Playlist for Show: Long Waves

The historical attributes of empires, Detailed by Schumpeter in 1919 are explored in the US creation of external enemies in Russia, ISIS, Al-Nursa, and Al Qaeda. This tactic generates internal tensions such as were seen in Furgeson, MO and the racial, class and religious divisions constituting much of the current US news.   The use of race as a political tool for unification is a historical hallmark of imperial cultures. The result is social, interpersonal, and state violence internally leading to the incarceration of large numbers of persons resulting in trauma to them and to their families as well. Diminishing social resources in the US necessitate that this trauma is largely untreated resulting in additional trauma in the social sphere.

The history of racial hatred in the US is documented in the Irish, Polish, and Italian waves of the 19th Century.

One becomes either an enemy or a vassal of state power within empires, and the activities of the empire cannot be challenged.

A detailed analysis of the Ukrainian coup removing Yanukovych and the installation of Yatsenuk is explored with particular attention to the aggression of US and its role in destabilizing Ukraine in order to realign their economics and politics with western interests.

The conclusion return to Schumpeter’s observation that the appeal to a racial, national  sentiment has social consequences:

“No other appeal is as effective, except at a time when the people happen to be caught in the midst of flaming social struggle. All other appeals are rooted in interests that must be grasped by reason. This one alone arouses the dark powers of the subconscious, calls into play instincts that carry over from the life habits of the dim past.”

Driven out everywhere else, the irrational seeks refuge in nationalism—the irrational which consists of belligerence, the need to hate, a goodly quota of inchoate idealism, the most naive (and hence also the most unrestrained) egotism. This is precisely what constitutes the impact of nationalism. It satisfies the need for surrender to a concrete and familiar superpersonal cause, the need for self-glorification and violent self-assertion. Whenever a vacuum arises in the mind of a people —as happens especially after exhausting social agitation, or after a war—the nationalist element comes to the fore.

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