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Disintegration: Indicators of the Coming American Collapse
The United States is undergoing a profound and radical transformation, all features of which point to the fact of its departure at an accelerated rate from its largely self-proclaimed status as a global hegemon. The United States has lost ground in every single category that defines the power and status of a nation in relation to its rivals.
246 pages, Paperback
First published May 1, 2021
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Displaying 1 - 13 of 13 reviews
May 18, 2021
Another brilliant book from Andrei Martynov.
There is so much I could write about this book that I am not sure where to start and I doubt I could do it justice unless I spent more time than I would like to writing a review I'd be happy with.
I suppose I could summarise it as a Russian born Senior Engineer's (I do Mr Martynov a disservice, according to Pepe Escobar, he is one the best Russia analysts) wide angle lens view of American elites, American industrial strength and policy, American military and MIC, energy, empire, culture etc. at this moment it time, and that in all these areas the USA looks like an imperial power rapidly going down the plug hole.
Martynov references Corelli Barnett's book 'The Collapse of British Power' several times as there seems to be a certain amount of commonality involved.
There are also many comparisons made to the Russia of today.
I am not an engineer. But I did work for many years as a recruitment consultant in the British engineering sector, and I grew to appreciate engineer's knowledge and opinions, occasional forthrightness and lack of bullsh1t. Mr Martynov comes across as one of those engineers I used to talk to at great length over the phone, responding in great detail to open questions about whatever projects they were working on or had worked on, improving my knowledge, and therefore future credibility, with the excuse (to the boss) of building rapport - conversations which I often found genuinely fascinating! Which brings me to the only part of the book I might disagree with or have doubts about, and that concerns fracking: An oil and gas engineer I spoke to dismissed the sort of concerns expressed by Mr Martyanov as 'hysteria'. But what do I know.
I have visited the USA numerous times, mostly road trips around the South West and Rockies (where most of the national parks are) and my experiences with Americans has been overwhelmingly positive - although I have taken a certain amount of care and research about where to go). I lived abroad for a couple of years where there were a lot of British and American expats and actually found Americans easier to get along with than my countrymen. Which is a sad thing to say, but as an Irishman wrote over a hundred years ago "an Englishman cannot open his mouth without another Englishman despising him" whereas to Americans I'm just a foreigner with a funny accent and that seemed to make things easier. The point is, I have got no pleasure from reading this book in the sense of schadenfreude and much of what is written in this book equally applies to the UK, and also as Airstrip One, we are very closely tied to the USA in so many ways, it concerns me how this will further develop.
The one positive I got from the book is that Putin stated in 2017 that he doesn't believe in MMGW. This ties in with something I read in "Global Warming, A Case Study in Groupthink". In 2004, at Tony Blair's request, a team of British 'scientists' were sent to an international seminar organised by the Russian Academy of Sciences. The aim was to get the Russians to sign the Kyoto accords. Rather then quoting the lengthy descriptions of what took place, I'll just say it seems the Russian scientists were astonished by audacity of the bullsh1t they were subjected to. I will quote this bit though: "Ilarionov (Putin's Chief Economic Advisor) ended with a peroration that the world seemed, once again, to be up against a 'man-hating, totalitarian ideology', dealing in'misinformation, falsification, fabrication, mythology and propaganda." pp24
Tony Blair did subsequently get Putin to sign the Kyoto accords in return for being allowed to join the WTO.
I often to see online comments by people saying Putin is just another NWO puppet because he seems to go along with MMGW, the Covid-19 hysteria etc. But the thought that occurs to me, is, I think a quote from Napoleon: "Never interrupt your enemy when he is in the middle of making a mistake."
There is so much I could write about this book that I am not sure where to start and I doubt I could do it justice unless I spent more time than I would like to writing a review I'd be happy with.
I suppose I could summarise it as a Russian born Senior Engineer's (I do Mr Martynov a disservice, according to Pepe Escobar, he is one the best Russia analysts) wide angle lens view of American elites, American industrial strength and policy, American military and MIC, energy, empire, culture etc. at this moment it time, and that in all these areas the USA looks like an imperial power rapidly going down the plug hole.
Martynov references Corelli Barnett's book 'The Collapse of British Power' several times as there seems to be a certain amount of commonality involved.
There are also many comparisons made to the Russia of today.
