How Do You Know If You’re Living Through the Death of an Empire?

The Survivalist’s Odds ‘n Sods

James Wesley Rawles January 6, 2022 January 4, 2022

SurvivalBlog presents another edition of The Survivalist’s Odds ‘n Sods— a collection of news bits and pieces that are relevant to the modern survivalist and prepper from “JWR”. Our goal is to educate our readers, to help them to recognize emerging threats, and to be better prepared for both disasters and negative societal trends. You can’t mitigate a risk if you haven’t first identified a risk. Today, we look at the collapse of empires

Inside The Rock: Operation Tracer

Over at Notes From The Bunker, my friend Commander Zero offered this amazing bit of WW2 history, inside the Rock of Gibraltar: Operation Tracer.

The Latest Threat: Suicide Drones in Iraq

An article linked over at the Whatfinger.com news aggregation site: Two suicide drones shot down while trying to attack US troops in Iraq.

Spiking Death Rates in Younger Americans

I saw this at The Gateway Pundit: “Highest Death Rates In History” – Indiana Life Insurance CEO Says Deaths are UP BY A WHOPPING 40% Among People Aged 18-64 in 2020 – Only a Fraction From Covid Deaths. JWR’s Comment: “Nothing To See Here, Move Along…”

Living Through the Death of an Empire?

Francis sent us this, that surprisingly ran in leftist stalwart Mother Jones: How Do You Know If You’re Living Through the Death of an Empire? Here is an excerpt:

“The fall of an empire is supposed to be a dramatic thing. It’s right there in the name. “Fall” conjures up images of fluted temple columns toppling to the ground, pulled down by fur-clad barbarians straining to destroy something beautiful. Savage invasions, crushing battlefield defeats, sacked cities, unlucky rulers put to death: These are the kinds of stories that usually come to mind when we think of the end of an empire. They seem appropriate, the climaxes we expect from a narrative of rise, decline, and fall.

We’re all creatures of narrative, whether we think explicitly in those terms or not, and stories are one of the fundamental ways in which we engage with and grasp the meaning of the world. It’s natural that we expect the end of a story—the end of an empire—to have some drama.

The reality is far less exciting. Any political unit sound enough to project its power over a large geographic area for centuries has deep structural roots. Those roots can’t be pulled up in a day or even a year. If an empire seems to topple overnight, it’s certain that the conditions that produced the outcome had been present for a long time—suppurating wounds that finally turned septic enough for the patient to succumb to a sudden trauma.”

The MSM’s Selective Memory Omits 1954 and 1971

The latest from the Mass Media Propagandists: “A year after a pro-Trump mob ransacked the Capitol in the worst attack on the home of Congress since it was burned by British forces in 1814…” Seriously? The journalists somehow selectively forgot about the 1954 United States Capitol shooting incident. And in terms of property damage, January 6th was a trifle compared to the estimated $300,000 in damage done in the 1971 Weather Underground bombing of the capitol. (That would be the equivalent of $2,058,874 in 2021 Dollars.) The journalists at the Washington Post need some remedial history study!