GANGS OF
THE NEW WORLD ORDER
By Marian Kester Coombs
Globalization can be described as
the dissolution of national identities and sovereignties into a massified,
featureless blob – a globaloma (with homage to Clare Boothe Luce’s brilliant
coinage “globaloney”). It also can be defined
as the triumph of Capital’s eternal drive to pay the lowest possible wage. Where borders once were shields against the
excesses of predatory employment practices, if only by sheltering competitive
alternatives, populations increasingly stand defenseless as their defining
qualities are sucked into the black hole of the New World Order.
The globaloma shrivels not just
wages, but social power. What is this scarcest of all
commodities? It can be as seemingly
trivial and basic as being able to get a decent job, start and support a
family, enjoy the respect of wife and children, “get ahead.” It extends all the way up to being able to
make decisions that protect, even save, one’s entire people. Social power is the energy of life itself, an
elixir compounded of the needs, desires and essential qualities of the
flesh-and-blood social being.
In the political economy of power,
scarcity always rages; there is never remotely enough of it to go around; and
in turn, the group and individual Will to Power is the prime generator of all
scarcity in human affairs. J.-P. Sartre
claimed that human beings throughout history reproduce scarcity at higher and higher levels, but the scarcity of
power is everlasting.
Numerous competing power centers
continue to exist in the not-yet-fully-globalized world of nations,
semi-autonomous provinces such as Scotland and Quebec, ethnic homelands such as
Kurdistan, loosely-administered or informal protectorates such as Taiwan, and a
few remaining frontier regions such as the Tribal Areas of Pakistan. These competing power centers help satisfy
men’s burning urge to have control over the fates of self and kindred and
community; they afford alternatives, second chances, refuge and inspiration as
well as cautionary tales to those who have been put in check by their own
societies. “Empowerment” is the polite,
PC term for the will to power, which cannot be denounced out of existence.
Within any one society, of course,
there are dominant and subordinate groups that share the limited available
power unequally and more or less uneasily.
Often, though not always, such class stratification originates from the
conquest of one people by another or successive others. Dominant groups are better situated to
recruit their own into the next cohort of power players. The great task of every generation is to sort
out which of its sons will win or be granted the status of men – that is, powerful self-determining adults – and which will
remain essentially powerless (emasculated).
Societies like Ireland under British rule, where, no matter what their
qualities, very few Irish Catholic boys could hope to attain manhood in this
sense, are as a result fatally unstable (that instability persists in
Ulster). The same situation repeats
itself around the planet, from the African experience in America to the caste
system of India to the Intifada against Israel to the suppressed nationalities
of the former Soviet Union; from the Hebrews under Egyptian and Babylonian
captivity to the Saxons under the Normans to the Scottish clans under the
English crown to the South under Reconstruction to the 19th-century Italian banditti under the nobles.
The phrase “will to power” links
this analysis to the philosophies of Schopenhauer and Nietzsche, while the word
“status” links it to the theories of C. Wright Mills, Richard Sennett, Paul
Fussell and Tom Wolfe (who declared his entire opus to be a commedia of status pursuit). These writers mock the “status panic,”
“status anxiety” and “hidden injuries” of the middle class, as though all these
amounted to no more than the petty dignity of a Walter Mitty. But Eric Hobsbawm’s classic study Bandits (1969) better judges the real
stakes of the struggle.
“The gentry use the pen, we the gun;
they are the lords of the land, we of the mountain,” explains one old Italian
brigand quoted in Bandits. Hobsbawm defines “social bandits” as
outlaws whom the lord and state
regard as criminals,
but who remain within ... society,
and are considered
by their people as heroes, as
champions, avengers,
fighters for justice, perhaps even
leaders of liberation,
and in any case as men to be
admired, helped and
supported.
The concept of social banditry
illuminates folk culture’s enduring celebration of Robin Hood, Jesse James,
Pretty Boy Floyd, Geronimo, Emiliano Zapata and Pancho Villa (not to mention
Fidel and Che), as well as its obsession with love matches between indomitable
commoners and maidens of royal blood in the face of fierce societal and
parental opposition.
