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AN ANNOTATED READING OF BETWEEN TWO AGES, BY ZBIGNIEW BRZEZINSKI, 1970, PAGES 15-18
Previous Entries: Chapter Two, Chapter One, Introduction
“The United States is the principal global disseminator of the technetronic revolution. It is American society that is currently having the greatest impact on all other societies, prompting a far-reaching cumulative transformation in their outlook and mores.”
Throughout time different nations have been the primary exporter of culture, technology, and justice either by force or by stimulating imitation in other societies. Athens and Rome for the Mediterranean, China for most of Asia, and France for Europe. Brzezinski claims that the French Revolution was “perhaps the single most powerful stimulant to the rise of populist nationalism during the nineteenth century,”.
Today this position of chief exporter is held by the United States. Not unlike the philosophical outflow of the French Revolution, the influence of America is disruptive in much of the world scene. Brzezinski cites communism as an example, a political theory he describes as capitalizing on social frustrations and aspirations, and a major source and target of these sentiments came to be America, its realities and its myths.
The United States is the focus of global attention, emulation, envy, admiration, and animosity. No other society evokes feelings of such intensity; no other society’s internal affairs—including America’s racial and urban violence— are scrutinized with such attention; no other society’s politics are followed with such avid interest—so much so that to many foreign nationals United States domestic politics have become an essential extension of their own; no other society so massively disseminates its own way of life and its values by means of movies, television, multimillioncopy foreign editions of its national magazines, or simply by its products; no other society is the object of such contradictory assessments.
The American Impact
In early years, the influence of America on the greater world was mostly philosophical. America was associated with this dreamy ideal of freedom, and that was true for awhile for many Americans, even if life wasn’t easy. America’s influence, and the concept of the country’s freedom, eventually became more materialistic. It was defined as the land of opportunity, and opportunity that was paid in fat American dollars.
In Brzezinski’s time (this book was published in 1970), as well as now (2024), the American Freedom concept isn’t such a defining element of the nation. For Brzezinski this concept was tarnished in the 1960s; the assassinations of JFK and MLK, the general racial and social tension, the flops in Vietnam. Brzezinski saw America’s global influence shifting to dominance in science, technology, and education.
This scientific and technological progress requires a dynamic environment. These developments depend on the resources committed to them, the available personnel, a high baseline of education, and “last but not least — the freedom of scientific innovation.” America has the resources to throw around and much of them get thrown into various research projects. American people have decently high access to education.1 As a result of a uniquely large population, the U.S. has a mass of educated and skilled workers. Brzezinski acknowledges that many aspects of the American education is deficient when compared to the standards of Western European and Japanese institutions, but he argues that “the broad base of relatively trained people enables rapid adaptation, development, and social application of scientific innovation or discovery”, that gives the U.S. its advantage.
America’s organizational structures and the intellectual environment are suited for experimentation and social adaptation. The material and status rewards that one can potentially receive not only incentivizes the country’s own people to pursue pathways to creative achievements, but also beckons the brightest bulbs of other nations, and its material attractions for the world’s scientific elite are historically unprecedented on the scale America performs.
Competitiveness and the emphasis on quick exploitation have resulted in a quick spinoff of the enormous defense and space research efforts into the economy as a whole, in contrast to the situation in the Soviet Union, where the economic byproducts of almost as largescale a research effort have so far been negligible.
Brzezinski predicted that the glitter of America would wane in attraction for Europeans. Partially due to American domestic issues and partly due to scientific advancements in Europe catching up after the World Wars. With that stated, he urged Europeans to accept America as the “closest to being the only truly modern society in terms of the organization and scale of its economic market, business administration, research and development, and education.” The resistance to this acceptance Brzezinski attributes to European anxiety over the widening technological gap between the sub-continents and a growing presence of large American firms exploiting their advantage of scale and organization to slowly collect controlling interests in key European industries.
Less tangible but no less pervasive is the American impact on mass culture, youth mores, and life styles. The higher the level of percapita income in a country, the more applicable seems the term “Americanization.” This indicates that the external forms of characteristic contemporary American behavior are not so much culturally determined as they are an expression of a certain level of urban, technical, and economic development.
For Brzezinki, such cultural exports became symbolic of American impact abroad and the “innovation-emulation relationship” between America and the rest of the world. And that world learns what is coming to it by watching America because of this relationship; from discoveries in space and medicine to pop art and LSD, air conditioning, air pollution, the issues of the elderly and the delinquency of the youth. Additionally, he notes, foreign students returned home from American universities had already contributed to organizational and intellectual revolutions among the intelligensia of their own countries.
