The End Times

Who survives the collapse?

The End Times

The long awaited collapse of the system has become an article of faith among alienated vanguardists. Strangely enough, I rarely see James Howard Kunstler mentioned in the context of this theory. Kunstler has done a better job than anyone in the White Nationalist movement in pinpointing the cause of the collapse and imagining what life would be like in “post-collapse” conditions.

For those who are unfamiliar with James Howard Kunstler, he is the Harold Covington of the Peak Oil movement. He has written two novels (World Made By Hand and The Witch of Hebron) which project The Long Emergency (Kunstler’s term for the Peak Oil crisis) playing out in a small town in Upstate New York.

As far as “collapse porn” goes, it doesn’t get any better than the World Made By Hand novels. Unlike the Northwest Quartet, Kunstler’s doomsday scenario has a degree of plausibility to it. The world hits the all time peak in conventional oil production. A gradual staircase ratcheting down of economic contraction begins.

Investment capital becomes scarce because of wildly unstable financial markets. The world is caught unprepared and doesn’t have the time or the resources to adapt to the end of cheap oil. A dysfunctional federal government led by incompetent leaders is finally discredited by its response to the crisis and gradually loses its authority over vast swathes of the country.

Everyday life swiftly becomes more local.

The Tribulations

In my opinion, one of the most persuasive insights that Kunstler makes is that Americans would interpret “the collapse” in religious terms. It would be seen as God’s punishment for electing the Antichrist, Barack Hussein Obama.

Living in the aftermath of “the collapse,” Americans would turn to the Bible and interpret their trials in the language of the Tribulations. Hardcore Calvinism would come roaring back and would thrive like never before. There would be a nationwide movement to stamp out sinners in preparation for the Second Coming of Jesus Christ.

“The racket was coming over what used to be our public radio station, WAMC out of Albany, but the familiar reassuring voices of normality were long gone. Some febrile evangelist was railing from the Book of Revelation:

“I know thy works and where thou dwellest, even where Satan’s seat is; and thou holdest fast my name, and hast not denied my faith, even in those days wherein Antipas was my faithful martyr, who was slain among you, where Satan dwelleth …”

I switched on the television on the outside chance that something might come through. Nothing had been on for years. The local network affiliates withered away after the national network of cable channels went out, until there was nothing. But when the electricity did come on, I automatically turned on the TV and roamed around the stations to see if anything had changed. It hadn’t.

I searched the FM band but there was nothing besides other pious pleaders, and they didn’t come into well. The AM band offered about the same thing, only with worse reception, nothing remotely describable as news, and no music because commercial entertainment as we knew it was no more, and its handmaiden, advertising, had gone with it.

For any skeptics who doubt the Apocalypse is at hand, there would be no shortage of war, famine, plague, and death to point to, particularly in the Middle East where the scramble would begin for the world’s remaining oil reserves. “The Holy Land War” figures prominently in the World Made By Hand novels.

Union Grove

The setting of World Made By Hand is a small town in Upstate New York called Union Grove. The books revolve around one Robert Earle, a former corporate executive who becomes a carpenter in the “New Times,” and Brother Jobe and his “New Faith Brotherhood,” which settles in New York after their exodus from Virginia.

The petroleum wars in the Holy Land have escalated the “War on Terror” into a Crusade. Islamic terrorists detonate nuclear bombs in Los Angeles and Washington in retaliation. The economy tanks and the high price of gasoline collapses ConAgra-style agribusiness and the Wal-Mart economy of importing textiles and manufactured items from overseas.

The residents of Union Grove sack the local K-Mart, CVS, and all the other chain stores in town for essentials. The grocery stores are sacked by ravenous unemployed suburbanites who are accustomed to food magically appearing in the supermarket and money out of ATM machines.

Automobiles are becoming useless without gasoline. There is a nationwide scramble from the chaos of the big cities into rural areas. No one really knows what’s going outside their own county. Gangs and looters infest the cities. Travel is unsafe because of outlaws and scavengers who rule the highways.

Diseases are running wild and killing off the survivors. The only people on the radio are doomsday preachers. Cell phones don’t work anymore and information travels at the speed of a horse.

