Phases Of An Empire Freezing To Death - 2

Warmest October on record

The global warming induced climate change deniers think we are going into an ice age (Red Ice Creations).

They are convinced that we are freezing to death rather than overheating ourselves to death.

While reading the piece detailing that trance of a notion, I thought about a couple of past Dredd Blog posts (e.g. Phases of an Empire Freezing To Death).

Posts which contemplated that confused "hot is cold ... cold is hot" state of mindlessness in another context, but never-the-less used it as a metaphorical means for depicting the demise of empires.

Empires growing cold to the tradition of the common good (The Common Good, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9) while exercising deluded thinking which is "telling them" that they are actually warming up (Is The Empress Taking Off Her Clothes?, 2, 3, 4).

This generally happens during the final phases of their typical, slow suicide routine:

Historically, self-destruction is the common denominator for past human civilization, culture, and society:

"In other words, a society does not ever die 'from natural causes', but always dies from suicide or murder --- and nearly always from the former, as this chapter has shown."

(A Study of History, by Arnold J. Toynbee). As regular readers know, I have posted Sigmund Freud's writings where he indicated that psychoanalysis of groups, including civilization itself, would not prove unproductive ...

(Civilization Is Now On Suicide Watch, emphasis added). This is analogous to individuals who go through the same temperature analysis delusion, which inexplicably leads to what is called paradoxical undressing:

Paradoxical undressing is a term for a phenomenon frequently seen in cases of lethal hypothermia. Shortly before death, the person will remove all their clothes, as if they were burning up, when in fact they are freezing. Because of this, people who have frozen to death are often found naked and are misidentified as victims of a violent crime.

(Weird Universe, cf. Freezing to Death). In a global warming age like ours, preparing for an ice age by turning the heat up, rather than turning it down, is like putting on an Arctic parka while trekking across Death Valley ...when the temperature is 120 degrees F.

I guess we can coin a phrase "paradoxical overdressing" for the Agnotology Textbooks; a malady that leads to heatstroke, and catalogue it as being engendered by cultural ignorance generators (Agnotology: The Surge, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11, 12, 13).

That is the trance the deniers are in, utterly deluded with frozen minds, utterly convinced that they see reality more accurately than 97-99% of climate scientists.

Delusion of this intensity is not isolated to what we are doing to our planet, no, "bringing democracy to the barbarians" is another one:

The enemy aggressor is always pursuing a course of larceny, murder, rapine and barbarism. We are always moving forward with high mission, a destiny imposed by the Deity to regenerate our victims, while incidentally capturing their markets; to civilise savage and senile and paranoid peoples, while blundering accidentally into their oil wells.

(Myth Addiction Is Establishment's LSD - 3). That quote from a 1944 book is accompanied by another quote from a book during the same time frame:

The "foreigner" is, moreover, outside the principal immediate system of law and order; hence aggression toward him does not carry the same opprobrium or immediate danger of reprisal that it does toward one's "fellow-citizen." Hostility to the foreigner has thus furnished a means of transcending the principal, immediately threatening group conflicts, of achieving "unity" —but at the expense of a less immediate but in fact more dangerous threat to security, since national states now command such destructive weapons that war between them is approaching suicidal significance.

Thus the immense reservoir of aggression in Western society is sharply inhibited from direct expression within the smaller groups in which it is primarily generated. The structure of the society in which it produced contains a strong predisposition for it to be channeled into group antagonisms. The significance of the nation-state is, however, such that there is a strong pressure to internal unity within each such unit and therefore a tendency to focus aggression on the potential conflicts between nation-state units.

(Certain Primary Sources ... of Aggression, p. 319-20, PDF, emphasis added). Those books describe behaviors which not only existed back then, but also exist right now.

These delusions were foreseen long ago as potential manifestations in our culture ("If Tyranny and Oppression come to this land, it will be in the guise of fighting a foreign enemy." - James Madison).

These aberrant cultural behaviors are perplexing to some close observers:

For a moment, do your best to suspend disbelief and imagine that there’s another superpower, great power, or even regional power somewhere that, between 2001 and 2003, launched two major wars in the Greater Middle East. We’re talking about full-scale invasions, long-term occupations, and nation-building programs, first in Afghanistan and then in Iraq.

In both countries, that power quickly succeeded in its stated objective of “regime change,” only to find itself mired in deadly conflicts with modestly armed minority insurgencies that it simply couldn’t win. In each country, to the tune of billions and billions of dollars, it built up a humongous army and allied “security” forces, poured money into “reconstruction” projects (most of which proved disasters of corruption and incompetence), and spent trillions of dollars of national treasure.

Having imagined that, ask yourself: How well did all of that turn out for this other power? In Afghanistan, a recent news story highlights something of what was accomplished. Though that country took slot 175 out of 177 on Transparency International’s 2013 Corruption Perceptions Index, though its security forces continue to suffer grievous casualties, and though parts of the country are falling to a strengthening Taliban insurgency, it has for some years proudly held a firm grip on one record: Afghanistan is the leading narco-state on planet Earth.

In 2013, it upped its opium poppy cultivation by 36%, its opium production by almost 50%, and drug profits soared. Preliminary figures for this year, recently released by the U.N., indicate that opium cultivation has risen by another 7% and opium production by 17%, both to historic highs, as Afghanistan itself has become “one of the world’s most addicted societies.”

Meanwhile, where there once was Iraq (171st on that index of kleptocracies), there is now a Shiite government in Baghdad defended by a collapsed army and sectarian militias, a de facto Kurdish state to the north, and, in the third of the country in-between, a newly proclaimed “caliphate” run by a terror movement so brutal it’s establishing records for pure bloodiness. It’s headed by men whose West Point was a military prison run by that same great power and its bloodthirstiness is funded in part by captured oil fields and refineries.

In other words, after 13 years of doing its damnedest, on one side of the Greater Middle East this power has somehow overseen the rise of the dominant narco-state on the planet with monopoly control over 80%-90% of the global opium supply and 75% of the heroin. On the other side of the region, it’s been complicit in the creation of the first terrorist mini-oil state in history, a post-al-Qaeda triumph of extreme jihadism.

(What If It Wasn’t Us?). Add to that what has happened domestically (police state, surveillance state, ongoing coups, race inequality, economic inequality), and it should be obvious that the empire that once had a warm heart now has a cold icy heart.

Current empire is deluded into thinking that murdering foreign nations and its own citizens is a form or part of the common good.

The previous post in this series is here.

---

Silvio, by Bob Dylan

---