And American society, more than any other, produces more news briefs, TV trash, and research papers than any other country. America had the lock on satellites early on, and in Brzezinski’s time there was already talk of the development of a “worldwide information grid”, which he anticipated would come into being by 1975. And he wasn’t far off. On October 29, 1969, ARPAnet delivered its first node-to-node communication from one computer to another. By the end of the 1970s Vinton Cerf had invented the Transmission Control Protocol (TCP), and so began the road to ruin.
For the first time in history the cumulative knowledge of mankind will be made accessible on a global scale—and it will be almost instantaneously available in response to demand.
New Imperialism
It is by these previously listed factors – America’s dominance in the fields of science, tech, and education, the dynamism of the U.S. economic and educational environment, the material and status rewards incentivizing intellectual experimentation and social adaptability, and the global spread of America’s cultural exports – that shaped the unique relationship between the United States and the rest of the world. Brzezinski points out that the outcomes have some overtones of imperialism, but that it differs from historic imperialism. It began taking shape after the conclusion of World War II when a lot of nations were directly dependent on the U.S. in matters of security, policy, and economics.
“The more than a million American troops stationed on some four hundred major and almost three thousand minor United States military bases scattered all over the globe, the forty-two nations tied to the United States by security pacts, the American military missions training the officers and troops of many other national armies, and the approximately two hundred thousand United States civilian government employees in foreign posts all make for striking analogies to the great classical imperial systems.”
The imperial aspects of these relationships were a transitory and spontaneous response to the power vacuum created in the destructions of WWII and encouraged by the subsequent threat felt from communism. It was neither formally structured or explicitly legitimized. By the late 1960s all this political and military dependence declined as Europe found its feet again. In its place rose a more pervasive but less tangible influence, that of American economic presence and innovation, either directly originated in the U.S. or stimulated abroad by American foreign business investment.
“. . . American influence has a porous and almost invisible quality. It works through the interpenetration of economic institutions, the sympathetic harmony of political leaders and parties, the shared concepts of sophisticated intellectuals, the mating of bureaucratic interests. It is, in other words, something new in the world, and not yet well understood.”
Brzezinski clarifies that it is a mistake to see the relationships between America and everyone else as the simple expression of imperial ambition. To assume this ignores the part played by the technological scientific revolution. Incredible achievements like man’s first steps on the moon, the first computers and gaming consoles; these captivated the world and compelled imitation, stimulating the export of new techniques, methods, and organizational arrangements from the more advanced to the less advanced among nations. This undoubtedly created an asymmetrical relationship, but Brzezinski denies that this asymmetry can be accurately described as imperialism. This is because the U.S. in unique in how great an effort, governmentally and privately, through business and a range of foundations, that the nation undertakes to export its expertise, to publicize its space findings, to promote new agricultural techniques, to improve educational facilities, to control population growth, to improve health care, etc. It yields similar notes to imperialism, but it is, according to Brzezinski, not the same.
However, Brzezinski goes on to note that this global impact is contradictory. It both promotes and undermines American interests as defined by policymakers. It advances the cause of cooperation on a larger scale while simultaneously disrupting existing social and economic fabrics. While laying the groundwork for stability and prosperity it also enhances the forces working toward instability and revolution. Unlike traditional imperialistic powers which utilized the principle of divide et impera, America has focused on promoting regionalism in Europe and in Latin America. By doing so, however, it has created larger entities that are more capable of resisting American influence and of competing with it in the global economy.
“Implicitly and often explicitly modeled on the American pattern, modernization makes for potentially greater economic wellbeing, but in the process it disrupts existing institutions, undermines prevailing mores, and stimulates resentment that focuses directly on the source of change—America. The result is an acute tension between the kind of global stability and order that America subjectively seeks and the instability, impatience, and frustration that America unconsciously promotes.”
The United States, Brzezinski argues, is the first global society in history. It is a society that is increasingly difficult to delineate in terms of its external cultural and economic boundaries. Brzezinksi believed such conditions of innovative stimulus would continue on indefinitely. He projected that by the end of the 20th century only thirteen or so countries were likely to reach the 1965 levels of per capita GDP of the United States. Without significant scientific or economic stagnation, or a major political crisis, America would continue to be a force for global change regardless of whether the dominant subjective mood was pro or anti American.
