“And I heard a voice in the midst of the four beasts
And I looked, and behold a pale horse
And his name that sat on him was death, and hell followed with him.”
– Johnny Cash, from the lyrics to The Man Comes Around (2002), paraphrasing Rev. 6:8
In this article I will discuss the philosophy of melee weapons, defined as hand-held non-projectile firing weapons, in what has been called the “multigenerational scenario” of social or civilizational collapse, spanning a number of generations. [1] The article will first outline why it is highly likely that modern civilization is well on the road to the systemic breakdown that will lead to the multigenerational collapse scenario. The evidence from the collapse of previous societies and civilizations indicates that these are times of hyper-violence and large-scale death, as one aspect of a collapse is a die-off of significant portion of the population, if not by warfare, then from starvation. Facing such tempest, warrior men would want to arm up and face their fate, come what may, while the wimps of postmodernity will die, as sniffling cowards.
I will argue that during the collapse period, firearms with conventional smokeless powder will dominate the small arms battle scene, with a return to classic black powder weapons, and archery perhaps after a generation or so. But in the even longer term, as the bullets run out, and spare parts too, and become difficult to make in the post-apocalyptic ruins, melee weapons will have a greater significance than at present. Having said that by way of outline, let us then examine the concept of civilizational collapse, and after that get down to the sharp end of things.
Collapseology: The Death of Civilizations
Philosophers and other theorists have been interested in the collapse of societies and civilisations in the West, at least since the time of the ancient Greek philosophers. Plato (428-347 BC) wrote about the golden age that had passed, and others speculated about a lost Atlantis, a continent that was speculated to have sunk beneath the waves of the Atlantic Ocean, west of the straits of Gibraltar. Theorization about the collapse of societies and civilization also occurred with Chinese and Arabic thinkers, such as by Ibn Khaldun in his Muqaddimah. [2] However in the West, the best known, and most studied case of the collapse of an empire was the fall of Rome, with a leading discussion offered by Edward Gibbon (1737-1794) in his treatise, The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire. [3] According to Gibbon: “The decline of Rome was the natural and inevitable effect of immoderate greatness. Prosperity ripened the principle of decay; the causes of destruction multiplied with the extent of conquest; and as soon as time or accident had removed the artificial supports, the stupendous fabric yielded to the pressure of its own weight.” [4] Apart from this element of hubris and internal disintegration [5], the barbarian invaders played an even more prominent role than Gibbon recognised, pulling Rome down quite quickly, once Rome had been weakened. [6]
The concept of a “civilization,” is usually defined along the dictionary way of a political system comprising an organized society, or societies with cities, agriculture, and cultural structures. A collapse of civilisation involves a breakdown, by various mechanisms of this order, leading to a radical decrease in population numbers, and the loss of organized society, such as science, the rule of law, culture and art. This breakdown leads to a new Dark Age, if the civilization cannot pull itself up by its bootstraps. [7] Some civilizations, such as China rebuilt; others such as Europe, that arose from the collapse of Rome, constitute a metamorphosis, while others collapse in total, such as the Viking settlement in Greenland and the case of Easter Island. [8] The total collapse scenario, as seen in the end of Easter Island, typically involves hyper-violence [9]; I call this the Mad Max scenario, after the movies.
Following Gibbon, many theorists propose that the principal mechanism of collapse is internal, at least to begin with; as Ophuls puts it, “a civilization declines when it has exhausted its physical and moral capital.” [10] As Will Durant has written: “A great civilization is not conquered from without until it has destroyed itself from within.” [11] In general, many collapseology theorists agree with the internal decay thesis, adding their own variations. Thus, Oswald Spengler in The Decline of West [12] saw all civilizations existing like organisms, having a birth, a period of virility, and a decline and death. Sir John Bagot Glubb, agreed that empires ultimately rotted from within [13], as did Arnold Toynbee, in A Study of History. [14] The more recent theorists, are Roberto Vacca in The Coming Dark Age [15] and Joseph Tainter, in The Collapse of Complex Societies [16], saw collapse arising from diminishing returns from increased complexity, which ultimately plays out in social breakdown, as problem-solving ability begins to fall. [17] Societies may then experience a drift to chaos. [18]
It is not an original view to propose that the West, especially seen in America, and Western Europe are already experiencing states of social disintegration and rot, and one can view many YouTube posts each day, such as Canadian Prepper, The Prepared Homestead, Angry Prepper, Full Spectrum Survival, and others, who give us updates on the dawning apocalypse. I mention these not for agreement, but as information sources for news items. For those who want print, we can refer readers to diverse sources and political perspectives, such as Zerohedge, Natural News.com, American Thinker.com (the occasional superb article on this topic, and good ones each day on political decline) and Michael Snyder’s substack, which is an extended commentary from a Christian perspective on the coming collapse. My point here is that these sites have compiled an enormous amount of evidence with links to the original sources, showing the decline and fall of the West.