“Youth gangs” based on ethnicity are
today’s social bandits, celebrated in fashion and music video. In 1961, only 23 large American cities
reported serious gang problems; now half of all towns with populations of
25,000 or less report gang activity. As
male initiation rites wither away along with the social power they once
conferred, the peer group becomes all, and the peer group in extremis is the gang. As
Lionel Tiger and Robin Fox analyze it in The
Imperial Animal,
In post-adolescent males, the
genetic message is one of sinister
and often undirected rebelliousness;
this threatening information
is received by older males, whose
steadier hormonal systems go
into reaction and insist on
containment.
But what happens when the old rites
of passage lead nowhere, when containment never gives way to coronation – “The
King is dead, long live the Little Prince”?
To shift perspective somewhat,
immigrants into a nation are the equivalent of an entire new cohort of youth in
terms of their “message” to the established power structure. They create an automatic power vacuum as they
push their frequently unwelcome way into pre-established bastions of
power. Usually these immigrants have
come from societies already suffering crises of power scarcity. It has been well documented how gangsterism is the natural response of
newly-arrived groups shut out of mainstream power relationships. Virtually every ethnic group that has come to
America, including the Germans but with the possible exception of the Finns,
Swedes and Norwegians (who often became diehard Reds instead), goes through a
gangster phase on its way to making it.
Gangs create alternative
institutions in a subterranean world with its own rules, values and
rewards. At the lowly street gang level,
where one is less than a man, forced to remain a boy, one’s women are
revealingly called “mamas.” The IRA depends
on such women just as Hell’s Angels do.
Since the “legit” economy is all sewn up – or at least does not offer a
quick enough payoff to the young man on the make – gangs develop their own underground or “black”
economy of smuggled, stolen and forbidden goods and services – “vice” of all
kinds – tax-free. Thus do they amass the
fortunes that buy them respect, that
nectar and ambrosia of social power, first in their world and finally in the
broader society.
Gangs may be “just a phase” for most
groups, but in some cases they outlive their initial purpose. Irish-dominated political machines survive in
big cities and in the Northeast. La Cosa
Nostra staggers onward, despite the great success of Italians in American life,
still offering pilfered power to its “made men” even as Don Corleone’s dream
for his son Michael in “The Godfather” – legitimacy – has long been realized;
the gang makes men (“men of respect”)
when mainstream society refuses to.
Assimilation of immigrants, then, is
in large part the process of gradually incorporating their men into the
existing structures of power in the host society. With the massive immigration flows of modern
times, however, that absorption process is breaking down. In some cases, as in the U.K., U.S. and
Canada, quotas and affirmative action arbitrarily allow some immigrants to cut
in line ahead even of more qualified native-born minorities, creating further
political, economic and social chaos.
But for ambitious immigrants who are not winners of the power lottery,
gangs more vicious than ever remain the time-honored way to go.
The U.S. now harbors dozens of
violent, ethnic-based gangs with hundreds of thousands of members. As our nation’s sovereign power base is
sapped by the globaloma, such gangs will become permanent features of a bleak
landscape. It is an already notorious
phenomenon that second-generation immigrants may be more prone to gangsterism
than were their parents. A gang of the
latest pattern, Mara Salvatrucha (MS-13), with its name so redolent of the
Virgin and salvation, is headed by illegal aliens from El Salvador who joined
in Los Angeles, were deported, regrouped in San Salvador, and have now
reentered the country to prey on our fellow citizens.
These citizens will be glad to learn
that gun control meshes well with Mara Salvatrucha’s style: Many of its murders are done by machete. Naturally such a gang targets police officers. Cops to them are just rival gunmen in the pay
of the gang in power. MS-13’s 20,000
members nationwide now include Mexicans, Ecuadorans, Hondurans, and Guatemalans
as well as Salvadorans. MS-13 is also
reputed to have met with “a top al Qaeda lieutenant” in Tegucigalpa ... But not
to worry: Authorities periodically
announce they have arrested and are planning to deport hundreds of MS-13
leaders. (Again.)
As this al Qaeda involvement
suggests, the scarcity of power, authority and manhood has been internationalized. Even Europe has reacted to America’s ueber-hegemon status by unionizing. Unfortunately, the European Union seeks to
counterbalance American power by wresting centuries’ worth of power off its
national foundations – a process akin to tossing priceless Greek statuary into
the street to serve as barricades.