- At the beginning of the 1960s the United States had more than 66 per cent of its 1519 age group enrolled in educational institutions; comparable figures for France and West Germany were about 31 per cent and 20 per cent, respectively. The combined populations of France, Germany, Italy, and the United Kingdom are equal to that of the United States—roughly two hundred million. But in the United States 43 per cent of collegeage people are actually enrolled, whereas only 7 to 15 per cent are enrolled in the four countries (Italy having the low figure and France the high). The Soviet percentage was approximately half that of the American. In actual numbers there are close to seven million college students in the United States and only about one and a half million in the four European countries. At the more advanced level of the 2024 age bracket, the American figure was 12 per cent while that for West Germany, the top Western European country, was about 5 per cent. For the 519 age bracket, the American and the Western European levels were roughly even (about 80 per cent), and the Soviet Union trailed with 57 per cent. ↩︎
On the next sick, sad world:
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“The Second World War has usually been agreed to have been under way before the launch of Barbarossa; among favored dates for its beginning are 1937 (in China) or 1936 (in Spain). What can truly be said was that it was an assemblage of wars, and that some were going on before 1939.”
J.M. Roberts, A History of Europe, page 496
The American president, Franklin Roosevelt, had believed since 1940 that it was in the interest of the U.S. to support Great Britain, but only up to the limits permitted by American public opinion and the law of neutrality.
By summer of 1941 Hitler considered the U.S. an undeclared enemy. Mainly due to the Lend-Lease Act of March, which provided production and services to the Allies without payment. Once the Lend-Lease program began America extended naval patrols and shipping protection further east in the Atlantic. The first meeting between Churchill and Roosevelt resulted in a statement of shared principles (the Atlantic Charter).“Hitler’s second fateful and foolish decision of 1941, was the declaration of war on the United States on 11 December, after a Japanese attack on British, Dutch, and American possessions four days earlier.”
In 1941 the war had gone global. The British and American declarations of war on Japan could have left two separate wars to rage, with only Great Britain, Australia, New Zealand, and the Dutch government in exile engaged in both. War with the U.S. was a gamble that failed; after the first victories, the Japanese faced a prolonged war they were certain to lose. Pearl Harbor had united American like nothing before and Roosevelt held the nation’s popular support to a degree that Wilson never had.
Hitler’s decision brought American power into Europe when it would otherwise have been deployed only in the Pacific. He had brought about the eclipse of European power, whose future would not be settled by its own efforts, but by American and Soviet Russia. However, Japan’s alliance with Germany and Italy amounted to little in practice. The prospects of rapid gains, mostly in raw materials and oil, by conquering the European possessions of the Far East, were the deciders in the Japanese offensive.
Only five European countries remained outside of the struggle: Turkey’s small holdings, Spain, Portugal, Sweden and Switzerland.
War in North Africa raged back and forth in Libya and Egypt. It spread to Syria and Iraq where a nationalist government supported by German aircraft was removed by British force. Iran was occupied by Britain and Russia in 1941. Ethiopia was liberated and the Italian colonial empire destroyed.
In early 1942 Japan seized the former European colonies in Indonesia, Indo-China, Malaya, and the Philippines. They pressed through Burma to the Indian border and were soon bombing Australia from New Guinea.
“The War’s demands carried social and economic mobilization much further than had the First World War. The role of the United States was decisive.”
Four great and very different battles were turning points:
- In June 1942 a Japanese fleet attacking Midway Island was broken in a battle fought largely by aircraft. Japan lost her strategic initiative and a long American counter-attack began to unfurl.
- The British army in Egypt decisively defeated the Germans and Italians and began marching west to join Anglo-American forces in French North Africa. Axis forces were evicted from all of North Africa by May 1943.
- At the end of 1942 the Soviet army trapped the German army at Stalingrad. Its remnants surrendered in February; it was the most demoralizing defeat yet suffered by the Germans.
- The culmination of the Battle of the Atlantic. The peak came in the early months of 1942: In March 850,000 tons of shipping were lost and six U-boats sunk, by the end of the early nearly 8,000,000 tons of shipping had been lost and 87 U-boats sunk. The battle was the most crucial for the Allies and their ability to draw on American production and it was prevailed over by British superiority in signals intelligence.