Post-Apocalyptic America

There are several scenes in World Made By Hand which vividly imagine the “post-collapse” world to come:

“We began to encounter some people now, inhabiting the ruined suburbs, the lawns replaced by potato patches, the split-levels and raised ranches turned into hovels now that the electric amenities and the plumbing were out of order, including the wells and toilets. Ill-clad, scrawny children played in mud puddles in the broken streets and stopped to blink at us as we passed by on our horses. When Brother Minor offered up one of his jokes, they just gaped. By and by, we crossed an old commercial highway strip with its complement of dead gigantic discount stores, strip malls, and defunct burger barns. The buildings were all in various stages of disassembly as materials of value were stripped from them – copper pipes and wires, aluminum sashes, windowpanes, steel girders, and cement blocks. The parking lots seemed especially desolate with nothing in them but mulleins and sumacs poking through the cracked pavements.”

The inhabitants of “post-collapse” America romanticize the “Old Times.” Many are unable to adjust and fall into alcohol abuse or commit suicide:

“The things I remember seem incredible,” I said. “Air conditioning. Cold beer. Baseball on television.” I start to get lost in the maze of my own stoned mind remembering all the things we didn’t have anymore.”

Horses are a status symbol in a world without planes and automobiles:

“It felt grand to sit high up behind that team and exhilarating to move so swiftly down the street, like the dream I had about the magic chair. He drove confidently. There was nothing I had yet seen that he was not confident about. The few people out of Main Street stopped to watch as we flew by. The temperature was rising, though, and he slowed the horses to a walk as soon as we got outside of town where there was no more need to show off, and the pavements got bad again. We passed the ruins of the Toyota dealership with its defunct lighting standards lording over a phantom inventory of sumac bushes where the Land Cruisers and Priuses used to sit parked in enticing ranks.”

The magic chair scene was very well done:

“In a recurrent dream, I was sitting in a comfortable padded chair gliding swiftly over the landscape in a way that felt supernatural yet oddly familiar. I did not feel any wind in my face, despite the speed, which was much faster than anything I was accustomed to. I was deeply at ease in my wonderful traveling chair and thrilled by the motion. Familiar sights whizzed by: the Larmon farm on the Battenville Road, Holyrood’s cider mill, the old railroad overpass outside the village of Shushan, pastures and cornfields, hills, hollows, and houses I had known for years. In the dream, I came to realize that I was moving inside some kind of protective envelope, not just sitting in a wonderful chair. Then, a dashboard resolved before me with its round glowing gauges, and then the steering wheel. Of course, I am driving a car! It had been so many years since I had done that! It was a dream-memory of something that now seemed hardly different from the magic carpets of my childhood storybooks. I careened around curves in the road just missing gigantic trees. I couldn’t remember what to do with my feet. I had lost control …”

The economy of Union Grove has come to revolve around salvage. The residents of a local trailer park have created a settlement called “Karptown” around the town dump which they dominate in addition to the drug trade.

In the “Old Times,” people threw stuff away into the dump they bought at Wal-Mart. In the “New Times,” the economy of Union Grove is based on salvage and scavenging for manufactured items in the old town landfill, which is now known as “the general supply.”

Martin Lindstedt is thriving in “post-collapse” America. Law and order has broken down. Physical strength has become much more important in a salvage based economy:

“In normal times. Wayne Karp would have passed through life as just another lumpen American Dreamer, a hardworking consumer of shoddy products, chemically tweaked foods, and rude popular entertainments, a taxpayer subject to the ordinary restrictions of the social contract. But in the new era, he blossomed into a local kingpin. . .

So, Wayne Karp turned the focus of his energies to running the general supply. He had a large crew out there systematically digging up the old landfill and sorting out valuables, especially glass, plastic containers, pipes, hinges, screws and nails, anything that could be reused. He sent other crews around the countryside to disassemble abandoned houses for their materials. Back in the glory days of the suburban expansion, many split-level houses had been built on roadside out-parcels far away from the towns, stores, and jobs. The people who built them expected to be able to drive cars everywhere to work and meet their daily needs forever. Now, with the population so far down, and many empty houses in town itself, and the oil gone, and no ability to drive heroic distances, these buildings had no value except for salvage.”

A form of serfdom has emerged as ruined suburbanites and other whigger assclowns who worked in the “information economy” sell their labor to the new planters and rural landowners who dominate the new caste system:

“I had a fascination with how people managed other people in the corporate world. In our world now, the freehold farmer was the new chief executive.”

That sounds plausible. Surely, a “post-collapse” America would be based on farming and salvage. I can see this happening.

