-and-present-predictions
[5] Such as this, from 2014: ‘How 9/11 hastened the decline of the American empire. Mary O’Connell.’ CBC News. 11 September 2014.
https://www.cbc.ca/news/world/how-9-11-hastened-the-decline-of-the-american-empire-1.2762110
[6] ‘Night Before 9/11: NYC newscast before terror attacks.’ Eyewitness News ABC7NY. YouTube. Premiered on 11 Sept 2019. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=x88_b6vxI_Y
[7] Breaking the Code of History. p66.
[8]A precedent was set in September 1998 in the US with the first ever coordinated bail-out of a large floundering financial firm, when fourteen banks and financial institutions were shepherded by the Federal Reserve Bank of New York to step in to bail out a hedge fund called Long-Term Capital Management (LTCM), which had been running up losses thanks to the July 1997 Asian financial crisis, which culminated in the August 1998 Russian sovereign debt default and the devaluation of the Ruble. Although New York Fed President William McDonough said there was a widespread feeling that there would have been widespread instability if LTCM was allowed to fail and Federal Reserve Chair Alan Greenspan said, ‘no Federal Reserve funds were put at risk, no promises were made by the Federal Reserve, and no individual firms were pressured to participate,’ the markets did not quite buy Greenspan’s testimony and the reaction was just the opposite. The market internalized that no financial firm would be allowed to fail, leading to what soon came to be known as ‘too big to fail.’ Firms took on even bigger risks in the confidence that they would always be bailed out. This irresponsibility eventually led to the 2008 financial crisis, where the Federal Reserve and the U.S. government were forced to step in (and as predicted, bail everybody out).
From ‘Yes Bank Rescue: Echoes of the 1998 LTCM Bailout.’ Amol Agrawal. Bloomberg Quint. 16 March 2020. (My emphasis).
https://www.bloombergquint.com/opinion/yes-bank-rescue-echoes-of-the-1998-ltcm-bailout
[9] The dissolution of the Eastern Bloc in 1991 left the world in a unipolar world, with the United States as the one dominant power, with no ideological adversaries. This kind of situation can be dangerous, as the presence of opposing views often provide checks and balances, and their absence to complacency. The nineties in the US were overseen by two terms of Bill Clinton’s presidency (1993-2001), in which during its last three years the Congressional Budget Office reported a budget surplus. Clinton–and Tony Blair in the UK–were keen exponents of the focus group; a market research tool which asks representative groups of voters what they want and then tailors policy accordingly. Pollsters used focus groups to help Clinton into the White House in 1992, and it used to be joked that Tony Blair ‘would not blow his nose until a focus group has pronounced on the wisdom of such a move’, although by 1999 the strategy was going out of fashion. See ‘End of the road for focus groups?’ Kathy Marks. The Independent. 14 July 1999.
https://www.independent.co.uk/news/end-of-the-road-for-focus-groups-1106465.html.
[10] ‘David Murrin Future Trend Speaker.’ David Murrin–Global Forecaster. Vimeo. Circa 2020.
https://vimeo.com/380212884?from=outro-embed
[11] Breaking the Code of History. p67.
[12] Ibid. p68.
[13] Ibid. p68.
[14] Ibid. p67
[15] Ibid.
[16] I clearly remember in 2011 President Obama being accused of ‘kicking the can down the road.’ The Dow Jones index then stood at 17,000 points and was adjudged to be overvalued then; it recently peaked at 37,000. US interest rates have remained close to zero, 14 years after the 2008 crash; when low interest rates were supposed to have been a short-term stimulus measure.
[17] ‘David Murrin on Default and Fall of American Empire.’ NewWaveSlave. YouTube. 13 July 2011.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UP5aqvfJZJQ&t=444s
[18] ‘Breaking the Code of History, with David Murrin.’ The Southbank Interviews. Southbank Investment Research. YouTube. 21 October 2021. (11.39 mins).
Users Today : 52
Users Yesterday : 23
This Month : 509
Total Users : 13937
