Special to WorldTribune.com
Commentary by Alexander Maistrovoy
[Editor’s Note: “God has a special providence for fools, drunkards, and the United States of America,” Otto von Bismark famously said. The author offers the following unvarnished perspective on the post-Trump world in 2022.]Thomas Hobbes is a founder of the modern political philosophy. We can deny his conclusions, like laws of mathematics and physics are denied in some American schools, but this is unlikely to help comprehend the ongoing processes.
The human society, Hobbes argued, in its primitive, natural form is no more than a Brownian movement, where “everyone is at war with everyone.” Such is the nature of man (no matter how disgusting it may be for progressives), striving to satisfy the basic animal aspirations — power, sexual possession, gain. To avoid extermination of all by all, people are forced to agree to a ‘Social contract’: they give up unbridled individual freedom in favor of rigid laws that ensure safety for all. People can choose different forms of state power: monarchy, elite republics, democracy. However, in any case, the state must provide for the basic norms of human society: security and order.
For this purpose, such institutions like the prosecutor’s office, courts, and the police were established and improved. All other functions of the state — commercial regulations, the rights of minorities, the privileges of estates, the distribution of income, the protection of nature — are secondary and unimportant in comparison with law and order.
The human society has been undergoing this process transforming from the most primitive forms to those complex. At first, large clans arose, headed by a leader or tribal council; then they united into principalities; at the next stage, there was a transformation into centralized monarchies. At the present stage, they transformed into totalitarian states based on universalist ideologies (Communism, Nazism, Fascism) and developed democracies.
This development was going unevenly. Some people, like most of the Arab and African countries, have not been able to completely abandon the tribal system of relations, and as the result the artificially-created states here ended up being very fragile. Others, like Europeans and their colonies in the New World, were able to build democracies where people became full-fledged citizens protected by law, regardless of class, gender, ethnic origin, and accumulated wealth.
However, before our eyes, the history turned back unexpectedly and rapidly. The very concept of law in the West has become ephemeral.
On paper, laws improved and became more complicated. In practice, the judiciary system has become a hostage to progressive and globalist mythology and a tool for undermining democratic institutions.
Political correctness and multiculturalism have paralyzed the police, judicial and legal institutions. Then, with the help of even more aggressive and zombifying ideologies, such as Critical Race Theory, Political Identity, Cancel culture, Institutional Racism, Intersectionality, “White Privilege/ Male Privilege” etc., the neo-Marxist elite began to destroy not democracy only, but the state itself.
The stake was placed on deconstructive parties, marginal groups and minorities living according to the laws of the patriarchal world. These groups, invited from outside, like in Western Europe, or nurtured from within, like BLM movement inside the African American ghettos in the U.S. or Islamist parties in Israel, with their cult of power and traditions of primitive communities, became an open challenge to Western norms and culture. All their activities have been aimed at destroying the state as such. Everywhere in the Western world, like mushrooms after the rain, archaic formations took root and grew, as if emerging from the prehistory of mankind.
In the new surreal reality, “the cream of society” — professors and bohemians, lawyers and tycoons of high-tech companies, human rights activists and the media — supported and defended the rights of rioters, drug dealers, traffickers, rapists and pedophiles. Militant feminists, gender-neutralists and pundits have justified burqa, female circumcision and vendettas.
Lawlessness has become the norm. Entire cities, regions and American states have begun to turn into “no man’s land”, dark and sinister lacunae, where there is neither law, nor order. Giant Muslim ghettos like Belgian Molenbeek, and metropolitan areas like Malmo and Marseille in Western Europe; Seattle, California, Chicago, and it seems even New York — in the USA; the Bedouin Negev and the Arab cities in Israel – these are “lost territories” today. The law of the jungle rules here: gangs, clans, radical groups, militant preachers. These “abscesses” expel rioters, rapists, psychopaths, single Muslim fanatics.
The police don’t stop them. The courts justify and protect them. Public prosecutors initiate cases against those who dare to challenge them.
Legislative assemblies have become hostages of marginal parties, that under the veil of demagogy about human rights and democracy undermine state national institutions. BLM and Antifa in the USA, the “Muslim Brotherhood” parties in Western Europe and Israel dictate the norms and rules of life, where the majority of the indigenous population is assigned the role of obedient, unfortunate Eloi, trembling with fear at nights before the bloodthirsty Morlocks.
These parties and movements receive double support: from the ruling elites and external players — Turkey, Iran, Qatar, Pakistan, etc. The very state, the main task of which is to prevent chaos, instills the atmosphere of chaos, arbitrariness, the cult of primitive and fanatical beliefs. All of this is happening at a truly staggering pace.
This is the picture today and, no matter how gloomy it may be, one should accept it as given, without making vain illusions.
Democracy has become a fiction. The right parties, even having won the elections, are forced either to follow the path of the radical left, like Merkel did and Boris Johnson does today, or to oppose the full power of the new kind of totalitarian system, including the highest bureaucracy, the prosecutor’s office, the academy and the media. As the experience of Trump, Netanyahu, Matteo Salvini and Sebastian Kurtz has shown, this is a doomed war. A ruler trying to save his country will be bound hand and foot and then removed from power. The worldwide “Church of progressivism” knows no mercy for heretics. And the fact that he will be eliminated with the help of not poison or a dagger, but accusations of sexual harassment in adolescence does not fundamentally change the matter.
Thus, before our eyes, modern states are falling into the void, and most Western countries have already passed the point of no return. Destructive processes can be stopped only through military dictatorship, which seems impossible, no matter how you feel about it.
This means that Western civilization (with the possible exception of Eastern Europe) is rapidly returning to the Dark Ages, where people did not live, but rather survived in the conditions of “the war of all against all.” Hostages to spontaneous riots, maddened crowds, crazy leaders, Muslim caliphs in the south and steppe hordes from the East, the recent subjects of the Roman Empire were in perpetual motion, seeking shelter from the frenzy taking place around.
This is what is happening now before our eyes. Families are leaving San Francisco, Portland, New York, Chicago, London, Paris and Stockholm, fleeing banditry, anarchy and violence and leaving behind a “no man’s land” inhabited by all sorts of rabble — local and foreign. In the same way, the Jews of Lod and Jaffa are fleeing from their homes, seeking shelter from the Arab rioters.
The same that happened in Libya, Yemen, Lebanon, Iraq, Mali and Somalia is now rapidly happening In Western countries : A state formally remains on the map, but ceases to be a state as such. It breaks up into ethnic and religious enclaves, zones of influence of clans and criminal groups, strongholds of drug cartels and armed militias.
In this bizarre mosaic, the luxurious villas of local oligarchs with their own security forces exist side by side with enclaves of poverty and banditry, and sharia law ghettos border with expensive boutiques, fine restaurants and postmodern buildings, where high-ranking officials rant about liberal values and the new world order.
In fact, the “new order” has already come to us. And its name is “the war of all against all.” History returns to its starting point.
Born in Moscow, Alexander Maistrovoy is a journalist based in Israel and the author of “Agony of Hercules or a Farewell to Democracy (Notes of a Stranger)”, available at Amazon and Barnes & Noble.