After The Fall

If “the system” does collapse, it is reasonable to assume that certain classes of Whites will suffer much more heavily than others. The elderly, the sick, and the young will be hit the hardest. They will be followed by outcasts who are a nuisance to their neighbors and those who live in metropolitan areas with no useful skills in a salvage based economy.

The people who will thrive after the collapse are farmers, soldiers, rural landowners, physically strong men, criminals, religious zealots, drug dealers, and people with strong kinship networks. The ideal place to live would be a heavily armed rural community with a long growing season and an infrastructure and knowledge base that has survived the global economy.

The degree to which you thrive in a “post-collapse” world would heavily depend upon your health, physical strength, access to firearms, access to farmland, knowledge of farming and your level of socialization (the number of people who got your back) in your community.

The loudest cheerleaders for the collapse tend to be those who are least likely to survive or prosper in extreme conditions. In the absence of the hated system, their mode of existence would quickly become unsustainable, which is perhaps the biggest irony of their worldview.

The old fashioned view is that evil is supposed to prosper in the End Times. I suspect this will come as an unwelcome surprise to our modern day prophets of doom.

About Hunter Wallace 12378 Articles
Founder and Editor-in-Chief of Occidental Dissent

18 Comments

  1. To my knowledge, none of the vanguardists who cheer on the collapse of civilization and deplore materialism are themselves willing to abstain from modern conveniences.

    Greg Johnson, for example, decries materialism one minute. The next minute he is on the internet holding a fundraiser, on a cell phone complaining about his money, and setting Counter-Currents up as an Amazon affiliate to take a cut of their profits.

    Johnson flies across North America on a Delta jet airplane to attend his favorite operas. I’m sure he has a PayPal button that enables him to do that.

    He is kind of like the Al Gore of the White Nationalist movement.

  2. “This is what life is like in Haiti now:”
    Their IQ (low, we are speaking about Negroes after all), their genetic predispostion to hunter/gatherer lifestyles (they make lousy farmers- witness modern day Zimbabwe), but most of all their predispostion to proliferate even in the absence of the means of sustaining a large population is largely what brought this about over time. Even before the earthquake, Haiti was dirt poor. A little smaller in square mileage than the state of Maryland, yet it has nearly twice as many people (Maryland, 5,699.478 vs Haiti’s 10,188,000).
    So what does the writer of “Haiti, nearly a year later” have to offer as a solution for their problems? This:
    “And that is the brutal cycle of poverty in Haiti that only jobs and trade can break. ”
    The brutal cycle of poverty he speaks of started long ago in 1804 when they revolted against France, gained independance and (just as with modern Zimbabwe) divided land ownership among a great many of its people. Instead of profitable sugar plantations (run efficiently by French colonials) they then had ownership of small plots of land by many former slaves and- no income. Add to that the usual despotic rulership that goes with a black-run country (many successive renditions of “Papa Doc Duvalier”) and unrestrained reproduction and you have the Haiti of today. “Jobs and trade” won’t be forthcoming to a country of longstanding poverty with no resources and nothing to trade located in an increasingly impoverished Western Hemisphere.
    Yes, their economy is based on foreign aid, and if it were to continue, it should only receive aid contingent upon a program of population reduction although, it seems as though mother nature is already at work providing that for them without their approval.

  3. This is an example of the glorious collapse, the Mad Maxers, are hoping for.

    What amuses me most, are the ones that believe that having a farm, will make them immune from what will come from the cities.

    http://blackswaninsights.blogspot.com/2010/07/elite-banker-preparing-for.html

    Near civil war between town and country was a pervasive feature of this break-down in social order. Large mobs of half-starved and vindictive townsmen descended on villages to seize food from farmers accused of hoarding. The diary of one young woman described the scene at her cousin’s farm.

    “In the cart I saw three slaughtered pigs. The cowshed was drenched in blood. One cow had been slaughtered where it stood and the meat torn from its bones. The monsters had slit the udder of the finest milch cow, so that she had to be put out of her misery immediately. In the granary, a rag soaked with petrol was still smouldering to show what these beasts had intended,” she wrote.

    Grand pianos became a currency or sorts as pauperized members of the civil service elites traded the symbols of their old status for a sack of potatoes and a side of bacon. There is a harrowing moment when each middle-class families first starts to understand that its gilt-edged securities and War Loan will never recover. Irreversible ruin lies ahead. Elderly couples gassed themselves in their apartments.