Terrorist groups are political gangs
that operate like international guerrillas, snatching at whatever shreds of
power they can reach. Sometimes entire
countries, “rogue states” in revolt against the stifling dominion of the
hegemons, are relegated to gang status by the “legitimate” international
community. Referring to the Muslim world
in Civilization and Its Enemies: The Next
Stage of History, neoconservative author Lee Harris threatens, “If a nation
contains gangs who have acted with conspicuous ruthlessness, then it is not
entitled to be considered a sovereign state.”
Such a threat is the problem, not
the solution. Islam in fact is rapidly
becoming the official creed of the world’s disenfranchised, disempowered men,
radiating outward from its Arab base to embrace millions in the “developing”
(i.e., subordinated) nations of Asia, Africa and Latin America. The hegemons all have nukes; their poor
relations want nukes, too. No one who
calls himself a man suffers another man to get the drop on him. To be forced to disarm is to be
castrated. The situation is quite
literally intolerable.
There is so little room for powerful
men in the emerging globaloma that the very subject of manhood is greeted with
outright hostility. Between nations and
within nations, manhood is now vigorously discouraged. An aggressive program of cultural neutering
to complement the political neutering is underway. The new behavior models for males – image after
image of fat, sluggish dolts alternating with howling party animals – reinforce
the message “Men are dogs.” So
relentless a reprogramming must be deliberate, as though man-hating viragos had
seized power in Washington and Hollywood and Madison Avenue, Davos and Whitehall
and Brussels and The Hague. (But of
course these “viragos” are themselves overwhelmingly male – men dedicated to
the dispossession and disempowerment of their very own “fellow men.”) It also
explains why public education is so stupefying and border control such a
joke: Countless men who would have had a
shot at social power in a sovereign America must now be reprogrammed as
submissive proles.
“Women have needs, too,” some will
point out. Women too want power over
their lives, to separate from their mothers, to not be dependent on “the
kindness of strangers,” to feel significant, to become successful adults; but
the drive of girls to attain adult womanhood is not the driving force of
history. Women continue overwhelmingly
to choose men for their power potential and to then share in that status. Where women’s will to power most powerfully
manifests itself is in mothers’ ruthless promotion of their own children’s
interests over those of other bitches’ brats.
Meanwhile their daughters more or less mercilessly whittle away at the
stock of rivals competing for the most potent males: “mean girls” in a war of
attrition, culling the herd of “superfluous” females.
Yet Steve Sailer is insightful to
argue that men have started investing a great deal more in their daughters now
that most families are down to one or two children. Half the one-child families will have a
daughter only, while two-thirds of the two-child families will have either one
or two daughters; in the absence of any son, many fathers treat a daughter like
a son.
Also factored into this
transformation must be the campaign against manhood, however: fathers realize their daughters must develop
masculine characteristics in the absence of men able to protect or support them
in future. Lionel Tiger for his part
argues that women are surging ahead of men in degree of education because they
now expect to have to support both themselves and their children, while men
expect to support themselves alone.
As for gangs “as heroes, as
champions, avengers, fighters for justice, perhaps even leaders of liberation,”
in Hobsbawm’s words, most if not all revolutionary movements do begin as
gang-like “cells” – Freemasons, Committees of Correspondence, Minutemen, the
League of the Just – that array themselves against the powers that be. The language of our Declaration of
Independence clearly voices the resentment felt by subjugated men toward their
haughty masters:
The History of the present King of
Great-Britain is
a History of repeated Injuries and
Usurpations, all
having in direct Object the
Establishment of an
absolute Tyranny over these States.
... He has
dissolved Representative Houses
repeatedly, for
opposing with manly Firmness his
Invasions on
the Rights of the People. ... He has
combined
with others to subject us to a
Jurisdiction foreign
to our Constitution, and
unacknowledged by
our Laws ...
The American revolutionary
experience, thankfully, led to greater social empowerment, greater freedom,
greater self-determination; but the rise of gangs to challenge and replace anciens régimes is not always a
liberating development. The Jacobins and
Bolsheviks spring to mind. The Nazis are
a particularly complex example, a hybrid of street thugs, parvenus and other
marginal types with established major players in German industry and the
military. The Freikorps bands,
reorganized as the SA and then replaced by the Waffen-SS, contested the
Wehrmacht for its monopoly on the use of force.