“The invasion of northern France in June that year (1944) was the greatest seaborne expedition in history. Mussolini had by then been overthrown by Italians and Italy had been invaded from the south; now Germany was fighting on three European land fronts.”
Soon after the landings in Normandy, the Russians entered Poland and by April 1945 they reached Berlin. Allied forces in the west had by then broken out of Italy into central Europe and from the Low Countries into northern Germany. An air offensive had destroyed large portions of German cities. On April 30th, 1945, Hitler killed himself in a bunker in the ruins of Berlin. On May 8th the nominal government of Germany surrendered unconditionally.
The war in the Far East kept on, but was swiftly ended when two nuclear weapons of a destructive power hitherto unknown were dropped by the Americans on two Japanese cities. Between the explosions, Russia declared war on Japan. On September 2nd the Japanese government signed a surrender and the Second World War came to an end.
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“Nationalism has now behind it at least two centuries as the most successful revolutionary force in modern politics.”
J.M. Roberts, A History of Europe, page 396
In developing societies where old social ties and loyalties were breaking down in great cities and large, anonymous markets, there was a social vacuum to be filled. Personal and collective identities had to be redefined, new emotional foci developed. This shift was occurring at a time when a new and more immediate sharing of information and emotion was becoming available through greater literacy, more popular newspapers, and speedier world communications.
“It could not be said in 1871 that the omens were good. The century’s history down to that year had been studded with revolution and war in the name of nationalism… For all the success of German and Italian nationalism in the mid-century decade and in spite of the establishment of new national states in Serbia, Greece and Romania by 1870, the threat of national aspirations posed to European peace did not go away.”
Ottoman Empire: Bulgaria and Montenegro emerged in the 1870s, Albania in 1913. Crete had obtained the sultan’s recognition of an autonomous government under a Greek governor.
Russian Empire: The more reactionary regimes of Alexander III and Nicholas II were able to contain disorder and maintain the de facto domination of the Russian peoples over other subjects of the empire.
The Dual Monarchy: In Hungary, Slavs who formed local majorities in some places felt oppressed and activists among them looked to Serbia as a possible future protector against Magyar domination.
There was also a large Romanian population in Transylvania, which might be encouraged by the new independent Romanian kingdom.
Any Austrian attempts to satisfy other nationalities ran into bitter opposition from the Magyars, stakeholders in the Dualist outcome.Great Britain: Had two intransigent European nationalist movements to deal with, both in Ireland. The most obvious was that of the Catholic Irish and by 1900 concessions had been made in attempts to soothe tensions, though they fell short of the solution of autonomy, or “Home Rule”. Progress toward the goal of Home Rule was opposed by the Protestant nationalism of Ulster, encouraged by the Conservative (Unionist) Party, which was committed to the maintenance of existing constitutional connection with England.
“National feeling among the populations of the great powers themselves – or what was claimed to be such a feeling in the first age of mass newspapers – was another potentially disturbing force.”
France and Germany were psychologically sundered by the German seizure of Alsace-Lorraine as spoils of victory in 1871. French politicians were long able to cultivate and exploit the seductive theme of revanche.
The British were also encouraged to feel antagonized by Germany over its commercial success in world markets and the danger it was supposed to present. The two countries were actually each other’s best customers, but this fact was ignored in an era of awakening political excitement.“It was unfortunate that because no united Germany had existed thirty years earlier, even Bismarck had found it easy to exaggerate the divisive dangers confronting a new nation as he sought support from nationalist politicians.”
German national feeling began being vehemently expressed during the reign of William II, the emperor of Germany and king of Prussia. Bismarck thought and preached that German Catholics who looked to ultramontane Rome and socialists who talked about the international working class were equally “enemies of the empire”.
Germany’s “new course” in the 1890s led not only to a new assertiveness about Germany’s role in Europe, but evolved into the promotion of a global vision of the country’s proper standing, a “world policy”.
One expression of this was the beginning of the building of a big navy; which raised questions about who the High Seas Fleet might be employed against, if not Great Britain. By this time there was a growing impression in several European countries, far from unjustified, that the German empire tended to throw it weight around too much in international affairs. Speculative sentiments of public opinion like these reflect some of the disturbing and unintended effects which nationalist politics could have as the 20th century began, for, in constitutional states, governments could not ignore public opinion.