  4. DingoBob,

    There’s no question that collapse will be a very ugly thing. The above describes like 1920’s Germany, right?

    Of course, we know what came after the Weimar hyperinflation. It’s basically a wholesale “reset” of the State, when the State loses it’s legitimacy and the Folk-Spirit becomes the State.

    Germans in the 1920’s were a pretty self sufficient bunch though, with a lot of farmers. it will be even worse, considering the human material we have to deal with in the Kwa. However, there’s a lot of good people who just have too much mass media and passivity, for whom a crisis will bring out a sort of person who would have otherwise lain dormant. We need a “reset” of the American people. Oprah and ball game watchers gave us this soft tyranny of political correctness. They are as much to blame as the tyrants themselves.

  5. Kievsky says:

    Langobard,

    Great post! The Whore of Babylon has drank the blood of the people of ancient Babylon (Iraq). We have come full circle.

    I believe there is a divine energy that is getting ready to hit back hard at Babylon the Great too — I sense it. A lot of people sense it — heck it’s plain as day now.

    Kievsky,

    Thank you for the kind words and sentiments — and yes, I full-heartedly agree that the divine energy you speak of is indeed global.

    Of course the punch line is that we may die too. Hunter mentioned that the people who wish for it the most are the least prepared for it. I have preps in place, including strong community ties with people who are also prepping, but there’s no telling how extreme the situation will be, when it “hits” and I think there will be a “hit” of some sort — an infrastructuer breakdown, when “Babylon is doomed in an hour.”

    Couldn’t agree more as well that those who seem to wish for it the most are often the one’s least prepared for it, especially the ‘Rapture Bunnies’ — who think they’re going to get their personal cloud that is going to wisk them straight out of the misery — no suffering necessary or required 🙁

    Great to hear that you have the foresight and discernment for whatever may happen.

    We should all be humble before the hit that is coming. There’s no guarantee any of us writnig on this board will survive. But hey, we’re all gonig to die anyway, so if we are part of a die-off or a kill-off, some Whites out there will survive. I can die happy, or happier, if I get to live to see the day that the anti-white regime is decisively annihilated, but i’m confident it’s going to happen one way or another.

    This is where men like you really shine through with strength, confidence and purpose. Your damn right that there is no guarantee of anything in this mortal existence of ours — certainly no guarantee that we will not suffer.

    Of course as well, death is a part of life anyway — and how we make use of the time we have on earth is what ultimately counts anyway.

    This is what will, ultimately count or ‘matter’ in the long run — most importantly, how each and every one of us cared for Our People — and the legacy that we shall leave for our descendants.

    Greater love hath no man than this, that a man lay down his life for his friends. – John 15:13

  6. I don’t think it’sgoingto be as bad, or as easy, as any-one sez or thinks.

    Re: DingoBob’s post – most American farmers are not going to allow “vengeful townspeople” to plunder and destroy assets. Townies that try this will find themselves incorporated into the farming system, the first time they try, shall we say….

    Also – Americans are pretty inventive. We wioll start manufacturing for ourselves, as soon s we can.

    The Wild Cards, for me, is the SWPL’s. They are clever, “educated” but clueless. Insanely racially disloyal .They wil be the first to be culled.If enough live long enough to get “society as they know it” up and running again – their predeliction for proving their love o’ diversity wll be a disaster. If enough see enough of their own kind culled, by their Darling Pet Darkies, and they awaken quickly enough – they wil be an asset.

  7. Denise,

    Swipples will be brought into line. I have known enough of them to know they lack any real conviction, that’s what makes them swipples.

  8. IMHO, if people are willing to withdraw from politics, to let a collapse occur (be it real or their Mad Max fantasy), with all the death and suffering of their own kind that would follow and worse, celebrate it, then I can’t see how they can call themselves Pro White.

    I now understand why Hunter is mainstreaming.

  9. Dingo – I don’t want civlization to collapse. It’s going to be horrible. I know history; civilization is always a delicate thing. Human nature is essentially predatory, and degenertes into barbarism in no time at all.

    Most human socieities have never really risen above savagery.

    What we, in the shards of the West, resided in, can no longer be consdiered “Civilization”. The sooner the tyrannies collapse – the better. Then, if Whites survive, civilization can be rebuilt, as soon as the dust clears.