In a mere dozen years Nazi gang culture transformed the face of
Germany. The entire nation adopted the
gang signs, songs, symbols, insignia, acronyms and colors of the NSDAP. The nation itself in effect became a gang, desperately
battling hegemonic Britain for its stolen “place in the sun.”
In the recent film “Der Untergang”
(“Downfall”), a burning-eyed Goebbels is shown more than once slipping away to
stare into a mirror; you get the sense that he has done this many times,
veering off to gaze at his image in its dramatic uniform as though to pinch
himself – “It is really I, who was nothing and am now a god of the Third
Reich.” Goebbels preferred his children
to die rather than be “slaves” in the postwar order.
In sum, history is a great Bildungsroman, a coming-of-age story of
the struggle of men to ensure that their own sons become the men of the next
generation – real autonomous manhood being the scarcest of all forms of social
power. Globalization thwarts and aborts
this process for untold millions by gutting and abstracting older forms of power
and authority – just as the One Ring does in J.R.R. Tolkien’s fantasia on this
very process, The Lord of the Rings.
And ceaseless emigration and immigration destroy the alchemy of assimilation
that historically gave newcomers entrée
to social power.
Further, globalization’s surreal
concentration of authority into fewer and fewer hands strangles not only the
power built up over centuries by hundreds of dominant national groups, but also the possibility of any
meaningful meritocracy of individuals. The latter phenomenon was an upside feature
of the expansive, revolutionary phase of European and American
industrialization; there is no way within the globaloma that this miracle could
ever come to pass again. There will
arise instead a vanishingly small coterie of the legitimate, already prefigured
in the phenomenon of political dynasties.
The Bushes and Cheneys, Kennedys and Clintons will take care that their
own never sink into peonage; the rest of us will be the equivalent of bastards,
dependent, powerless and “lumpenized.”
Yet history is also the story of
irresistible resistance to tyranny.
People’s response to power shortages in the past has been to form
alternative institutions to keep alive their identity and aspirations: trade unions, workingmen’s associations,
Friendly Societies offering benefits “such as unemployment, superannuation,
sickness, accident and death allowances” (from G.D.H. Cole and Raymond
Postgate, The Common People 1746-1946), co-operative workshops and
factories, “Co-Op” stores (which introduced the masses to healthy foods),
credit unions, strike funds, underground schools that taught forbidden
languages like Basque and Irish, samizdat, boycotts, organized Luddism
and sabotage, vigilantism, “subversive” forms of religious belief, not to
mention the vibrant cultures of pub and music hall. These institutions helped heal the ravages of
raw industrial capitalism; they long predate the imitations that the State was
forced to come up with to deter revolution.
The rising global elites now are
quietly, swiftly shifting to their own new institutions like the International
Criminal Court, the Kyoto Protocol, the Law of the Sea Treaty and the
imposition of a global tax under the cover of U.N. “reform.” They seem to be trying as rapidly as possible
to lay waste traditional institutions – religion, marriage, citizenship,
private property, the separation of powers, equality before the law – as they abandon
them. The Supreme Court has begun citing
international conventions, not the Constitution. Free traders in Congress behave as though
favoring American workers were an act of the most hideous racism.
The more centralized and totalized
the government, the less benefit to the governed. Healing the ravages of globalization will
require salvaging and rebuilding alternative power centers of our own. Home schooling and the charter school
movement are immensely important enterprises in this cause. The Minuteman Project’s direct action on
America’s southern border, “just doing” the job that the official
border-controllers refuse to, is another great precedent. Even blogging, while a very mixed bag, serves
notice that “official” sources of information are no longer allowed to do their
usual lousy job of framing the news, and demonstrates that there are far more
voices out there demanding to be heard than can possibly be accommodated by the
so-called MSM.
On September 11, 2001, the only
hijacked plane that did not find its mark was brought down by a gang of
passengers armed only with the heroism of despair. When the state goes off its rocker, as it
periodically does, it is the “little platoons” of civil society that set our
lives in vital order once again.
NOTE,
August 2018: I
wrote this essay more than 10 years ago, but it didn’t seem to need much
updating.
----
Marian Kester Coombs
