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Gangs of the New World Order
by Marian Kester Coombs
August 2005

I. INTRODUCTION WITH DEFINITIONS

lobalization can be defined as the dissolution of national identities and sovereignties into a featureless mass, a globaloma (with homage to Clare Boothe Luce's "globaloney"). It also can be defined as the triumph of Capital's eternal drive to pay the lowest possible wage. Where borders once were shields against the excesses of predatory labor-users, if only by sheltering competitive alternatives, populations increasingly stand defenseless as their defining qualities are sucked into the black hole of the New World Order.

The globaloma shrivels not just wages, but social power. What is this scarcest of all commodities? It can be as seemingly trivial and basic as being able to get a decent job, start and support a family, "get ahead," enjoy the respect of wife and children and make decisions about their lives. It extends all the way up to being able to make decisions that protect, even save, one's entire people.

In the political economy of power, scarcity always rages; there is never remotely enough of it to go around. J.-P. Sartre claimed that human beings throughout history have reproduced different types of scarcity at higher and higher levels; but the scarcity of power is everlasting.

"Empowerment" is the polite PC term for the will to power, which cannot be denounced out of existence. Throughout history men have proven capable of just about anything in the struggle to empower themselves.

II. POWER-SHARING WITHIN SOCIETIES

Numerous competing power centers continue to exist in our not-yet-fully-globalized world: sovereign nations, semi-autonomous provinces (such as Scotland and Quebec), ethnic homelands (such as Kurdistan), loosely-administered or informal protectorates (such as Taiwan), and the few remaining "frontier" regions (such as the Tribal Areas of Pakistan). These competing power centers help satisfy men's burning urge to exert control over the fates of self and kindred and community; they afford alternatives, second chances, refuge and inspiration as well as cautionary tales to those who have been put in check by their own societies — but for how much longer?

Within any one society, of course, dominant and subordinate groups have always unequally and uneasily shared the finite amount of power available. Often such group distinctions or class stratifications originated from the historic conquest of one people by another or successive others. The great task of every new generation is to sort out which of its sons will achieve the status of men — that is, powerful self-determining adults — and which will remain powerless, emasculated; and dominant groups are naturally better situated to recruit their own into the next cohort of power players. Folk literature is full of bitter recognition of this fact. Societies like Ireland under British rule, for instance, where, no matter what their qualities, very few Irish Catholic boys could hope to attain manhood, are as a result fatally unstable.

The situation repeats itself around the planet and across history — from the African experience in America to the caste system of India to the Intifada against Israel to the suppressed nationalities of the former Soviet Union; from the Hebrews under Egyptian and Babylonian captivity to the Saxons under the Normans to the Highland clans under the English crown to the Italian banditti under the nobles.

Writers such as C. Wright Mills, Richard Sennett, Paul Fussell and Tom Wolfe (who has declared his entire opus a commedia of status pursuit) have mocked the "status panic," "status anxiety" and "hidden injuries" of the middle class, as though all at stake were the petty dignity of a Walter Mitty. But Eric Hobsbawm's classic study Bandits better judges the real stakes of the struggle.

"The gentry use the pen, we the gun; they are the lords of the land, we of the mountain," explains one old Italian brigand quoted in Bandits. Hobsbawm defines "social bandits" as

outlaws whom the lord and state regard as criminals, but who remain within ... society, and are considered by their people as heroes, as champions, avengers, fighters for justice, perhaps even leaders of liberation, and in any case as men to be admired, helped and supported.

This concept of social banditry illuminates folk culture's enduring celebration of Robin Hood, Jesse James, Pretty Boy Floyd, Geronimo, Emiliano Zapata, and Pancho Villa (not to mention Fidel and Che), as well as its obsession with love matches between indomitable commoners and maidens of royal blood in the face of fierce societal and parental opposition.

III. YOUNG GUNS

Youth gangs based on ethnicity are today's social bandits, celebrated in fashion, film and music video. In 1961, only 23 large American cities reported serious gang problems; now half of all towns with populations of 25,000 or less report gang activity. As male initiation rites wither away along with the social power they once conferred, the peer group becomes all, and the peer group in extremis is the gang. Lionel Tiger and Robin Fox observed in The Imperial Animal,

In post-adolescent males, the genetic message is one of sinister and often undirected rebelliousness; this threatening information is received by older males, whose steadier hormonal systems go into reaction and insist on containment.

But what happens when the old rites of passage lead nowhere, when containment never gives way to coronation — "The King is dead, long live the Little Prince"?

The young have always had to battle their way to some extent into positions of social power. In expanding societies, room at the top also expands to accommodate these newcomers, with enough "wild cards" handed out based on sheer merit to soothe the ruffled feathers of "disadvantaged" groups (see Paul Johnson's The Birth of the Modern for a fascinating account of how brilliant members of the working classes were welcomed to participate in the Industrial Revolution and richly rewarded for their contributions). In contracting societies, on the other hand, no one gives you a leg up on the ladder of success; the ladder itself seems to have been removed.