  10. DingoBob,

    There’s no question that collapse will be a very ugly thing. The above describes like 1920?s Germany, right?

    Of course, we know what came after the Weimar hyperinflation. It’s basically a wholesale “reset” of the State, when the State loses it’s legitimacy and the Folk-Spirit becomes the State. – Kievsky

    Remember as well Kievsky, DingoBob, and Denise, that what really traumatized Germany was the aftermath of the phyrric “victories” of the Allied powers of the First World War, which also brought the collapse and downfall of several European empires, especially the Czarist Russian and Austrio-Hungarian ones.

    Also bear in mind the dreadful conditions that Germany experienced due to the prolonged food blockade, which did not in fact abate until the early-to-mid 1920’s –

    Naval Blockade of Germany after 11 November 1918

    VINCENT, C. Paul, The Politics of Hunger: The Allied Blockade of Germany 1915-1919 (Athens OH 1985); (this fantastic book is almost totally unobtainable). Two million Europeans died, mostly in Germany and Austria; the mortality rate was 250% higher than in Great Britain, as a result of the blockage. Vincent makes a direct connection between the illegal blockade and Hitler’s rise to power: psychoanalysis shows the later consequences of mistreatment in childhood; the German “hunger generation” of 1915-1920 became the most radical followers of National Socialism. Britain’s starvation blockade was a “significant factor in the formation of the Nazi character” (in English in the text).

    http://1914-1918.invisionzone.com/forums/index.php?showtopic=587

    So in many ways, the Germans had it significantly worse and faced greater hardships than many Americans can, or even likely will, face contemporarily.

  11. The USA is in an obvious downward spiral. This nation is tearing itself apart and is likely headed toward another Civil War type scenario in a couple years if current trends continue. Why? Because the reds are out of control.

  12. DingoBob,

    Nothing I can do would avert collapse. I have tried to convince local Whites to “wake up” and do gardens and prepare and such and they had no interest. Therefore, I wash my hands of the masses of such people.

    Remember when gas went to 4 bucks a gallon and people couldn’t give away their SUVs? When gas fell back down to 2.50 people were buying SUVs again. Who can feel mercy for such people?

  13. @DingoBob,

    We’re in the middle of an ongoing genocide. The enemy can only keep the lid on it with prosperity. They have the education system, mass media etc but personally i don’t think it would be enough without enough prosperity to keep the bulk of white people sedated.

    Now even with prosperity I think WNs should have been able to get a much higher percentage of white people onside, maybe 10-15% as a guess, and that didn’t happen for various reasons, but while mass prosperity exists i think it will be hard to get the bulk of non SWPLs onside.

    “Diversity is Good” is an idea with a trajectory. In multicult terms where 100% diverse is implicitly defined as 100% non-white that trajectory is genocidal. It started small enough for people not to register that but genocide is where it ends. The question is how to make enough white people see that before it is too late. We need the system to falter to give us the opportunity to wake more people up.

    Personally i’m not into waiting for a collapse. I’m into actively trying to bring the system down by undermining people’s faith in their rulers – which is fun.

  14. Hunter said:
    “In the South, it would almost certainly lead to racial conflict and a surge of religious fanaticism. A Camp of the Saints scenario would unfold as starving negroes and mestizos from Latin America and the Caribbean would replicate the barbarian invasions at the end of the Roman Empire.”

    Not exactly. If the U.S. completely collapses there will be no welfare, no free health care, no jobs, and precious little food for newcomers from the turd world. In short, no infrastructure that churns out all the free goodies and all the things that attract free loading non-whites will dry up overnight. Violence, suffering and death will be in abundance and Haitians and Latin Americans are unlikely to risk life and limb to come to an America that’s turned into a coast to coast death trap.

    Katrina and other natural disasters have demonstrated that blacks will revert to African savagery while whites organize to feed and protect their families and communities. As in Africa, black communities in America will be wracked by famine, disease and intra-tribal warfare. White communities could also face some of these things but not nearly to the degree it will be seen with blacks and browns.

    Similarly, with few exceptions, alliances and communities in a post-collapse America will be strictly based on race, ethnicity and to some extent religion. Dozens of little white ethnostates will dot the American landscape and there won’t be a civil rights mafia, NAACP, ACLU or lying Jewish media to do a damn thing about it.

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