I have been exchanging emails with a young human concerning his nation’s war entanglements. Below is one of my missives. This is actually the subject of my ongoing project 40,000 Years from Home, so I will be attaching this as an end note. My next entry for the book will be an interlude on the function of ideology in war: Scalp, Cross, and 401K.
Of course Islam has its infighting. And when fighting an ideological war one must whack all traitors.
How are they winning?
They have already turned the US into a police state. Now it has willingly become that which they claimed it was, with no values in terms of liberty to defend; and that, that liberty impulse, is the only thing which has ever broken the chains of faith—game over here. They never have to land. You just need to believe they might. Done deal; 911 was the one punch KO of the moral principal that underpins the materialistic enemy of the caliphate.
The front the 19th Century Islamists had on their mind was Black Africa. Did you know that last year the US conducted operations in 45 African nations? Did you know that in every one of those nations about which I have been able to find reports Black animists, Christians, and secular forces have lost ground to Islamists both black and Arabic? Right now Kenya and Nigeria make the news sometimes. These are the places where what Americans fear will happen here is happening, so reports are filtered.
Let us not forget that this is a religious movement. Only the idea has to cross the border. That is why Homeland Security is buying armored fighting vehicles and many police departments train their officers to confiscate all weapons—even if licensed, legally held and safely stored—that they come across in traffic stops, home investigations, etc. As the US military looses 45 Vietnams in Africa the lessons learned are being brought home by the mercenaries who work for the DOD and passed on to the FBI and Homeland Security who train local police.
The idea is, once Islam blooms in America in the fertile soil of a purely material and deteriorating ideology, the police state should be so centralized as to make it vulnerable to regional insurgencies as has been the case in Afghanistan, which models nicely for an ethnically and ideologically fractured America. Think about it, in a world of the spirit, Afghanistan is the iconic symbol: both the atheist Soviet Union and the materialist US Emperium broke their teeth there. The how and the why is not only not forgotten, but forms the basis for a curriculum taught to boys around the world even as our masters bomb funerals, weddings, and homes and even send drones after the responding ambulance, for a whopping 98% collateral damage tally, further enhancing recruitment of Jihadists from the remaining orphans and embittered survivors.
We have a 4-year view.
The Islamists think in terms of Ages, and will fight for hundreds of years. Western societies have rarely been able to sustain war efforts beyond a decade, and when they have, it has brought about the demise of those societies, the 30 years war being the best case study.
I predict an Islamist win late in this century. Please tell your grandchildren you knew the nut that made the call.
There you have it earthlings. I just don’t see the currency of the western banks that provide the means to pay for the West’s mercenary forces rising. I do see Islamist currency rising. Today’s western militaries are very much analogous to the forces that Wallenstein managed on behalf of this prince and that in the 30 Years War. Even at his apex he never would have dreamed of testing his conglomeration of short term contractors against the will of Islamic arms.
The reason for western hegemony has been superior technology. But now that technology has made the very battlefield obsolete. With war now increasingly a test of societal will and the West refusing to acknowledge the ideological nature of the struggle, I see no other logical conclusion, other than to honor the many American Indian leaders who predicted that although they could not stand before the God of Things, that no purely material society would remain dominant or prosperous for long. Of course, for an American 4 years is forever, so I suppose all of you humans are correct in your own fractious way.
"The redeeming feature of war is that it puts a nation to the test. As exposure to the atmosphere reduces all mummies to instant dissolution, so war passes supreme judgment upon social systems that have outlived their vitality."
Karl Marx
Sept 24, 1855
You are a quite the bibliophile Jeremy, and I am honored to have somehow made your reading list. Please though, could you put my book on a different shelf than that guy's book?
This was certainly not a unique viewpoint in the 19th Century, though Marx said it best. As much as I dislike the old bearded pervert, and look with distaste on 19th Century martial hubris, I cannot bring myself to disagree with this statement. I suspect that by 1919 a lot of folks were wishing it weren't so.
Thanks.
You’re welcome James,
And fear not, I don’t keep your works anywhere near Karl Marx’s books. In fact my copies of The Fighter’s Edge and The Logic of Force lie on the bookshelf between Enemies Foreign and Domestic and Shillelagh: The Irish Fighting Stick. FYI, it just worked out that way; there is no other dimension to their placement.
“All counter-revolutionary wars are unjust, all revolutionary wars are just.”
Mao Zedong
Jeremy, I used to click on the comments box on the back end of the website for fear that Charles would scold me for not keeping up. Now, when I drag myself off of that 15-year-old futon mattress on the floor, I mumble, 'Let's see what Jeremy has to say'. A slave ancestor of mine who belonged to a certain Brit bastard named Talbot was the first of my line to toil on these shores so I feel his ghost is quite snug between those two titles.