The Shadow Knows: Part One

The Discontinuity

There’s an elephant in the room, but I rarely write about it.

The primary issues that we cover at Gates of Vienna are Islam, sharia, and the Islamization of the West. In addition we sometimes branch off into closely related topics, such as political correctness, multiculturalism, Socialism, and all the other debilitating ideologies that have weakened Western Culture and allowed Islam to establish such a massive beachhead.

Dymphna and I occasionally range even further into topics that are tangential at best, including the culture wars, social and political history, American party politics, and any number of other topics.

But I hardly ever discuss the elephant. I don’t even like to reach out and tug at his tail or touch his trunk, because he’s so damned big and overpowering. He’s much more significant than anything else I can see, but before long he will flatten our puny little bamboo village, and there’s no way to stop him. Any lengthy discussion of the looming pachyderm seems pointless.

I refer, of course, to the elephant of the coming economic collapse.

I make no predictions about when its enormous legs will begin to cut their inexorable swathe of destruction. I read all the doomsday forecasts back in 2008, and they all turned out to be wrong, at least in their predicted time frame. The signs that were predicted back then — the rise of oil and food prices, continuing unemployment, the stagnation in GDP, and the flight to precious metals — have begun, but they are clocking in two years later than predicted.

So the global financial system seems to be a lot more resilient than most people thought. The Powers That Be are adept at jury-rigging, and have patched up the decrepit machine with bailing wire and duct tape — i.e. bailouts and quantitative easing — to help keep it running for a little while longer.

However, the entire structure must eventually come crashing down, and the longer the postponement, the more spectacular will be its fall. The Western welfare state is built out of enormous, unthinkable quantities of debt. It is the greatest Ponzi scheme in history, and its demise is mathematically inevitable. The only question is exactly when the scam starts to unravel in earnest — the outside limit is about a generation from now, when the demographic disaster can no longer be papered over.

Fjordman believes, as do many others, that the party will be over much sooner than that. I tend to agree, but I’m no expert, and I’ve seen a lot of experts fail in their predictions. So I present no timelines, but the end of the world’s current financial regime is coming soon, and there isn’t anything that can be done to prevent it.

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El Inglés has referred to a “discontinuity” in the affairs of the West which will change the rules about how we may discuss and deal with the looming crisis. It seems evident now that the discontinuity will take the form of an economic collapse, and the concomitant failure of the welfare state.

The end of the welfare state will act as a high colonic for some of the worst excesses of our culture. The lavish funding of our most absurd and destructive behaviors will come to an end. State support for the able-bodied, and probably even for the aged and disabled, will be drastically curtailed.

Immigration and its attendant problems will in due course become insignificant, because what remains of civil society among the natives will hunker down to protect itself, by whatever means necessary. Yes, I realize that much of California and other parts of the Southwest are already alien territory, and will simply become part of Aztlan or whatever the mestizo majority decides to call it. But at least the new entity will no longer be kept on life support through the beneficence of politicians in Washington D.C.

And much of the Muslim problem in Europe will be solved. When the state is no longer supporting three-quarters of the urban immigrant population, the denizens of the no-go zones will have to figure out some other means of subsistence. One presumes the resolution of the ensuing struggle for resources will not be pretty, but the problem will be resolved.

But what about the rest of civil society?

Forget about the immigrants, the underclass, the drug addicts, and the aged and infirm. What about the rest of us?

The crisis I’m describing will occur relatively soon, and many people who read this will still be alive when it comes.

What will life be like for you then?

What will be your part in it?

This is something for which we are all ill-prepared. Most of us have been trained to be part of global modernity, to be apprentice mechanics whose job it is to help keep the world-machine running. When it finally huffs out its last plume of steam and clatters to a permanent halt, we’ll be left standing there, useless monkey wrench in hand, lacking even the ghost of a clue.

What then?

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I’ve been pondering these matters for the last couple of years, trying to understand what is happening so that I might be able to write about it. Grasping a thread to unravel the whole mess is almost impossible, because it is so complex and so unprecedented. We have no real idea of how the catastrophe will unfold.

For the sake of argument, I’m avoiding the absolute worst-case scenarios. I assume there will be no all-out nuclear war. I won’t look at what might happen after a major EMP over the United States or Europe. I assume that the electric grid will still be up, at least in most Western countries, most of the time.

My premise is that there will be remnants of civil society still functioning in a lot of places, where people like us are doing their best to hold communities together using whatever means come to hand.

If this is in fact what we all can expect, then we need to start preparing for it now, even though we don’t know exactly what lies ahead. Nor can we count on any of the major elements of the existing system — the government, the media, the educational system, the military, law enforcement, major corporations, etc. — to help us. Ordinary people, acting autonomously and coming together when they can, will have to solve this on their own.

With all this in mind, I propose making conscious a process that has already begun spontaneously over the last decade or so.

I call it THE SHADOW.

The analogy for this concept is a “shadow government”: in a parliamentary system, when the opposition party is out of power, it maintains the structure and offices of the government, but in simulacrum within its own ranks, so that it is fully prepared to assume the functions of government as soon as an election returns it to power.

In our case, however, we will need a shadow everything. When the fiat money system breaks down and the currency inflates, the welfare state will fail in its entirety, and there is no backup system waiting to be brought online when that happens. If we don’t devise the Shadow, then when the time comes we will be faced with our own white-bread version of Somalia, the War of All Against All within Western culture.

Fortunately, part of the Shadow is already in the process of forming, so I’m not proposing anything new. I simply want to conceptualize the process and make it conscious, in hopes that its formation might thereby be augmented and accelerated.

I divide the Shadow somewhat arbitrarily into the following component functions, which are not really discrete, but may be described separately for the sake of analysis:

1.		Civil administration
2.		Education (primary, secondary, and post-secondary)
3.		The media and mass communications
4.		Manufacturing and commerce
5.		Legislative bodies
6.		Law enforcement
7.		The military

If a remnant of civil society still exists, and a Shadow has been formed for each of the above functions, then it may be possible to reconstitute the bare necessities of a viable society while a replacement for the mass welfare state is devised.

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It’s important to remember that most of the people who have the competence and grit to be part of the Shadow are not major players in the current power structure. The existing system selects against the most creative, talented, innovative, independent, and intelligent people. Most such people are driven out of the system by its oppressiveness and irrationality, and those who remain never rise very high in it.

Yet brilliant and competent people are all around us — I have encountered plenty of them in my Counterjihad work, both here and in Europe. These are the people who are even now being drawn into the Shadow, and who are preparing themselves — whether they realize it or not — for the grim tasks that lie ahead.

I’ll cover each of the above functions in future posts, with the exception of #7, the military — I’m aware that a shadow military is already forming, but I know very little about it, and prudence would militate against a close investigation. So I’ll just leave it be.

But the other six are worth examining in depth. Media (#3) is the function whose shadow is the most advanced — we are part of that shadow, which is already running as an effective parallel to the traditional system.

An effective civil administration (#1) is the most crucial element, because without it the rest of the new society’s functions will break down. In tandem with legislative bodies (#5) and law enforcement (#6), it will permit the formation and protection of new structures of governance, which with luck will help preserve the remains of our culture.

Reader input will be welcomed in this series. I know no more than you do about these matters, and probably less.

“Who knows what evil lurks in the hearts of men? The Shadow knows...”