Amerika

The current conceptualization of a cold war resembles a picture of two warriors divided by some form of curtain. It happens in real time but because the warriors cannot see each other properly, intentional blows might miss while unintentional blows may hit. Effectively it is a sort of nasty guessing game where collateral damage is acceptable.

But what if the two warriors were the same guy?

This would change the picture to a young guy unknowingly fighting his slightly older self. The young progressive guy is fighting the older experienced self where the older guy is set in his ways and the younger wants new ways. The old guy is stodgy and the younger a punk.

Does that not feel familiar?

This time-based battle can happen at the civilizational level too. After WW2 the old Soviets had a cold war situation with the younger, arrogant American side and just for completeness one could imagine a two-axis layout with Soviets on the Left, America on the Right, Euro-Monarchs on top and Africa at the bottom.  The more fighting age warriors are on the horizontal axis, while the much older vs the much younger battle front is on the vertical axis.

One can imagine that the two curtains differ significantly too, therefore the battle is significantly different. For example, between left and right people are actively killed, while between top and bottom people are actively saved (in inverted commas).

One might ask how is a battle about saving people? Well, the horizontal axis provides medical products to the vertical axis. Then the Euro-Monarchs “help” Africans to invade Europe so they can work in nursing homes giving them those life-extending medicines. After all, you cannot invite unhealthy people to look after you.

If this is used as a basis to develop a possible future scenario, then it is obvious that the Euro-Monarchs will die out, after which both Left and Right will live in nursing homes begging for more assistance from Africans. Technically the two-axis model predicts the future as African.

The only factor purposefully ignored at this point in the argument is China because that will require a third axis.

If one accepts the initial basis of the above two-axis model, further implications can be investigated. The obvious first part is the original cold war followed by the (somehow) second version with China. However, the reason China would be better served on a third axis is because the West now appear to represent a Quad of countries while China plays a victim and dominant player all at the same time using a Hundred Year Plan (knowing that leaders cannot survive that long).

The real second cold war is still on the horizontal axis and with Russia (again).

Second, it is pretty obvious that the “Biden” administration is a who’s who of all the worst russophobes of the Obama era: Nuland, Psaki, and the rest of them are openly saying that they want to increase the confrontation with Russia. Even the newcomers, say like Ned Price, are clearly rabid russophobes. The folks in Kiev immediately understood that their bad old masters were back in the White House and they are now also adapting their language to this new (well, not really) reality.

Finally, and most ominously, there are clear signs that the Ukrainian military is moving heavy forces towards the line of contact. Here is an example of a video taken in the city of Mariupol:

Besides tanks, there are many reports of other heavy military equipment, including MLRS and tactical ballistic missiles, being moved east towards the line of contact. Needless to say, the Russian General Staff is tracking all these movements very carefully, as are the intelligence services of the LDNR.

This is all happening while Zelenskii’s popularity is in free fall. Actually, not only his. Think of it: Biden stole the election in the US and has to deal with 70 million “deplorables” while the EU leaders are all facing many extremely severe crises (immigration, crime, COVID lockdowns, Woke ideology, etc.). The truth is that they all desperately need some kind of “distraction” to keep their public opinion from focusing on the real issues facing the western societies.

What could such a “distraction” look like?

One should ask but why Russia (again), and the apparent answer via a two-axis model is that, basically, America got much older (and more like the Euro-Monarchs unfortunately) after the Iron Curtain fell, and Russia regenerated itself and got younger (and more like Africa). So, in terms of the model, the roles have reversed while the axis and its curtain remain in place. Today’s Ukraine is yesterday’s Israel.

People are going to die in the horizontal axis today, if not tomorrow. What the author above suggests is that not only is an active cold-war being played out, it obfuscates the polarization between Democrats and Republicans inside America. Within this scenario, what is becoming very disturbing due to the (internal polarization) cold war desperately hidden from sight by the White House, is the White House’s simultaneous cooperation in the world-wide battle between progressives and populists driven by the aging/demented Euro-Monarchs. They hide their fight against populists in roughly the same manner Euro-Monarchs hide their fight against Africans. Similar (but not terribly similar) curtains are being used.

