colonies

COLONIES
All right! Glad to see dissent and mutiny in the comments section again. It makes things much more lively. Of course, please be aware that any such persons will be marked for future liquidation under the Bisonia dictatorship. Today we are going to talk about your future in an imperial colony. I don't think I've devoted an article to it before. If I did, please forgive my imperfect memory. While some of us are exceptional in that regard, I'm not part of the Borg which can draw from the hive mind. I Hoover up a ton of information, it mixes and melds and I pop out this kind of drivel. The creative process does not allow rote memorization. I've only been able to remember one telephone number in my life and that was the only place I lived more than a few years.
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Colonies are nothing new. They have been around since organized armies at the start of the Agricultural Revolution. If you are on the winning side, it is pretty cool to have new lands and resources to plunder. The spoils of war. Even cooler is the original population of that land being forced to do all the work providing you with those resources. Then, after the military outlay, it is all gravy. You are just raking it in. And you need to have a military anyway, if for no other reason than not to end up someone else's colony. So that is a fixed expense and winning a war and acquiring a colony is as close to a free lunch as you can get. Now, not everyone has fabulous luck getting and running colonies. The Romans were pretty darn good. Britain did a bang up job. America is the undisputed champ. Spain did okay, while France pretty much embarrassed everyone ( of course, under the direction of Champlain they administered one one the most benevolent colonies around ). I won't even mention those countries settling for ice bound islands. Or Germany's pathetic acquisition of a few fly specks in the tropical Pacific or the leftovers in Africa.
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More often than not, colonizing is a survival strategy. You can't feed everyone on the land you have, so you expand the farming area at your neighbors expense. A gentle form of genocide keeps that population from eating too much into your imports. After fighting amongst themselves for centuries the Europeans had enough of a technological lead to colonize pretty much the rest of the world. When that began yielding decreased amounts of wealth they once again went to war for the ultimate consolidation. The joke was on them because the new kid on the block with the overwhelming majority of the coal and oil took over and made then vassals of its central bank. Suckers. Of course, the new kid, being an adolescent, had no restraint and lived it up in the grandest party of all time and blew through that fabulous wealth quickly.
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We are now in the process of the globes dominant imperial power quickly losing control as the resource base was striped quicker than necessary from importing cheap labor to keep the locals in extreme comfort. The twenty five percent population increase coincided with the global fall off in oil production and unfavorable weather patterns ( natural or Gore Warming, it doesn't matter anymore ). And the use of paper currency to forestall the resource decrease consequences. All that money spent on education and nobody ever heard of the Mayans?
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As the empire collapses, centralization will falter. Political units will shrink smaller and smaller. I'll leave alone the subject of urban area and rural area colonization within our own borders. For now, we can travel to a near future after the US has disintegrated. Far more worrisome than the traveling gang of motorcycle hoodlums will be the arrival of new petty kingdoms and home grown tyrants. War will remain a constant, your beet and rutabaga field will change hands on a regular basis. One week a serf, the next paying fifty percent taxes. Then, as things stabilize and it becomes more difficult to overthrow the next government, you go from a constant state of war to a constant state of being ruled and overtaxed. Then, your glorious dream of living off the land and growing your own food backfires. You won't be allowed to remain a Yeoman farmer, independent and living off your own labor. No, you will most likely become a more primitive version of today's Third World farmer. You will grow what you are told, and you will be lucky if the surplus feeds your family. That is if you aren't deliberately starved off the land so the exploiters local farmers, say perhaps retiring soldiers given a land grant, can take over your land.
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Now, for the love of God, please don't complain how I hate farming and how there is no other way to survive, etc. As I've tried to explain numerous times, times beyond counting, so many times I feel it is tattooed on my forehead, I'm not telling you farming is a bad idea. I'm telling you that it is only the best of many bad choices and that you need to be fully aware of the realistic dangers you face. As much as I'd love this to be the end of a parasitic order and the start of a new freedom, it is only going to get worse rather than better. You will become a cog in someone else's machine. Your land will import cash crops and you will try to survive on a vegetable garden or be forced into buying inferior foods in a market economy. Your plan on the ultimate survival technique, growing your own crops, has many problematic futures. Freaky weather, outright theft, colonization. Instead of farming being your ultimate back up plan, you need to have a plan for farming failing. You see, this is why I don't have advertisers or tens of thousands of readers. I don't offer easy solutions ( who wants to eat wheat kernels, live in a trailer, shoot old surplus guns? ) and I try to rain on everyone's parade. I call it realistic, you can choose your own term. And, by the way, I know this is the same old tired argument against farming I've already made, just with a new name and form of governance thrown in for camouflage. If I repeat myself enough you will agree with me, just to shut me up. Enjoy your brave new world. You were a wage slave, next you can tied to the land, malnourished and disease ridden.
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