I am not an engineer. But I did work for many years as a recruitment consultant in the British engineering sector, and I grew to appreciate engineer's knowledge and opinions, occasional forthrightness and lack of bullsh1t. Mr Martynov comes across as one of those engineers I used to talk to at great length over the phone, responding in great detail to open questions about whatever projects they were working on or had worked on, improving my knowledge, and therefore future credibility, with the excuse (to the boss) of building rapport - conversations which I often found genuinely fascinating! Which brings me to the only part of the book I might disagree with or have doubts about, and that concerns fracking: An oil and gas engineer I spoke to dismissed the sort of concerns expressed by Mr Martyanov as 'hysteria'. But what do I know.
I have visited the USA numerous times, mostly road trips around the South West and Rockies (where most of the national parks are) and my experiences with Americans has been overwhelmingly positive - although I have taken a certain amount of care and research about where to go). I lived abroad for a couple of years where there were a lot of British and American expats and actually found Americans easier to get along with than my countrymen. Which is a sad thing to say, but as an Irishman wrote over a hundred years ago "an Englishman cannot open his mouth without another Englishman despising him" whereas to Americans I'm just a foreigner with a funny accent and that seemed to make things easier. The point is, I have got no pleasure from reading this book in the sense of schadenfreude and much of what is written in this book equally applies to the UK, and also as Airstrip One, we are very closely tied to the USA in so many ways, it concerns me how this will further develop.
The one positive I got from the book is that Putin stated in 2017 that he doesn't believe in MMGW. This ties in with something I read in "Global Warming, A Case Study in Groupthink". In 2004, at Tony Blair's request, a team of British 'scientists' were sent to an international seminar organised by the Russian Academy of Sciences. The aim was to get the Russians to sign the Kyoto accords. Rather then quoting the lengthy descriptions of what took place, I'll just say it seems the Russian scientists were astonished by audacity of the bullsh1t they were subjected to. I will quote this bit though: "Ilarionov (Putin's Chief Economic Advisor) ended with a peroration that the world seemed, once again, to be up against a 'man-hating, totalitarian ideology', dealing in'misinformation, falsification, fabrication, mythology and propaganda." pp24
Tony Blair did subsequently get Putin to sign the Kyoto accords in return for being allowed to join the WTO.
I often to see online comments by people saying Putin is just another NWO puppet because he seems to go along with MMGW, the Covid-19 hysteria etc. But the thought that occurs to me, is, I think a quote from Napoleon: "Never interrupt your enemy when he is in the middle of making a mistake."
October 13, 2024
"CONCLUSION: NOT EXCEPTIONAL, NOT FREE, NOT PROSPEROUS"
Martyanov is a bit irritating but the man has a point. Make that a lot of points. He fundaments his conclusions and shares very clearly and competently his thoughts and reasoning. He is very articulated, very comprehensive and very convincing and a bit irritating. This is an important book to help contextualising the scary, crazy, dystopian zeitgeist we live in.
"The political tyranny will start with demolishing the U.S. Constitution and transitioning the country to a de jure one-party state with political purges following this transition. Initially those purges will be in the form of firing people from their jobs or preventing them from getting employment, but eventually the social score system will be introduced officially and the “rehabilitation camps” may become a reality. One may say that this is too dystopian and fantastic to even consider. If it is, it is all for the better. But for a country where half of the population believed that the president of the United States was Russia’s Manchurian Candidate, with all the media singing in a single voice promoting this fantasy, or where most universities define human nature as a social construct, or where people who have zero background in such fields as physics, mathematics or chemistry are driving the “green energy” field—in such a country nothing is impossible. Such a country will disintegrate, inevitably, because it is unsustainable (...)"
"An increasingly pornographic culture dominated by celebrities, sports stars and media personalities, most of whom are barely educated in any practical sense but are nonetheless enabled to pontificate on subjects they have no clue about—such a culture was inevitably destined to crash."
"In the end, how do you even talk to people who believe that they are invincible, even in the face of overwhelming empirical evidence that militarily they are not, or that the United States is deindustrialized to such a degree that the only path it can take is further financialization and deindustrialization of the country, merely postponing the inevitable collapse?"
