Safe Places to live/stay for the coming New World Order.

October 18, 2008 10:44 AM

Safe Places to live/stay for the coming New World Order.

I am looking for countries, regions around the world that are relative safe-havens for what is occuring. Food shortages, disease, police state, chemtrails, etc...

or where the rockafellers might be staying during this chaos?

posted by Nillocsoc to law & government (27 comments total)

Here's a table of the top 50 most "stable and prosperous" states, according to Jane's Information Services (more). Top ten:

1 Vatican
2 Sweden
3 Luxembourg
4 Monaco
5 Gibraltar
6 San Marino
7 Liechtenstein
8 UK
9 Netherlands
10 Ireland

USA comes in at 24.
posted by TheophileEscargot at 10:55 AM on October 18, 2008 [1 favorite]

Anywhere inside a reality bubble should sort you out.

Or, alternatively, any country in thr First World will be unaffected by any of those.
posted by Brockles at 10:57 AM on October 18, 2008 [3 favorites]

The Bush family trust allegedly bought a 100,000 acre spread in Paraguay . . . just sayin'.
posted by troy at 11:00 AM on October 18, 2008

Areas with loess soil are "are among the most agriculturally productive in the world." I'd stick near them.
posted by frobozz at 11:00 AM on October 18, 2008

Jackson Wyoming for Rockefeller. The Moonies are going to Paraguay,Bush tags along.
posted by hortense at 11:14 AM on October 18, 2008

I'm living in rural Texas. I figure if the whole world goes to hell -- I've got guns and lots of ammo, they've got guns and lots of ammo, and half the people in the surrounding area are hunter/camper survivalist types who are pretty much self-sufficient anyway.
posted by SpecialK at 11:27 AM on October 18, 2008

I'm trying to grasp the angle of your question. Are you genuinely seeking a safe hideout in which to weather the coming hard times, or do you just want to know where the master criminals might be hiding out?

re: the latter. If they're all going to Paraguay, good on 'em, I say. Here's hoping they stumble upon some weird naturally occurring jungle hallucinogenics and all go batshitinsane together. Lord of the Flies except with bigger, sharper sticks.

re: the former. I would recommend any reasonably functional "neighborhood". That is, a community of people who are around when you need them and otherwise mind their own business.

As for all those places on your list, I'm guessing that unless you've got first or second generation blood ties to them, the only way in is to pay for it ... in gold.
posted by philip-random at 11:33 AM on October 18, 2008

From personal experience, the last safe place to live will be Madagascar. Just make sure to get there before they shut down their airports.
posted by Willie0248 at 11:38 AM on October 18, 2008 [15 favorites]

note that all of the states mentioned by TheophileEscargot depend for their stability and prosperity on trade. if things really do go down the shitter, you'd better be sure that everything you need (food, shelter, water, etc.) is available within 5km of your abode or you're going to starve.

you'd better also hope that the collapse of government and the end of maintenance on things like, oh, nuclear plants, doesn't irradiate the countryside and that when the water treatment system goes kaput you don't get cholera (do hope that everyone else does, though. there'll be more for you to eat).

i suggest that you check out the first episode of "Connections" by James Burke to get a real solid grasp of just how fucked we're all going to be if "modern civilization" comes to an end.
posted by klanawa at 11:44 AM on October 18, 2008 [1 favorite]

[Bunch of stuff removed. I can let this question stand, but this isn't the right place for either proselytizing or jokes. Let's try and keep this reasonably even-keeled within the scope of the question if at all possible.]
posted by cortex at 11:45 AM on October 18, 2008 [1 favorite]

Having lived there myself, Paraguay's a good bet. Just see to it you aren't heard speaking against the current dictatorship, whatever or whomever it may be...they provide free baths for practicants of such free speech, (into which baths they fling plugged-in toasters, blow dryers, etc., despite the attached plastic tags urging against such uses.)

You should be able to walk down any street and subsist on the mangoes you pick up off the ground. If you're a guy, you can pee in plain daylight in the central plazas. Women just wear long skirts and squat, although admittedly that's more common in Bolivia and Ecuador.