IV. IMPORTING A POWER VACUUM

Immigrants into a nation are the equivalent of an entire new cohort of youth in terms of their "message" to the established power structure, as they push their often unwelcomed way into established bastions. It has been well documented how gangsterism is the natural response of newly-arrived groups shut out of mainstream power relationships. Virtually every ethnic group that has come to America — including the Germans but with the possible exception of the Finns, Swedes and Norwegians (who often became diehard Reds instead) — has gone through a gangster phase on its way to making it.

Gangs are parallel power structures that well up below and finally come to exist alongside official structures. They create alternative institutions in a subterranean world with its own hierarchy, rules, values, and rewards. Since the "legit" economy is all sewed up — or at least does not offer a nearly quick enough payoff to the young man on the make — gangs develop their own underground ("black") economy of smuggled, stolen, and forbidden goods and services, untaxed and unregulated. Thus do they amass the fortunes that make them men (that is, "men of respect") and buy them respect, that nectar of social power, first in their world and finally in the broader society.

Gangs may be "just a phase" for most groups, but in some cases they outlive their initial purpose. Irish-dominated political machines survive in big cities and in the Northeast. And despite the great success of Italians in American life, La Cosa Nostra staggers onward, still offering pilfered power to its "made men" even as Don Corleone's dream for his son Michael in The Godfather — "legitimacy" — has long since been realized.

Assimilation of immigrants, then, is largely the process of incorporating their men into the existing structure of power in the host society. With the massive immigration flows of modern times, however, that absorption process is breaking down.

The U.S. now harbors dozens of violent, ethnic-based gangs with hundreds of thousands of members. As our nation's sovereign power base is sapped by globalism, such gangs will become permanent features of a bleak landscape. Indeed, many second-generation immigrants are demonstrably more prone to gangsterism than were their parents. The increasing violence and viciousness of gangs are a gauge of how broken the traditional system of accession to power has become.

One prominent gang of the new globalist pattern, Mara Salvatrucha (MS-13), is headed by illegal aliens from El Salvador who joined in Los Angeles, were deported, regrouped in San Salvador, and have now reentered the country to prey on our fellow citizens. Naturally such a gang targets police officers — cops to them are just rival gunmen in the pay of the gang in power. But gun-control enthusiasts will be pleased to know that most of its murders are done by machete. Mara's 20,000 members nationwide now include Mexicans, Ecuadorans, Hondurans, and Guatemalans as well as Salvadorans. MS-13 is also reputed to have met with a top al-Qaeda lieutenant in Tegucigalpa. But not to worry: Authorities say they have arrested and are planning to deport more than 100 MS-13 leaders. (Again.)

V. TERRORISM AS A GANG PHENOMENON

This al-Qaeda contact points to the fact that with globalization, the scarcity of power, authority, and manhood is becoming internationalized. Even Europe has reacted to America's ueber-hegemon status by "unionizing." Unfortunately, the European Union seeks to counterbalance American might by wresting centuries' worth of power off its national foundations and forcing it into some Euro-abstraction — a process akin to heaving priceless Greek statuary into the street to serve as barricades.

Terrorist networks are essentially transnational political gangs that operate like global guerrillas, snatching at whatever shreds of power they can reach. Increasingly entire countries — "rogue states" in revolt against the dominion of the hegemons — are being tagged with gang status by the "legitimate" international community. Referring to the Muslim world in Civilization and Its Enemies: The Next Stage of History, neoconservative Lee Harris threatens, "If a nation contains gangs who have acted with conspicuous ruthlessness, then it is not entitled to be considered a sovereign state."

Such a threat is just the problem — it is not the solution. Islam in fact is rapidly becoming the official creed of the world's disenfranchised, disempowered men, radiating outward from its Arab base to embrace millions in the developing (i.e., subordinated) nations of Asia, Africa and Latin America, promising vengeance and restoration of manhood; not for nothing were the West's Twin Towers symbolically cut off.

The hegemons all have nukes; the gang-states want nukes, too. No one who calls himself a man suffers another man to get the drop on him. To be forced to disarm is to be castrated. When the U.S. and its globalist allies warn Iran to give up its nuclear program, imagine the sheer intolerability of it: one group of men telling another they are not permitted to defend themselves and their people. What is the message of the Iraq war, if not that countries with no nukes can be walked all over? It escapes no one that North Korea, possessing nuclear-tipped missiles, has not been invaded.

In the emerging New World Order generally, there is so little room for men that the very subject of manhood is greeted with outright hostility. Within nations and between nations, manhood is now vigorously discouraged. An aggressive program of cultural neutering to complement the political neutering is underway. The new behavior models for males — image after image of fat, sluggish dolts alternating with howling, regressed party animals — reinforce the message "Men are dogs." So relentless a reprogramming must be deliberate, as though man-hating viragos had seized power in Washington and Hollywood and Madison Avenue, Whitehall and Brussels and The Hague. But they are not viragos, only powerful men determined to monopolize the few remaining opportunities to act like men. This also explains why public education is so stupefying and border control such a joke: Countless men who would have had a shot at social power in a sovereign America must now be reprogrammed as submissive proles.