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1789 to 1799
“Nearly all the great legal reforms had been legislated, at least in principle, in 1789. The formal abolition of feudalism, legal privilege and theocratic absolutism and the organization of society on individualist and secular foundations…”
J.M. Roberts, A History of Europe, page 312
Other Europeans were either shocked or amazed as a new legislative engine tore down and re-built institutions on every level of French society. Judicial torture, titular nobility, juridical inequality and the corporate guilds of French workers were brought to an end. Trade unionism was made forbidden by legislation that barred association by workers or employers for collective economic ends. French peasants who had benefitted from the abolition of feudal dues were unhappy about the disappearance of the common lands and the rights to exploit them, from which they had benefitted.
The holy vessel kept at Rheims from which the kings of France had been anointed since the Middle Ages was publicly destroyed by authorities during the Terror, an altar to Reason replaced the original at Notre Dame, and many priests underwent fierce personal persecution. Most Frenchmen didn’t miss the theocratic monarchy, but the treatment of the Church had aroused more popular opposition than anything else had. The cults of quasi-divinities of the revolutionaries, such as Reason and the Supreme Being, were abject failures.
“The principles of ’89 had at first commanded much admiration and not explicit condemnation or distrust in other countries. This soon changed, in particular when French governments began to export those principles by propaganda and war.”
Revolution in France generated debate about what should happen elsewhere and thus gave Europe a new type of politics. Liberals and conservatives came into political existence by the litmus of political attitudes highlighted by the revolution. One one side: republicanism, a wide suffrage, individual rights, free speech and free publication. On the other: Order, discipline, a belief in duties rather than rights other than those entrenched in law, the recognition of the social function of hierarchy and a preference to temper market forces by morality.
“The old idea that a political revolution was merely a circumstantial break in an essential continuity was replaced by one which took it as radical, comprehensive upheaval, leaving untouched no institution, limitless in principle, and tending, perhaps, even to the subversion of such basic social facts as the family and property.”
The judicial murder of monarchs had hitherto been believed to be an English aberration. In January 1793 the Convention voted for the execution of the king. A new instrument for humane execution, the guillotine, became the symbol of the Terror. The Terror was the name given to the period during which the Convention strove to save the Revolution by intimidation of it perceived enemies. Roughly 35,000 died in the events of the Terror, but only a minority by guillotine.
By 1797 the Republic was ruled by a kind of parliamentary regime under a constitution whose adoption closed the Convention era in 1796. Abroad, the Royalists worked to gain allies with whom they could return home; they also intrigued with malcontents within France. Conversely, there were figures who argued that there were still great divisions between the rich and poor that were as offensive as the old disparity; they also believed Parisian radicals should have greater say in affairs. Pressed like this from the Right and Left, the new regime known as the Directory would be destroyed from within when a group of politicians conspired with soldiers to overthrow it by coup d’etat in 1799.
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“Ocean man, take me by the hand
Lead me to the land that you understand”
Victor Marie Hugo, also known as the Ocean Man apparently, was born in February of 1802, the same year that Napoleon ate Italy alive. His father was a general in Bonaparte’s army, and his mother was a woman with a cool name (Sophie Trebuchet). Hugo’s father once informed him, be letter, that he had been conceived on the highest peak of the Vosges mountains, which his father believed was the source for Hugo’s creative temperament.
Sick of all the moving required of a general’s family, Hugo’s mother left and took the children to Paris. They moved into a former convent in the, at that time, ratty and abandoned Left Bank. In the chapel at the back of their rotting mansion lived a fugitive named de La Horde, who was avoiding a death sentence for attempting to restore the Bourbons. He became a mentor to Victor and his brother until he was finally found and executed in 1812.
“I shall be Chateaubriand or nothing.”
Hugo’s success came early. At age twenty he had published a collection of poetry that earned him a royal pension from Louis the 18th, one of those neutered post-Revolution kings. Hugo’s first heavyweight hit was The Hunchback of Notre Dame, which became so popular across Europe that Paris had to bother with cleaning up the cathedral, lest they embarrass the city in front of the tourists.
Les Miserables didn’t start coming together until 1845. It ended up taking seventeen years to write the beast. A classic novel of human misery and social injustice, Hugo considered it the “crowning point” of his writing career. Copies of the book sold out within hours of the first release. The literary elite of his time eloquently shat all over it, but the unwashed masses gobbled it up.