Not as many stray mangoes there, though.
posted by mumstheword at 11:48 AM on October 18, 2008 [1 favorite]

Everywhere has something going on. And no where is hermetically sealed and safe from the tides. As long as there are people - there is a potential for danger.
posted by watercarrier at 12:15 PM on October 18, 2008

I'd shoot for Palau or the Visayas in the Philippines. Both have relatively small islands you can rent for 99 years. Get a big generator, and you're away from any outside influences.
posted by Bernt Pancreas at 12:20 PM on October 18, 2008

You might want to do some googling around how people prepared for the Y2K apocalypse.
posted by mattholomew at 12:21 PM on October 18, 2008

Jesse Ventura told Alex Jones he's moving to Mexico.
posted by moxiedoll at 12:35 PM on October 18, 2008

Westport, CT.
posted by Zambrano at 12:36 PM on October 18, 2008 [1 favorite]

These things have been happening to humanity since day one. There's no big disaster right now where you will need to flee, especially from the first world to the third world. Live where you have a stable job and have access to healthcare.

>or where the rockafellers might be staying during this chaos?

What's good for the ultra-rich is not good for you. They can afford a personal island with a few dozen servants. You cant. Most likely the rich are doing what Warren Buffet is doing: investing in the stock market while its low. Bad news is an investor's best friend. These poeple didnt get rich by running to mexico everytime there was a small problem and switching to an agrarian lifestyle.
posted by damn dirty ape at 12:43 PM on October 18, 2008 [2 favorites]

I think you're looking at this wrong - it's not where you're gonna be that matters, but rather where you could go. Nobody can predict the future with any degree of certainty. Those G20 countries linked to above might actually get more than a little nasty when times are tight. While working down in Africa I learned that sometimes its best to be able to get up and go when things get dicey.

Key thing to keep in mind: with few exceptions, every country on the planet treats tourists better than citizens. As nobody can predict the future, you want to keep your options open, to the maximum degree.

If you google "Five Flags theory", you can see how some folks are structuring their personal affairs to minimise government meddling and possible intrusion. I'm a student of this philosophy myself. In the most ideal case, it works like this:

Originate and maintain citizenship in one (perhaps more) country while living in a second. Generate your money in a third, deposit your assets in a fourth and select fifth nation where you'll spend the bulk of your leisure time.

These five countries - The Five Flags - minimise the control any single government can exert over any one of us. Short of achieving escape velocity, this is about as good as it gets in this day and age.

Your heart is in the right place, but your mind is looking in the wrong direction. Don't worry about where you're gonna be when the shit hits. Try to insure that no matter where the crap falls, you'll be able to move out from under.

Look at it this way: for decades if not centuries everyone, absolutely everybody on the planet looked to America as the pinnacle of human freedom and the protector of personal rights. And now, in 2008, my, my how times have changed. Will they get better? They might. But they also might not. Who knows?

It's better to have options, multiple domiciles, rather than to select one country from a list as the place you're gonna sit it out. And although I don't think the end days are coming, I've organised my affairs accordingly.

All the best!
posted by Mutant at 12:44 PM on October 18, 2008 [12 favorites]

Any place where you rely on money to buy your subsistence is dangerous. You need to be able to subsist off the land.

Unfortunately, in dire circumstances, you will not be the only one trying. Invest your money in learning how to shoot, how to hunt and fish, how to farm on a small, efficient scale, how to build a shelter, and how to protect your perimeter. By some land in Northern Ontario (hey, global warming will make it arable soon) with lots of trees for fuel and cover (and build a high efficiency concealed greenhouse).
posted by fourcheesemac at 1:16 PM on October 18, 2008

If you look at it critically, your situation is basically hopeless. Mutant's philosophy may protect you against a certain set of circumstances (legging it out of a decaying political situation in a propitious manner) but under other circumstances (pandemic outbreak, nuclear terrorist attack) being in a major urban population center could be the worst possible choice.

Look at pandemic. You could argue the safest place would be somewhere totally isolated - a place where no one flies, where nobody comes in from the outside. Such places exist. A pretty good bet for political unrest and scarcity crises caused by the breakdown of the global supply chain. On the other hand, if you die of an infection that could have been cured by 7 dollars worth of antibiotics while (as it turns out) the whole world goes along in more or less its normally fucked up manner, you might feel a bit foolish. Or rather, you might feel a little OH GOD THE SNAKES THE SNAKES ARRGHHUHHHHHhhhh... while an unbiased outside observer would find your situation foolish. There are pragmatic reasons that the net flow of humanity is towards more industrialized regions.

And of course, if you can find isolated places, so can other people running from the flu or the SARS or whatever, including the ones that didn't run soon enough, and you know, cough cough.

