Here's the question: what's the connection between local food, local power, and other forms community resilience to fourth generation warfare?
The answer is simple. A government's legitimacy is based on its ability to deliver basic services.
The ability to deliver these services is the difference between a failed/hollow state (see this post on what a failed state is, although I would argue food/power is tied with security in first position) and a functional/strong one. States that fail to provide these services (or suffer perpetual systems disruption) are vulnerable to predation by non-state entities that can provide them -- as we have seen with Hezbollah, Hamas (Sadr is making the switch to a more robust plate of services right now), and a wide variety of militias (from Sao Paolo to Pakistan). Community resilience of the type we are exploring on this weblog, whether it is applied in the US or Iraq or Nigeria, is a way to stave off that predation.
Bill Lind expands on this:
In the Great Depression of the 1930s, states’ economic failure brought governments and even systems of government, including democracy, into question. In both Europe and the United States, Communism and Fascism gained certain popularity because in the Soviet Union, Fascist Italy and Nazi Germany, everyone had a job. But the state itself was not challenged, because there was no alternative to the state.Now, there is. Intelligent Fourth Generation entities, ranging from some drug gangs through organizations such as Hezbollah, are competing directly with the state for people’s primary loyalty. If those Fourth Generation entities can provide basic services, including food, when the state can no longer do so, they will gain the legitimacy that state is losing. In Fourth Generation war, that is a bigger win than any potential military victory.
As you watch the global financial system continue to unravel this fall, think hard what it will take to prevent rampant state failure in a chaotic global market system that has already weakened (privatized, hollowed out, and bankrupted) nation-states across the entire landscape.