Before giving a gloss on this evidence, it is instructive to consider the present state of Haiti, which is heading towards Mad Max, and demonstrates what to expect from collapse. At present, Haiti’s (former) prime minister Ariel Henry, upon return from a trip to Africa seeking firepower aid to restore order to Haiti, found that gunfire from the gangs who had come to control the majority of the capital of Port-au-Prince, prevented the plane landing. Henry had to land in Puerto Rico, trying to figure out a way into the country without getting shot; he never did and resigned on March 12, 2024. Thus, Haiti has no operating government; what remains of the police force are battling with warlords on the streets. Meanwhile under the rule of the warlords, there are reports of gang members engaging in cannibalism (not for food, but intimidation), although other reports deny this. Jimmy “Barbecue” Cherizier (also said to have “barbecued” his enemies), heads one of the toughest gangs, known as the Revolutionary Forces of the G9 Family and Allies. A few weeks back this gang attacked two Port-au-Prince prisons, releasing almost 4,000 dangerous criminals, who presumably joined the gang. Bombings of the National Palace and Interior Ministry have occurred, police stations have been destroyed. The US embassy has been evacuated. [19] As Monica Showalter says in summary:
“It’s part of a trend of nations in our hemisphere falling into extreme states of chaos from newly empowered gangs, all of them made rich from shipping illegal migrants into the U.S. and made muscular with new manpower from major prison breaks preceding the armed takeover attacks. We’ve seen it in northern Mexico, we’ve seen it in Ecuador. In Venezuela and Nicaragua something comparable is happening, except that the worst has already happened. The gangsters are the government, not challengers to the government. But the chaos is also there and these government gangs are growing rich off shipping illegal migrants to the states and emptying their prisons too.” [20] Indeed, the Biden regime is already preparing to welcome the Haitian criminals as new Democrat voters; DoD officials have testified before the Armed Services Committee that the US must prepare for this migration, of at least one million migrants. [21] In fact, they are already coming and no doubt will be here before this essay is finished. Presumably, resistance is useless, every criminal in the world has their part to play in altering the electoral boundaries to favor the Democrats, and some mass raping and murder is the price that must be paid for new vibrant Democrat voters.
The invasion of the illegals through the southern border, kept open by the Biden regime for electoral manipulation, has led to a “migrant crime crisis” in many major US cities. [22] Thus, in New York, illegals attacked the police in Times Square, and machete attacks have occurred across the United States. The murder of nursing student Laken Riley, who was slaughtered by an illegal while she was out jogging, has also raised the issue of illegal migrant crime. The Biden regime has flown in 320,000 illegal immigrants from Latin American airports to 43 US cities, but US customs and Border “Protection” have refused to identify where they went. Note that this concern is not a “racist” issue, as we should be concerned about invaders of whatever colour, and what is of concern is conduct, not color, fact, not fiction, the content of their character.
Mike in Alaska has noted that the illegals are in number equal to an invading army. [23] FBI Director Christopher Wray stated in November 2023, that there could be tens of thousands of potential terrorists crossing the border. [24] More recently, concern has been widely expressed about the tens of thousands of military age Chinese that have entered through the open southern border, perhaps as communist PLA agents to form sleeper cells until China is ready to invade Taiwan, where they go into action attacking the grid, the internet and essential infrastructure. [25]
Along with this, many US cities are descending into chaos, with a spike in felonies occurring, well documented by Michael Snyder. [26] New York has recently employed the National Guard on the subways, while police do bag searches in an attempt to deal with spiralling crime. [27] In Chicago, gang members outnumber police 22 to 1. [28] Pittsburgh police will no longer respond to calls such as thief, harassment and burglary alarms. [29] And Austin Texas has become “machete city,” as the homeless wielding cheap machetes and knives to terrorize ordinary citizens [30] As Tyler Durden put it: “A sure sign of accelerating collapse is the growing prevalence of psychopaths and psychopathic behavior in the open.” [31] And a sign of the decaying times, attacks upon churches in the US have increased by 800 percent over the last six years [32], while the state of California seized enough fentanyl in 2023 to kill the entire population of the Earth nearly twice over. [33]
All of this and more indicates that the US is in a serious state of civilizational collapse. If present trends continue, the Haiti fate awaits. And that which has been said above applies to most countries in the West, especially Western Europe, the UK, France, Germany and Sweden. In many respects, Sweden with its no-go zones, explosion of rapes, and real explosions by bombs, challenges the US in the race to the bottom of the wheelie bin of history. The Swedish military are now getting involved in dealing with crime, but the situation may be too entrenched now, left to fester for far too long.
(To be continued tomorrow, in Part 2.)