Interesting enough, the same year that Hugo started writing Les Mis he was nominated by the king to enter the Upper Chamber of Parliament as a pair de France. In 1851, eleven years before the publication of the book, Hugo was driven into exile when the third Napoleon seized power, after calling him a traitor to France. He returned home in 1870, after Napoleon 3’s fall, and immediately he was elected back into the National Assembly. He was treated like a national hero, and there were rumors he would be given the dictatorship. In his diary he wrote, “Dictatorship is a crime. This is a crime I am going to commit.”
Hugo died from pneumonia at the age of 83 and all of France went into mourning. Despite his request of a pauper’s funeral, he was given a state service that Friedrich Nietzsche, in attendance, described as a “veritable orgy of bad taste,”.
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Manly P. Hall, 1944
“Experiences are the chemicals of life with which the philosopher experiments”
I have read a lot of conspiracy theories and books about them. I read these the way I read a good pulp novel, but with a twist of remorse. The people who pour their hearts out crafting over formatted presentations of these things on what is now the typical conspiracy forums are bordering on being brilliant writers. If nothing else, brilliant world builders, these people could be the New Voices of sci fi and fantasy, but they bog themselves down fighting the windmills that are corporatized, IPO-lusting forums, (can I just say Reddit?).
What Americans have officially been told in the past has been proven sometimes untrue. What Americans will be told in the future will be sometimes be untrue. Conspiracy theorists aren’t bottom feeders, but it’s very difficult to put effort into that world and not come to see it all in a persecuted and paranoid lens. Thing is, it is persecuted to a degree. I found the book I’m writing about while on invoiced time with my day job. Every year, around the same time, the great king rat of a search engine conglomerate I work for makes a big push to eradicate unseemly or otherwise sordid things from its search index. Likely to save on server cost, from what I’ve seen slip through their AI assistant’s RightThink filters. Usually, it means nullifying the chance of a suicide forum being found easily by verbatim search queries, or clearing out shady pharmacy websites from India. The time I bought this book was the only time I experienced Dear Employer lashing out at an Amazon entry. For all the fauxery they sell, this book published and reprinted by Penguin Ltd. was the target.
Manly P. Hall was dead well before Amazon developed its bookstore UI. I’d call him a philosopher, sincerely, despite the sneer that seems to be invited by that term when one isn’t dressed in a sheet in the year 500. I ordered the book because it was cheap and I recognized the reviews to be the type written by conspiracy consumers. The wholesale believers. The people that will ruin their car death gripping a sharpie to quote the copy of a viral enough anti-THAT movement. The people that grifters twist their symbolic mustache at. I thought I was getting the standard fare. The Turkey and Havarti David Icke. The Ham and Swiss John Coleman.
Nah. Nay. Naw. I got a taste of the last utopian. A true believer or someone who writes well enough to come off as one. A man who believed that Thomas Paine came to America to help the cause of a couple of men before they knew it, and not the Paine hiding out from the threat of legal troubles. It was refreshing as hell because it was so positive. Instead of something like: These people, of infinite resources you will never know, control you and everything that bothers you in life comes from this Club of Rome/Fuckpark in California, what is immediately given is: There were big idealistic dreams for America, as the Great Experiment, and they can still flourish.
I’d be more surprised to find out Hall wasn’t a Mason or something similar. I have no delusions about masons, I was raised by one and had to carry his silly hat during parades. My biggest irk is that there’s this Great Society mentioned throughout the book, an Order of the Quest. Sounds like the rough draft placeholder names of a Kickstarter game. He never names them, not really. The Royal Society is named, and Francis Bacon very much so. The whole premise is that America, to such as the Royal Society and Bacon; as well as some more all-encompassing but unnamed shadowy guilds, saw America as the New Atlantis. The place to build Plato’s Critias story of the philosopher kingdom. And he painstakingly lays out his cause. Several essays devoted to establishing some sense of America as Atlantis all the way back in near-naked Greece, when a bunch of builders formed a guild that incorporated a little bit of weird. He tries to sincerely make cause for Quetzalcoatl to have been a Western visitor, enlightened in the Great Quest and equipping the most visibly advanced people of the Americas to understand and defend their roost from the devils to come. There are legitimate points made about Columbus, whose identity is much harder to trace than I thought before reading this book. I tried Wikipedia and Brittanica when I was reading, and found the same shrugs: believed to be, assumed to have been, records may demonstrate…
There are parts that get a bit National Treasure-ish. Pop history, unbacked stories of the singular old man who forced through the signing of the declaration with a grand speech before disappearing anonymously into the ether. Another one about a guile Professor, who happened to be at some house George Washington was showing off his wife’s needlework to. They were making a flag, caught up in the spirit of the blood, and some sage old man came along to properly temper Washington to berate his wife into making the better flag.
