Living with the aftermath

The various news outlets are babbling about a half-ton half-century-old Soviet spacecraft is going to fall from the sky sometime this month.

No one knows exactly when or where it will fall – given the orbit, population, and the ratio of water to land on this planet, it will most likely fall unobserved and without serious impact somewhere in the oceans. But until then, the media will play ambulance chaser and freak as many people as possible.

But it should remind us that the negative effects of governments – failed or obliterated – often live on long after those governments have disappeared. Or lost jurisdiction over areas they once controlled.

Admittedly, there are some good benefits of societies and nations – if not governments themselves – that long outlast those entities. But it is the negative effects that we need to understand and deal with – including a simple case of survival.

A very physical example is the vast litter of lethal military ordinance that has long dotted the battlefields and cities of Europe and Asia. While we sometimes are supposed to be (and should be) shocked by the death of a small child in a Afghan or Kashmirian or Korean battlefield, the danger is far older and far more widespread. From the cities and long-abandoned airfields of England, the Low Countries, and Germany, to the vast, bloodsoaked battlefields like Verdun and the Somme (WW2), the Hurtgen Wald and Iwo Jima and Kursk war grounds (WW2), thousands of tons of expended but unexploded bombs, shells, and more are still being dug up, more than a century later in the case of the WW1 fields. And now and then one or more people are killed by them: in addition to the unknown war dead still entombed. Today we find the same thing going on in Ukraine, Syria, Gaza, Yemen, and elsewhere.

But it is more than just physical relics. The procedural, mental and moral effects of long-dead regimes and nations are seen for centuries, and even millenia. Some are deemed by many of us to be good: the 24-hour day and 60-minute hour. The 360-degree compass and circle. All products of Babylonian (and probably Hebrew-Aramaic) civilization. Others are just weird: that the gauge (the distance between the tracks of American railroads) is based on the width of the axle of standard Roman Legionary carts, for example.

But there is more: the mental and moral defects of most of Latin America’s governments (and the government of the State of New Mexico and to some degree the State of Arizona and State of California) are the descendents of government beliefs and ideas formed by 700 years of war of the Reconquista – the liberation of the Iberian peninsula (now Spain and Portugal) from the Islamic “missionaries” (conversion by the sword and taxation) which conquered the land and Visigothic/Celtic people in the AD 700s. A Reconquesta which took all the way to 1492 when the last Moorish stronghold of Grenada was overrun by the army of Ferdinand and Isabella.

The stupidity of the colonial powers who divvied up Africa and much of Asia with a variety of borders lives on long after the demise of those empires in the “imaginary” lines dividing people, clans, and families. The insane theft (tax) laws of a century and more past impact on investments and the success of business enterprises in 2025 around the world.

When at last people are fully fed up with, and willing to take action to throw off the chains of government and start over, if they are not careful, they will allow the consequences of those overthrown regimes to survive and continue to harm them for decades and centuries.

The fight for liberty does not end when the ancient regime is done away with. Especially if parts of it (people especially) are recycled in some new scheme of rule. Which pushes the libertarian – free market anarchist solution even more strongly: no form of mandatory, monopolistic force applier, can be allowed to exist.

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