Posted on 08/26/2013 6:20:36 AM PDT by Travis McGee
Good Lord. . .another one? I am going broke buying all your books.
;-)
This one is just a freebie short story.
Thanks. . .but I went an bought the anthology for my Kindle.
I expect the rest of what I read in there to be excellent. . .in other words. . .usual fare from you.
Ha.
Yeah, that’s only on the kindle so far, but I may make a printed version at some point.
Excellent read, Matt. Thanks.
Thanks. I hope it never comes close to that scenario. But it might. Electricity truly has become our oxygen, and we have become very distant from our food sources.
Short term, that's pretty obvious. (Though I would not want to be the tech-driven South Korean military if the leaders of North Korea, with 1950s-era technology or worse, decide to get their food from "down south.") There are a lot of places in the world where lower-tech military conflicts could still create tremendous problems.
But what about long term, and specifically this question:
144 posted on 8/26/2013 2:41:04 PM by WI_Rifleman: “You have to wonder if the Rupture could be the end of European civilization. Europeans may not understand how to live without electricity, but I’m sure that many Middle Easterners wouldn’t be bothered. Europe crumbles, the muslims invade.”
Just what we need... camel-riding desert warriors in search of more water and farmland crossing into the ruins of a devastated Europe because the Arab warriors don't need electricity, with no Charles Martel to stop them at a future Battle of Tours.
I spent some time today thinking this scenario through.
When the dominant economic order of a culture collapses, it doesn't result in everyone dying. Some people are left. In a survival-of-the-fittest scenario, not only individuals but also some groups and cultures are capable of surviving the collapse. Some of those groups are likely not only to be able to survive but also to be able to exploit and take advantage of the situation.
A good case can be made that is **EXACTLY** what happened when a band of religiously radicalized Bedouin desert warriors in search of food and water decided to attack the war-weakened frontiers of the Byzantine Empire and Sasanian Empire (the late Persian Empire), and then kept going when the far-off rulers in Constantinople and in modern Iran couldn't fight them off.
It's probably something we should have on our radar screens — not just for a total SHTF scenario like what Bracken contemplates, but also for less devastating forms of regional economic collapse, i.e., a worse version of what is already happening in Greece.
That, unfortunately, is a quite realistic scenario. It doesn't take too much to imagine an economic collapse back to a Great Depression such as the 1930s. That happened within living memory of some who are still alive today, and the consequences in a technological age could be much worse.
Fortunately for us, many of the leaders of the more powerful Muslim nations, and even more so their princeling children, are just as addicted to Western ways as any American or European.
At the other end of the economic spectrum, Islam is inherently anti-capitalist because of its objection to charging interest — an aspect of Islam which isn't always obvious to Westerners because Muslims don't have a problem with participating in an “infidel” banking and commercial system, but don't want to encourage capitalism among their own people. Islam breeds forms of welfare which, although they'd claim not to be socialist, have similar effects on their urban poor populations.
The key weakness of Islam is that is is an ethical system which is not based on personal self-sufficiency but rather on shared tribalism, and not uncommonly leads to family conflicts and tribal conflicts even between Muslims. That's different from Western poverty due to lack of an ethic of self-sufficiency, but in an urban environment apart from the rural family-based economic system, it produces gangs rather than stability.
Many Middle Eastern cities, even if (unlike Western poor urban residents) their residents are used to the power going out periodically, would quickly become horrible hellholes if the water supply got turned off, or if food paid for by oil money wasn't coming in regularly via shipping from countries with much better agricultural productivity. A major collapse of world commerce would harm Middle Eastern cities just as badly as those of Europe and North America, and perhaps more so because of the need for importing food and transporting water.
Of course, there are lots of places like Afghanistan or Yemen with radicalized rural minorities. Such people would survive when the major urban centers of the Middle East collapsed, blame “faithlessness to Allah” for their problems, and take over whatever was left of their part of the world. Perhaps after a while they would decide the time was come for jihad in search of more water and more food elsewhere.
Realistically, could Islam take over the West via a future economic collapse, much like the way it conquered the Persian Empire and devastated the Byzantine Empire?
My guess is that in a post-collapse scenario, an Appalachian hillbilly with a horse and rifle is quite capable of taking on a desert Arab with a camel and a rifle.
I'm not so sure I'd say the same about rural Europe where rural life was based on feudalism and protection by a local noble, not individuals with firearms like the American frontier. Even traditions of rural self-sufficiency which survived the rise of the Industrial Age were largely stamped out by socialism in rural Western Europe. In Eastern Europe, I suspect that Communism, together with forced urbanization, did even more damage.
But in any case, I think it's obvious that a lot of Third World Muslims are much more capable of surviving “hard times”, however we want to define them, than most Westerners.
That is something to consider as our economy continues to have major problems.
246 posted on 8/27/2013 4:27:06 PM by Travis McGee: "The America of the 1930s that got through the Great Depression without tearing itself apart no longer exists. Now kids murder for fun on full stomachs. Imagine when they are starving.
Bracken is right in more ways than one.
Major economic crises tend to bring out the core character not only of individuals but also of nations. For all the problems of FDR and the Great Depression, America didn't turn into a Prussian-style militarist state as Germany did or a military-driven imperial expansionist state as Japan did in the 1930s, and there are reasons for that.
I am much less certain those reasons which applied in 1933 continue to apply in 2013. A welfare state has consequences, and modern America is in a lot of ways much worse than 1930s America or 1930s Germany.
Muslim nations have not, at least not yet, gone through the same collapse of social and moral standards.
The core character of Islamic nations is very different from anything we've seen in Western history, and I don't think most Americans want to face a committed Muslim enemy without the technological and economic superiority we now have.
I’m glad that we have a few oceans between us and the middle east. Europe will have tougher time dealing with them than we will, even post “Babylon.”
Excellent analysis.
bookmark for later
It’s free, swipe your EBT.
Ping
Thank you, Travis McGee and Boxlunch...
BFL
Book Mark
My view on the current economic and political situation is that the party can go on for quite a while. First the Democrats will cement their power. They will inexorably expand the welfare state while their shrinking job base chips away at the middle class. We still print the world's reserve currency and the printing has yet to go full throttle. But that is inevitable due to the fact that the federal government will be able to fund perhaps 1/2 of the interest on debt at realistic (i.e. what most of the rest of the world pays) rates. When the emperor finally exposes himself, the fall will be dramatic, mainly because the party can and will be allowed to continue for so long. Bottom line, we have time, IMO.
So back to the technology. The internet and non-internet comms like broadcast radio can be made to be survivable and independently powered. The only hitch I can see is that rechargeable batteries eventually wear out. Personally I prefer a very heavy oversized battery bank because my hundreds of pounds of lead should hold some value (except the extreme situation of course). I rarely need to do a deep discharge now although that would quickly change if TSHTF.
The drawback is that it isn't portable so it must be defended. On the lighter side I have an Anker power pack and Mercury 10 solar charger that will last a long time provided I don't do deep discharging. That provides more than enough power for the Raspberry pi, but I'm not sure about the SDR because I have to try that out. After reading your excellent short story, that is high on my list. I have a bit of survival skill but as long as I do survive I will make sure I have some gear to play around with.
I’m a huge fan of high quality rechargeable batteries and multiple charging sources. Even in the worst case, being the last guy left in your AO with an electro-optical rifle scope and even just a working flashlight will give you a huge edge.
Mark for reading
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