Thing is, there’s not quite nothing here. Maybe I’m only huffing the backdraft of the long dead Hall’s hopes, but there were things stated here that were so fantastical I had to look into them, and I found myself unable to dispute them. Not even for lack of time, all of the most outrageous seemed to have some shitty old scan to be pulled up on the Internet Archive. But ultimately, I think Hall was maybe a latecomer. I get it. My late teens would have been entirely devoted to my city’s punk scene if I didn’t have other obligations. It was fun, it was hopeful where few things in 2008 elsewise were. I’m able to look back now and see how silly, how useless to assume a Punk Scene was worth reviving when it had already been commodified to the point where the bands I stood around watching were intentionally awful noise because there was nothing left to do. I faded out, but Hall built and funded a whole institution out of it. An institution still in operation today, the Philosophical Research Society, still in Los Angeles. So who the fuck am I to say.
Ultimately I can’t call his thesis malarky. Partially unprovable, but not entirely even with our modern marvels. Clearly well drunk in the sauce of a particular punch bowl, but try as I might to find murky citation, it just isn’t there. I proved him more right than wrong in my 2023 attempts to question his statements. All of it leaves me thinking about how sad it is, were this really something men spent the better part of their lives trying to build, that it came to this. Whatever your political flavor preference, this isn’t the world where intellectual cultivation is the top interest. This is a landscape that allows for such musings without fear of imprisonment, but one that is much more friendly the those with the gumption to steer it into a marketable pool. I won’t join his cause or donate to his school, but Manly P. Hall wrote the only conspiracy oriented book that didn’t tell me the world is doomed and I’m fucked for it. He didn’t even write the book telling me that Europe was doomed, and his temporal nostalgia-spot was the only Eden of America. He was a conspiracy theorist, a well-read one, and his conspiracy to theorize was that there was a dream for this country to be arena of all and that what good was gotten would be shared and contributed to freely among brethren. I didn’t even like the book that much, I was bored by it in several places, but I didn’t realized until I held it in my own face how refreshing it was to see someone dreaming big. Any attempts of mine to recall the last time I witnessed someone in such fervors over a pursuit, it was a always something like a coworker’s dropshipping business that’s going to get them out of this place. Or my niece, a month away from graduating high school, asking me for some startup cash to open a supernatural bookstore that was going to rock the socks off of whatever city she’d never known but would somehow decide to settle on. I can’t remember the last time I saw a friend trail off about the inherent good still stowed away in the world. I can’t remember the last time I did. I guess this book is like “fine wine” or whatever token allegory. Sounded great, kinda sucked to get through til I got used to it, ended on a flat note, and then only fully appreciated long after.
Buy a copy here.
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Seed: “From the 12th century she [Russia] had been given a more distinctive cultural and institutional shape by her origins and the historical forces playing on her. One was her exposure to the Mongols…With Byzantium in decline and the Germans and Swedes on their backs, Muscovy was for centuries to pay tribute to them and their successors, the Tatars of the Golden Horde, another historical experience sundering Russia from the west, shaping its political culture.”
“Tatar domination had its greatest impact in the southern Russian principalities… they had to pay regular tribute to the Tatars in cash, slaves, recruits, and labor… Their emissaries had to go to the Tatar capital at Sarai on the Volga to make arrangements with their conquerers. It was a time of dislocation and confusion and the struggle to survive favored able despots. Muscovy’s princes enjoyed Tatar favor because they were effective tax gatherers… Harassed though it continued also to be by German and Lithuanians, Muscovy hung on, exploiting, when it could, the divisions within the Golden Horde.”
Query: Where did they come from? Where did they go?
They were the Tatar Rome to the Mongol’s Constantinople. They were the western branch of the empire. “Golden” is for the color of the khan’s yurt. “Horde” is an innocent enough term sourced from the Turkish “ordu”, meaning a camp or fief. An inverse of the Roman Empire’s dynamics, the Horde of the west outlasted the Empire of the Great Khan in the east. The Horde had been founded in Russia by a grandson of Ghenghis Khan, and the ruled the land for 250 years.
They were able to rule by fear for as long as they did, giving little in return, because their rule was indirect. The used local princes to keep order and exercise authority so long as the prince was paying his tribute on time. If an area started getting fussy they simply raided it or threatened to raid it.
