You Know the Gops, Right? Almost as Bad as the Krats

“Any state, any entity, any ideology which fails to recognize the worth, the dignity, the rights of Man... that state is obsolete.” -- Rod Serling (1961)

Conversation before voting in 2501, location unknown. 

Voter 1: Peace in our time. We’ve done it. Remember the Gops and the Krats? 

Voter 2: Two sides of the same corrupt coin. The Gops represented the military and the police, and the Krats boosted lawyers and unions. Neither cared about the individual. 

V1: By the time America’s 2024 presidential election rolled around, people forgot that if divisions ran too deep between dominant political players, it was too late for any real change.

V2: Yup. If you can’t break bread with your enemy during widespread indebtedness, violence is the only path left—or some form of segregation or displacement. It was even worse for the Uni-party Americans, because you need honest lawyers to temper law enforcement excesses and reasonable unions to mitigate corporate excesses, and of course no society can prosper without honest police. Two flip sides of the same coin… that forgot they were either bound or worthless. 

V1: Mind-bogglingly, a nation of people with mostly German ancestry managed to forget that Germany in the late 1930s and early 1940s was one of the world’s strongest countries. Germany was arguably first in technology—how else did they manage to conquer so much? And that’s not all—they founded, during Nazism, the companies Adidas and Volkswagen, which still exist today. The Nazis were clearly good marketers—Volk and Wagen mean “People’s Car.” 

V2: So the Nazis came to power by caring about the individual German citizen and convincing them they would prioritize them over non-Germans? 

V1: Something like that. Remember—Germany’s strong economy attracted many immigrants—that’s why there were so many non-Germans there. 

V2: So Germany under Nazism was, at the beginning, one of the world’s more diverse countries?

V1: Exactly. And it also supported films and the cinema, which at the time was relatively new.

“The Nazis valued film as a propaganda instrument of enormous power, courting the masses by means of slogans that were aimed directly at the instincts and emotions of the people. The Department of Film also used the economic power of German moviegoers to influence the international film market. This resulted in almost all Hollywood producers censoring films critical of Nazism during the 1930s, as well as showing news shorts produced by the Nazis in American theaters… The main goal of the Nazi film policy was to promote escapism, which was designed to distract the population and to keep everybody in good spirits.” — from Wikipedia

V2: Ah, so co-opting the entertainment industry allowed the government to minimize and suppress voices it believed were anti-military and anti-German, creating the illusion of stability. 

V1: Yes. In 2024, intelligence agencies had co-opted social media companies, where young Americans received their news. The government’s power over media was so strong, it managed to imprison the most honest journalist in the West, an Australian named Julian Assange.

V2: It was right there in the name with social media company Facebook, right? How could people not know Mark Zuckerberg’s company was CIA-supported facial recognition and data mining software? 

V1: Everyone back then was too enamored with technology and its promise to bring people together. Even the ones who understood more than most couldn’t wean themselves off because surveillance capitalism became ubiquitous. 

V2: But the willingness to destroy privacy backfired, didn’t it? 

V1: True. Not only did governments lose the trust of their citizens, but their own backdoors were hacked by foreigners, effectively handing technological security to the private sector. After 2016, the issue wasn’t really privacy or security, but whether corporations or government agencies would resolve the balance. 

V2: So ironic. Elon Musk and Jeff Bezos, two billionaires, effectively replaced NASA, and NASA ended up giving them taxpayer funds to explore space. The 2024 presidential election was essentially an incompetent lawyer supported by governmental military leaders versus a billionaire in the pockets of private defense contractors.

V1: Even at lower levels, the private sector was winning the credibility battle. The official chess body, FIDE, had an online platform and even a corporate London listing, but its technology looked amateurish. The better and more popular chess site was privately-owned Chess.com. Meanwhile, as Zuckerberg’s Facebook aka Meta was making billions of dollars relying on artificial intelligence and not paying for content, pornographic distributor OnlyFans paid 20 billion dollars to content creators in less than ten years.

V2: The pornographers were creating an individual-centric economic model?

V1: Not really—the pornographers were an arm of the international mafia, which supported a separate technological standard called Blockchain. Basically, by 2024, mafias had gained more credibility and technological expertise than most governments. 

We needn’t have been surprised. So much talent in the West was ignored because it didn’t support military objectives. In 1922, the New York Times interviewed Adolf Hitler but not Malcolm X, a New York resident. Who interviewed Malcolm X? Playboy, a pornographic publication. Later, during much of the early 21st century, the best place to gain military intelligence was Larry Flynt’s letter in Hustler magazine.

“If the First Amendment will protect a scumbag like me, then it will protect all of you, because I’m the worst.” — Larry Flynt, American pornographer shot and paralyzed by a white supremacist

V2: [audible sigh] The government, as we all understand today, has one main job: present better alternatives than the informal sector, aka the mafia. To accomplish that purpose, it must ensure its civilian employees retain credibility, which requires adherence to clear and articulated principles.

You don’t want the military running or controlling civilian institutions because “following orders,” while necessary for large organizations in life-and-death scenarios, is incompatible with human progress. Neither is “dulce et decorum est pro patria mori” a unifying principle. Successful civilian governments unite residents under principles, and political struggles, if meaningful, produce prime principles, the first of which is always, “Thou shall not tolerate corruption nor racial unrest.”

V1: Ah, the Singaporean model. Much easier to do in a small country than a large one. 

V2: Sure, but much harder to do in any country when military spending outpaces civilian spending, or when military spending is non-transparent. In 2024, one turning point was the 2024 Likud-Hamas war, which began as a local conflict, then expanded into a regional humanitarian disaster. Anti-Palestinian propaganda became much harder when innocent Christians were killed in Gaza and Lebanon with American weapons.

Also, in October, Likud struck Russia’s Hmeimim military base in Syria. Very few news outlets covered the incident, but the attack, in threatening Russia’s oil-based economy, changed Russia’s tolerance for longer-distance conflicts. Thus, the United States and Europe, already bogged down in Ukraine, had to deal with further uncertainty. Post-Vietnam in the 1960s, the United States lost the credibility to direct economic influence in Asia, and after Ukraine, the West again lost credibility as China- and Russia-backed BRICS expanded. 

How could the West have believed antagonizing one billion Muslims, one billion Chinese, and all of Russia was a winning strategy? We are told Western countries, in sharing trillions of dollars of debt but no moral principles other than a superficial understanding of Christianity, had no choice. Essentially, the Russians learned from the Soviet Union’s mistakes but the Americans did not until 2143. As weapons got smaller and cheaper and digital surveillance became easier, no one needed a massive defense budget anymore. Instead, “peace investments” focused on getting along with one’s neighbors, fortifying domestic production, and protecting supply chains. India and Australia initially had difficulty balancing the past with the future, but they eventually got it right. 

So who are you voting for, mate? 

V1: The one who’s promising me the most entertainment credits. And you? 

V2: The one who says his heroes are Lee Kuan Yew; Goh Chok Tong; Václav Havel; Malaysia’s Anwar Ibrahim; economist Hernando de Soto Polar; Australia’s Paul John Keating; Scotland’s Gordon Brown; and Dwight D. Eisenhower. But I think your candidate is leading. 

V1: ё-моё!

© Matthew Rafat (October 14, 2024 from Singapore)