History, then, is a great Bildungsroman, a struggle of men to ensure that their own sons become the men of the next generation, autonomous manhood being the scarcest of all forms of social power. Globalization thwarts and aborts this process for untold millions by abstracting and spiriting away older forms of power and authority, just as the One Ring does in J.R.R. Tolkien's fantasia on Power, The Lord of the Rings. Meanwhile ceaseless emigration and immigration destroy the alchemy of assimilation that historically gave newcomers entree to social power.

VI. REVOLUTIONARY GANGS

Most if not all revolutionary movements have begun as gang-like cells (Freemasons, Committees of Correspondence, Minutemen, the League of the Just, the 26th of July Movement) that counterpose themselves to the powers that be. As for gangs "as heroes, as champions, avengers, fighters for justice, perhaps even leaders of liberation," in Hobsbawm's words, the language of our Declaration of Independence clearly voices the resentment felt by subjugated men toward their haughty masters:

The History of the present King of Great-Britain is a History of repeated Injuries and Usurpations, all having in direct Object the Establishment of an absolute Tyranny over these States. ... He has dissolved Representative Houses repeatedly, for opposing with manly Firmness his Invasions on the Rights of the People. ... He has combined with others to subject us to a Jurisdiction foreign to our Constitution, and unacknowledged by our Laws ...

The American Revolution, uniquely and miraculously, led to greater social empowerment, greater freedom, greater self-determination; but the rise of gangs to challenge and replace despotic anciens regimes is not usually such a liberating development. The Jacobins and Bolsheviks spring to mind. The Nazis are a particularly complex example, a hybrid of street thugs, parvenus and other marginal types with established major players in German industry and the military. Freikorps bands, reorganized as the SA and then the Waffen-SS, contested the Wehrmacht for its monopoly on the use of force. In a mere dozen years Nazi gang culture transformed Germany: The entire nation adopted the gang signs, songs, symbols, insignia, acronyms and colors of the NSDAP. Germany itself in effect became a gang, desperately battling hegemonic Britain for its "place in the sun."

VII. GLOBALIZATION GANGS UP ON CIVIL SOCIETY

Globalization's surreal concentration of authority into fewer and fewer hands suffocates not only the powers built up over centuries by hundreds of dominant national groups, but also the possibility of any meaningful meritocracy of individuals. The latter phenomenon was an upside feature of the expansive phase of European and American industrialization; there is no way within a borderless world that this miracle could ever come to pass again. There will arise instead a tiny coterie of the "legitimate," already prefigured in the rise of globalist political dynasties. The Bushes and Cheneys, Kennedys and Clintons will take care that their own princelings never sink into peonage; the rest of us will be the equivalent of bastard sons, dispossessed, dependent, impotent.

Yet history is also the story of irresistible resistance to tyranny. People's response to power shortages in the past has been to form alternative institutions to keep alive their identity and aspirations: trade unions, workingmen's associations, Friendly Societies (which offered such benefits as unemployment, sickness, accident and death allowances), co-operative workshops and factories, Co-op stores (which introduced the masses to healthy foods), credit unions, strike funds, underground schools that taught forbidden languages like Basque and Irish, samizdat, boycotts, organized Luddism and sabotage, vigilantism, "subversive" forms of religious belief — not to mention the vibrant cultures of pub and music hall. These institutions helped heal the ravages of raw industrial capitalism; they long predate the imitations that the state was forced to come up with to deter revolution.

The arising global elites are now swiftly shifting to their own new institutions like the International Criminal Court, the World Trade Organization, the Kyoto Protocol, the Law of the Sea Treaty and the imposition of a global tax under the cover of U.N. "reform." They seem to be trying as rapidly as possible to lay waste traditional institutions — religion, marriage, citizenship, private property, the separation of powers, equality before the law — as they abandon the peoples they once "served." The Supreme Court has begun citing international conventions rather than the Constitution. Free traders in Congress and corporate America behave as though favoring American workers were an act of unspeakable racism. It takes vicious bombings in London for the British government to again permit the British people to speak favorably of "Britishness."

Healing the ravages of globalization will require salvaging and rebuilding alternative power centers of our own. Home schooling and the Minuteman Project's direct action on America's southern border are both immensely important developments toward this end. The relatively spontaneous self-directed activity of "unofficial" groups may smack of gangsterism to those it challenges, and it will not always be a pretty phenomenon, but more and more we will be forced to rely upon such rough mercies — to return to self-reliance.

On September 11, 2001, the one hijacked plane that did not find its mark was brought down by a gang of passengers armed only with the heroism of despair. We are all gangsters now. When the state goes off its rocker, as it periodically does, it is the "little platoons" of civil society that set our lives in vital order once again.