So things are getting pretty messy with the terrorist attack on Nordstream. First there was the official version that the Russians carried out a terrorist attack against themselves. Then, a solid journalistic source revealed that the action was carried out by the US military, that it was carefully prepared, that Norwegian security forces were involved, and that the US president personally approved it. This is a version that sounds very logical, and the various pieces of information fit together carefully. It even gives the impression that the information was not leaked completely by accident, and that there is a dispute between the President and the military at the Pentagon, who do not want to continue the war.
But it implies, among other things, that the President is a regular perpetrator of a serious crime. The Republicans have an opportunity to set up a commission of inquiry, to investigate this, and to fill the public space with it. Until the election.
So we have a communications counterattack. You might be expecting now the revelation of guaranteed evidence that it’s all Russians. Or that some colonel will take the fall, claim the president didn’t know anything, do a few years, and quietly get a fat compensation package. Wrong! Biden’s people quite commonly blame it on the Ukrainians. Do they themselves take it that no one can believe the version of Russian guilt?
In any case, it’s very clumsy. How can anyone ask the Germans, for example, to support the Ukrainian NATO troops in that war when they had friendly relations with Russia and the Ukrainians are carrying out terrorist attacks against them? By the way, this opens up other questions – if a Ukrainian group really did this (I personally don’t believe it), they would need NATO support to do it. So are attacks against German industry being directed from Brussels offices?
It rather shows the confusion. They didn’t give a damn about the rules. They assumed that they would win soon and that all was forgiven to the winners. Now it looks like defeat, they are panicking and trying to get out of it. By the way, they can’t even lie properly anymore!
X
Modern bureaucracy is characterized by, among other things:
- Every activity can only be carried out by a person with the prescribed training,
- Every action must be carried out according to a regulation,
- A written record must be made of the performance of each act so that it can be checked afterwards to see what regulation it was based on, whether the regulation was followed, and who is responsible for it.
We all know the disadvantages of bureaucracy. A flood of paperwork instead of real work. An endless thicket of regulations, which are rapidly increasing. Cumbersomeness. Incompetence. Corruption. Mountains of unnecessary formalities. Complexity so enormous that officials are effectively taking control.
But there are a few upsides. These we realise when we compare them with the arbitrariness of the Middle Ages, when there were no fixed rules. Just the will and arbitrariness of the powerful, usually tempered by custom.
But times are changing. A new kind of bureaucracy seems to be emerging in the West, one that contains only the disadvantages. In the case of the Czech foreign minister, for example, who failed to graduate from university, we cannot even think of any qualifications. Senior civil servants blatantly ignore regulations, and the high courts have come to tolerate them. And written records have stopped being kept. A high commissioner of the Czech government hands out millions without adequate written documentation. Someone in the US administration made a major decision, it was executed and in retrospect there is no way to know who gave the order.
Are we going back to pre-Enlightenment times?
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Again, I have given some time to American non-conservative publications. Lots of writing, of course, about how terrible Russia and China are, and what action needs to be taken against them. And the usual platitudes about how it’s not the Americans’ fault. They wouldn’t actually want to get involved, but all sorts of countries around the world are begging for an American military presence or NATO membership. And that begging is not coming in the least bit from the groups that the Americans pay to do so.
But as you go through more of the articles, you’ll notice something else. None of the many well-trained thinkers are asking questions like: How do we provide enough raw materials for our factories? Who will run those factories if the decline of education continues? Will our people have homes to live in? How do we maintain good long-term relations with other countries? Such questions do not exist at all. They are not thought about.
The neoconservative questions sound different. Who is undermining our hegemony? Where are the limits of our military power? What other means of power should we use? Who are our main enemies?
It is said that when one holds a hammer, every object is a nail to him. Here we seem to have a substantial part of the elite thinking in symbols of domination and ignoring everything else. When gaining influence is not a tool to make people’s lives good (even if it is at the expense of people in other countries), it becomes an end in itself. But that’s not all. It’s even worse when the pseudo-war elite are so stupid that they don’t realize that to wage war you also need a functioning manufacturing industry and motivated people. I emphasize pseudo-left because they are not real soldiers, but journalists, “analysts” and similar professions.