But where did they go? They were ground down and scattered like ash over time. By the 1440s they were fragmented into several petty khanates. Over time they lost their sense of identity and slowly blended with whatever local people surrounded them. The Mongol language was chipped away and supplanted with Arabic and Tatar. Political fragmentation increased rapidly once the common tongue was lost. The power and reach of the Khans declined as a new state rose in central Russia.
The final nails were hammered mostly by two of the Greats, Ivan III and Catherine. Ivan threw the Horde out in 1480. Catherine finished them off by annexing their last tottering stronghold in Crimea in 1783. By then all trace of Mongol culture was gone from them, what was left were the Tatars. There is a very goofy conspiracy out there concerning a mass cover-up of the existence of the glittering utopian Empire of Tataria that reaches all the way into Red Russia and the World’s Fair.
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Mortimer Cymbelline’s was a death for the headlines.
One could say Mortimer first became famous in his childhood, when newspapers experienced record-breaking sales from the headline CYMBELLINE HEIR SHOT DOWN IN STREET. Of course, it wasn’t in any street, but on the tracks of one of the family’s privately owned tram services. One article in particular would go into now famously grisly detail of the boy’s death. And of course, he hadn’t died. He was shot in the head and quickly shuffled away inside while the family fetched their personal doctor. The shooter, and the highly illegal gun held in private possession, seems to have not been a matter of concern to law enforcement.
Though he was small at the time of the incident, many who knew Mortimer as a child mentioned how different he was after his injury. Before he had been like any laughing boy at the playground. He ran off with friends, came back dirty, laughed at the world. Afterwards they would say he never smiled again. This is probably an exaggeration, but the release of the family’s now-deceased doctor’s notes contains an entry that is commonly believed to be about Mortimer. In the entry he reviews a clinical interview he engaged in that day. His subject, “a boy who was set up to inherit the world,” from “the family that has always been Endcliff’s most doting,” was undergoing a probing interview to gauge the state of his mental capacity after a traumatic brain injury. The doctor noted “He seems to think that his full potential has been lost. He described himself as a vase that had fallen and broken on the floor. One tries to glue the vase back, but so much of it’s form was rendered to dust and blown away. He feels as though he only has a few pieces of himself left, as opposed to how he conceived of himself before.”
As an adult, Mortimer is a sleepless man, moody and mercurial. He avoids daylight as much as he can. The gunshot’s most prominent echo was Mortimer’s extreme light sensitivity. He is either prone to migraines or prone to lying about them to get out of social engagements, though most who know him personally say they view him as an honest man. In fact, Mortimer has always kept a close cohort of loyal friends made up from lesser names around Endcliff. What public appearances he made was in the company of these friends. Little is known of Mortimer but what journalists have gleaned from wild speculation. Over a lifetimes worth of public attention, reclusive though the subject may be, many of noticed his extreme reservation. He’s never been photographed or reported to shake someone’s hand, hold an arm around his wife, or give regard to his children.
Mortimer’s death was sudden, it occurred while he was descending his front stairs. The main line out of the rumor mill was that his wife, Cora, had done something to him. She was investigated as one of the primary suspects, but the Directory investigators found no sign of involvement. Even after the autopsy, the only evidence that every came to record was the story of one of the house’s staff members. The woman, one of the cleaners, had told recorders that she had seen him fall and when he landed he’d said, “She’s done it,”. He died some moments after.
More on this world and its people can be read here.
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China is intent to filter in nature.
Circled nothing is had,
Or must not cut out the logo.
Tuscany and steak seasoning.
The blood in place until use.
Our kindness may be beyond the damage.
Slightly tapered waist.
Cream ice glass.
Kansas is too harsh.
They definitely could use an interpretation.
Health news and politics.
Clinical governance and visibility,
Sitting in a clayey soil.
Sexy without being hateful.
The old pin and slip effect.
Point at me.
Relocation and foreclosure secrets.
Sweet air felt across the knees.
A spoiled mule of Moscow.
Happy is all.
Somewhat disappointed in ourselves,
For being as friendly.
We couldn’t look more ridiculous.
Never quite free.
And teasing me.
So rich by association.
Go alligator hunting.
Force uniform scaling.
Then go dig another dugout.
Crack an egg which renders pure speculation.
Winchester is a pinched tip.
Yes, only half.
The living lung.
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The Normal Times 