There are a lot of dichotomies like this. All organized states are to a varying degree police states and living in a police state can be quite amenable as long as you don't insist on expressing yourself to vigorously, which some might argue is preferable to consuming bugs in a hole in the ground. Further, consider a society that has so advanced that it maintains neither police nor army, because its perfectly enlightened populace have mastered total self-governance - let's call it Metafiltopia for the sake of argument. When food shortage and pandemic hit and the secret world power cabal takes the opportunity to come out into the open and run roughshod over human dignity and civil rights, surely they will leave little Metafiltopia with it's pool of exploitable resources that its citizenry is so nicely sustainably managing alone, right? Right. And no matter how stable where you go is, if things were to go totally haywire there is likely to be a backlash against the inevitable influx of safety-seeking tourists.

rockafellers, or as I like to call them, Rockerfellers, are not going to be made safe (if indeed they are safe) by being in a particular place: they are going to be made safe by the money they command and the power it (and their connections through a long history of commanding it) provides. Which incidentally brings up the other flaw in Mutant's strategy, which is it only works if you are essentially independently wealthy.

The language you are using and some of the issues you bring up suggests that you are partaking rather indiscriminately from the very large pool of what is essentially speculative fiction about what is actually transpiring in the world and what is going to transpire in the world (and because the predictive powers of human faculty are notoriously faulty the latter is ALWAYS speculative fiction). It is well to remember that even if you accept the assertion that most of what is presented as the mainstream worldview is hired bullshit, it doesn't mean that the alternatives people cook up on their own are any more truthful.

If you want genuinely useful advice, mine would be to accept the fact that life is fleeting, uncertain, and frequently ends suddenly and sometimes violently for reasons that appear almost unbearably arbitrary. Quit filling your head with undifferentiated data simply because you find their horrific narratives compelling and pay attention to the moment you are living in. It is your best bet of staying alive under any circumstances, your only chance of living a fulfilling life, and you might just discover pragmatic ways in which you could actually do some good and improve the little corner of reality you are inhabiting instead of dwelling on some imaginary impending catastrophe. Because the TRUTH is that the catastrophe here, now, and it has been going on since before recorded history. Try to relax and enjoy it as much as you can.
posted by nanojath at 1:36 PM on October 18, 2008 [27 favorites]

Since we're being serious: if the market economy collapses, and the state turns predatory, what you're left with is family and friends. The best place to be is where they are. The best way to prepare is make sure your social and family networks are as wide and strong as you can make them. And try to make sure your neighbours owe you favours.

Unless you're worried about just one particular nation collapsing, it doesn't really make sense to leave it for somewhere where you'll be a suspicious alien outsider, easy prey for an angry mob or a government looking for scapegoats.
posted by TheophileEscargot at 2:36 PM on October 18, 2008

If you're into that sort of thing, communes and co-ops will probably be able to switch to self-sufficiency more quickly than others, and tend to already have systems in place to deal with the needs of large groups. Berkeley, CA and Oberlin, OH have colleges in which student-run co-ops have a large degree of autonomy and influence. Of course, there's also a lot of hippies.
posted by Jon_Evil at 3:34 PM on October 18, 2008

If civilization as I know and enjoy it goes down the shitter, I'd rather go down with it than eke out some day-after-dreary-day existence in the middle of fucking nowhere with my trusty flint and fishing line.

That said, nthing the whole "part of a small tight-knit community" thing. And I'm guessing the interest in Paraguay is hydroelectricity.
posted by mandal at 4:41 PM on October 18, 2008 [1 favorite]

n+1thing of the community solution. Here, read this.
posted by codswallop at 5:46 PM on October 18, 2008

Live where you have a stable job and have access to healthcare.

This particularly. Mental healthcare, especially, as your state of mind is extremely important. In fact, I think I'd start sharing your concerns with a therapist right away.
posted by Countess Elena at 7:45 PM on October 18, 2008 [2 favorites]

Another link on the topic of community preparedness. When Y2K was a hot topic Eric Utne, founder of the very liberal publication Utne Reader put together a publication that talked about this topic in terms of relying on community to weather a technological breakdown. It is maybe unfortunate that this work was linked to a problem that turned out to be part way overblown, part adequately dealt with, with its attendent poor credibility, because there is a lot of good and interesting thought about how members of a community can support each other in a crisis. It's worth a look if you want to inspire thought about how community involvement can help ameliorate the impacts of catastrophes.

Y2K Citizen's Action Guide.
posted by nanojath at 9:40 PM on October 18, 2008

How willing are any of those countries listed to let random Americans emigrate? That's something to check out.
posted by jenfullmoon at 9:36 AM on October 19, 2008