"The collapse of the Soviet Union and the economic catastrophe which followed taught Russians a lot, and also left an aftertaste of the humiliation of losing power—a process the United States is going through right now. Speaking in a layman’s lingo, the Russians get it. They, unlike any other people in the world, can relate to what the United States is going through right now. Russians can read the signs extremely well, while the U.S. elite not only has no experience with it but is completely insulated from understanding it. This is America’s tragedy unfolding before our very eyes. Not only is America’s crisis systemic, but its elites are uncultured, badly educated and mesmerized by decades of their own propaganda, which in the end, they accept as a reality. They are also arrogant and corrupt."
"As the astonishing statistics of weapons sales in the last year attests, very many Americans have lost faith in the U.S. establishment’s ability to provide even basic law and order. The sales of handguns in the U.S. more than tripled in March 2020 when compared with the year earlier and were up almost two times for long-guns. This is all one needs to know about how “safe” Americans feel themselves in their homes—those who have them—when seeing the dramatic and grim transformation of their country into a third world political and economic circus. It couldn’t have been otherwise in a culture which today is almost entirely based on lying—which also is being praised as a virtue and, in fact, is encouraged. “When I was a cadet, what’s the cadet motto at West Point? You will not lie, cheat, or steal or tolerate those who do. I was the CIA director. We lied, we cheated, we stole. We had entire training courses. It reminds you of the glory of the American experiment,” Pompeo boasted as the audience laughed and celebrated the statement."
Enough quotes. Just know that there are hundreds of pages of this calibre, fully justifying the reading time invested. A pity we don't have an audiobook.
Martyanov is a bit irritating but the man has a point. Make that a lot of points. He fundaments his conclusions and shares very clearly and competently his thoughts and reasoning. He is very articulated, very comprehensive and very convincing and a bit irritating. This is an important book to help contextualising the scary, crazy, dystopian zeitgeist we live in.
"The political tyranny will start with demolishing the U.S. Constitution and transitioning the country to a de jure one-party state with political purges following this transition. Initially those purges will be in the form of firing people from their jobs or preventing them from getting employment, but eventually the social score system will be introduced officially and the “rehabilitation camps” may become a reality. One may say that this is too dystopian and fantastic to even consider. If it is, it is all for the better. But for a country where half of the population believed that the president of the United States was Russia’s Manchurian Candidate, with all the media singing in a single voice promoting this fantasy, or where most universities define human nature as a social construct, or where people who have zero background in such fields as physics, mathematics or chemistry are driving the “green energy” field—in such a country nothing is impossible. Such a country will disintegrate, inevitably, because it is unsustainable (...)"
"An increasingly pornographic culture dominated by celebrities, sports stars and media personalities, most of whom are barely educated in any practical sense but are nonetheless enabled to pontificate on subjects they have no clue about—such a culture was inevitably destined to crash."
"In the end, how do you even talk to people who believe that they are invincible, even in the face of overwhelming empirical evidence that militarily they are not, or that the United States is deindustrialized to such a degree that the only path it can take is further financialization and deindustrialization of the country, merely postponing the inevitable collapse?"
"The collapse of the Soviet Union and the economic catastrophe which followed taught Russians a lot, and also left an aftertaste of the humiliation of losing power—a process the United States is going through right now. Speaking in a layman’s lingo, the Russians get it. They, unlike any other people in the world, can relate to what the United States is going through right now. Russians can read the signs extremely well, while the U.S. elite not only has no experience with it but is completely insulated from understanding it. This is America’s tragedy unfolding before our very eyes. Not only is America’s crisis systemic, but its elites are uncultured, badly educated and mesmerized by decades of their own propaganda, which in the end, they accept as a reality. They are also arrogant and corrupt."
"As the astonishing statistics of weapons sales in the last year attests, very many Americans have lost faith in the U.S. establishment’s ability to provide even basic law and order. The sales of handguns in the U.S. more than tripled in March 2020 when compared with the year earlier and were up almost two times for long-guns. This is all one needs to know about how “safe” Americans feel themselves in their homes—those who have them—when seeing the dramatic and grim transformation of their country into a third world political and economic circus. It couldn’t have been otherwise in a culture which today is almost entirely based on lying—which also is being praised as a virtue and, in fact, is encouraged. “When I was a cadet, what’s the cadet motto at West Point? You will not lie, cheat, or steal or tolerate those who do. I was the CIA director. We lied, we cheated, we stole. We had entire training courses. It reminds you of the glory of the American experiment,” Pompeo boasted as the audience laughed and celebrated the statement."
