Copley on the revolt of the Westphalians against rulers of today's city-states

"The Decisive War of Democracies" is the title given to the podcast of Gregory Copley's discussion on the Tuesday John Batchelor Show. Listen if you want to appreciate more about the growing conflict between anti-national elites who control the world's most powerful urban centers and those who support national sovereignty.

Will the conflict morph into open warfare -- and even an apocalyptic war, as top Trump advisor Steve Bannon clearly sees on the horizon? I'm betting it won't, for the same reason I eventually abandoned the theory of a doomsday virus. The counter-theory is based on the fact that the more hosts a highly infectious and deadly virus infects, the more chances for the virus to "reassort" with other, less-deadly viruses infecting the same hosts. These reassortments tend to produce a less virulent strain of the deadly virus. 

I think this is a key consideration in an era of avian, human, and animal megapopulations. In an almost poetic twist, the bane of humanity -- 'overpopulation' -- might well be our best defense against a doomsday virus in an era of globalized air travel, which within hours can deposit a highly lethal virus all around the world.

To apply this same line of reasoning to whether a doomsday war would result from conflicts between supporters of nation-states and city-states -- 

An inadvertently funny accusation was mounted recently by a group that totted up 200 Western media outlets it claimed were either outright supporting Russia or didn't realize they were Russian dupes.  

I exclaimed in amusement, "Only 200?" There are surely thousands if not tens of thousands of Western blogs and other media outlets that can be considered Russia friendly, if one takes into account that Russia has become the bastion of Westphalian thinking. There are now so many of these media outlets that the idea of accusing them all of being Russian agents or dupes belongs in a Looney-Tune cartoon.

One casualty of this situation has been David Cameron, who seemed to view all the land between London and Doha as flyover country. Another casualty last year was the American Democratic Party, which viewed all land between New York City and Los Angeles as flyover country.

Which is to say that unlike earlier eras, when a relatively small number of people periodically warred against urban elites who'd gotten too big for their britches, today there are vast numbers in rebellion, and they are distributed throughout societies, across the world. The surprise Brexit "yes" vote, as with the surprise election of Donald Trump, are but two of the many indications of the huge number of such people and their diversity. 

That the mainstream media and political pollsters have ignored these vast numbers of people, or portrayed them as bumpkins, or didn't even perceive their existence until the two surprise votes, has nothing to do with the reality of their size.  

So I think that the simple fact of megapopulations in this era works against the traditionally 'closed shops' controlled by the kind of elites who touched off, say, World War I in the name of a phony nationalism. Those elites were fighting to maintain their own power not protect national boundaries or the masses, who were considered too uneducated to be of use other than as cannon fodder.

Today's masses are increasingly well educated, and don't take to dying on a battlefield for an illogical argument. What could be more illogical than arguing on the one hand that only jingoists support nationalism, while on the other urging people to sign up to defend their nation?

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