A Furious Tide

The Fourth Dimension of Warfare

Part IIA— Revolt to Revolution, its Potential and Development

by Seneca III

Epilogue as a prologue:

The tides of human affairs rarely rise and fall to a regular timetable, unlike those of the oceans with their predictable lunar rhythms. Rather, the mass consciousness of nation states ebbs and flows in fits and starts, with long periods of slack water followed by furious surges. Here, now, on the eve of the third year of the second decade of the 21st century we find ourselves yet again on the cusp of such a surge. In greater numbers we are awakening to the sobering reality that all but a few of the freedoms we for so long and so carelessly took for granted have been spirited away during the times of affluence and indulgence, and that we in the West have degenerated into little more than a collective of embryonic police states.

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“All men are created equal.”
— Thomas Jefferson, the Declaration of Independence, 1776, in refutation of the concept of the Divine Right of Kings

“Power tends to corrupt, and absolute power corrupts absolutely.”
— Lord Acton, historian, philosopher and moralist in a letter to Bishop Mandell Creighton in 1887

The social atmosphere is that of a besieged city. And at the same time the consciousness of being at war, and therefore in danger, makes the handing-over of all power to a small caste seem the natural, unavoidable condition of survival.”
— George Orwell, ‘1984’

“First we shape our institutions, then they shape us. And when those institutions break the covenant we must reshape them, as often as is necessary.”
— Seneca III

In Britain and continental Europe functional democracy is dying, and it is dying for three specific reasons:

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