Enough quotes. Just know that there are hundreds of pages of this calibre, fully justifying the reading time invested. A pity we don't have an audiobook.
July 8, 2022
Written by a Russian military scholar, in this book, you will find a story of The US failure; nevertheless, beyond the Russian's wordsmith desire to see the Us collapsing and the apparent author's bias against American politicians and media outlets, some aspects must be distinguished. For instance, the failure of American consumption and wealth what the author coins "Affluenza"; the US deindustrialisation and finalisation of its economy, which represents a dependency on other nations like China its so-called "enemy"; American incapacity to catch up with Russian modern weaponry, and the corruption and ineptitude of American elites.
Likewise, it must be mentioned that quoting does not mean a trend, nor substituting well-documented research. Thus, I would recommend this work to someone who wants to know a little more about the US decline, however, it should not be viewed as a teleology, despite the evident American decadence.
Likewise, it must be mentioned that quoting does not mean a trend, nor substituting well-documented research. Thus, I would recommend this work to someone who wants to know a little more about the US decline, however, it should not be viewed as a teleology, despite the evident American decadence.
March 6, 2022
As somebody who was following Dmitry Orlov and Andrei Martyanov since the early 2000s I wasn't deeply surprised by content of this book. I think it would be eye-opening to Western readers. To me the book was useful as source of quotes of different historic figures. But I disliked very much how author is ranting on and one using long meaningless pseudo-intellectual sentences. I'll give you one example: "It is also a great indicator of the lack of intellectual nourishment in American culture as a whole due to a combination of factors, among which epistemic closure is the most important. The American belief system as it exists today is incapable of accepting empirical evidence because it destroys American exceptionalism’s extreme confirmation bias and most modern American intellectuals on both the nominal left and the nominal right cannot deal with it". You could say the same thing with 5 words.
February 20, 2024
Author Andrei Martyanov lived through the collapse of the Soviet Union in the early 1990s, and he gives readers a perceptive--and brutally candid--take on the slow-motion collapse of the USA.
Martyanov writes with the same partially-repressed astonishment of Slavoj Zizek (see for example Zizek's book First As Tragedy, Then As Farce). It's as if he can hardly believe wha... [see the rest on my book review site.]
Martyanov writes with the same partially-repressed astonishment of Slavoj Zizek (see for example Zizek's book First As Tragedy, Then As Farce). It's as if he can hardly believe wha... [see the rest on my book review site.]
February 8, 2023
A Very Important Book
Much of what is said in this book, I already knew explicitly or if not, had the intuition for. However, the arguments presented are so convincing as to leave no room for doubt. There is no appeal to controversy or conspiracy either. The facts laid are bare and undeniable. This is a short but critical analysis of the USA that may prove to be a very important record in the impending future.
Much of what is said in this book, I already knew explicitly or if not, had the intuition for. However, the arguments presented are so convincing as to leave no room for doubt. There is no appeal to controversy or conspiracy either. The facts laid are bare and undeniable. This is a short but critical analysis of the USA that may prove to be a very important record in the impending future.
November 21, 2023
The sobering, sad truth.
Our nation is dead because of selfishness and ignorance. No Hollywood ending here as fiction is not truth. Sad to experience the plunge from greatness to absurdity believed by the slaves of media.
Our nation is dead because of selfishness and ignorance. No Hollywood ending here as fiction is not truth. Sad to experience the plunge from greatness to absurdity believed by the slaves of media.
April 21, 2022
Superb analysis of the causes, symptoms, and consequences of US collapse!
A very must-read book!
(read in Beijing, China)
A very must-read book!
(read in Beijing, China)
May 4, 2022
The substance of Martyanov's argument is well-supported and difficult to refute. His style is somewhat rambling, and comes close to rant, but maintains civility.
August 1, 2022
Enlightening
September 22, 2023
A very long speech about how caput the Anglo-Saxon empire is. Nothing that we, the awake, didn't know already.
July 5, 2024
Just finished this last week. I don't see eye to eye with the author on every single point, but he makes informed and correct analysis of geopolitics and economics. Definitely recommend reading.
June 29, 2022
Required reading
Well written, logical, important book by a Russian about the United States' decadence. Important to understand our present times. Highly recommended. Very insightful.
Well written, logical, important book by a Russian about the United States' decadence. Important to understand our present times. Highly recommended. Very insightful.
Displaying 1 - 13 of 13 reviews