The complex nature of a two-axis effect explains why the time-based model could not be detected previously. The White House is hiding its battle against the populists from behind the curtain of unity, while playing China from behind the Russian curtain, using an African type of curtain.

Just quickly on the complicated third axis issue with China. One suggestion for a third axis is China vs India. However, whereas Russia is the globally accepted adult/white target, a different approach is required for China because Chinese are classified as black (this was literally adopted in Africa and accepted in Western Universities). So, how can the White House be against China?

The second gear of this two-axis model kicks in when the question is asked why young societies battle against older societies, because it could so easily have a more fundamental reason such as identity, language, culture, race etc. All of this is persuasive of conflict and is not discounted at all. The new idea proposed here is that everything that has been used to characterize civilizational conflict in history, missed the time-based model.

The reason nobody (in conflict resolution) thought of it before is that conflict is between two actual entities. It was and still is today, very unusual to say the young is battling the (same) old simply because those parameters are not being measured by anybody. This includes psychologists, politicians, historians, and philosophers anywhere in the world.

Yet we have multiple cold wars raging in the world today. The most confusing of which is authoritarians against populists. Suffice to say that authoritarians are the established and older world order, while populists are the younger world order.

Another question people ask is why can Republicans or Conservatives not conserve anything? The two-axis model suggests that conservatives cannot outlast progressives simply because they are older. Hence the war between young and old is basically a war of attrition where the old eventually die out. This will even emerge in a Uni-Party such as Britain and now America as well. It is quite possible to think that Western Civilization will fail simply because it is getting old.

The third gear of the two-axis model kicks in when asking the question where this pathological drive for time-based conflict comes from?

Well, we are fighting ourselves. The kicker is we do not know it. What researchers have found however, is that we do like to give our younger selves advice because we obviously did something wrong:

Participants mostly gave themselves advice around relationships (“Don’t marry her. Do. Not. Marry. Her.”), education (“Go to college”), selfhood (“Be yourself”), direction and goals (“Keep moving, keep taking chances, and keep bettering yourself”), and money (“Save more, spend less”). These topics closely match the most common topics mentioned in research on people’s regrets.

Obviously, it is more about personal regrets than lessons learnt in society. We also know already that organizations do not perform lessons learnt and we also know that we generally leave history to be written by the victors which in most cases got their win by sheer luck.

But older people also don’t like the kids these days.

The researchers studied a sample of 1,824 people, chosen to be representative of the U.S. population. They asked the participants about how the next generation compared with earlier ones—in particular, whether they were respectful, intelligent and well-read. Overall, people gave the young lower ratings, in keeping with the “kids these days” effect.

For some reason younger people  don’t like older people either.

Fed up with waiting for the older generation to sort out its problems, a growing number of teenage activists are taking matters into their own hands. Here, six motivated people reveal why they’ve decided to fight for a better world.

A short example in 2021 is that boomers are flying their private aircraft while simultaneously telling younger generations that they must eat grass. It makes the kids angry to the extent that they want a better world – not just a reset.

The young – old conflict is also a business problem and Jim Collins and Harvard have realized this already (to no avail).

I was appalled to learn recently that 60% of the respondents to a poll of 1,380 HR directors of large U.S. companies said their firms have no CEO succession plans in place.

Obviously, this applies to the political and cultural arenas as well. The initial Western domestication  culture took care of it by raising children to follow in their parents’ footsteps i.e., to become independent, while grooming cultures such as in Africa raise their children to remain dependent on them. After the Industrialization era however, Western organizations did not adopt that important cultural aspect (due to a lack of long-term risk assessment), where the suggestion is (today) that human resources science failed or was compromised for some reason – as it likely has during previous civilizational failures also.

Framing civilizational clashes as young vs old is a new idea despite it being a part of nature. The book on Clash of Civilizations was correct when it pointed to the fight between cultures, but it missed the young vs old pathological cause.  Because it is so natural and ever present, people tend to look past it, but not anymore.

Those same Westerners involved in the Soviet Cold War, are now fighting their children and vice versa, because the children want a better world i.e. parents have failed miserably. Therefore, I fight with my children, not against them, regardless.

Tags: cold war, inter-generational conflict, multipolar order