T he big turnout in Paris was bracing but it also might reveal a sad
fallacy of Western idealism: that good intentions will safeguard soft
targets. The world war underway is not anything like the last two. Against
neo-medieval barbarism, the West looks pretty squishy. All of the West is one
big fat soft target.
Recriminations are flying — as if this was something like a Dancing
with the Stars contest — to the effect that the Charlie Hebdo massacre
should not be labeled as “France’s 9/11.” It’s a matter of proportion, they
say: only 12 dead versus 2977 dead, plus, don’t forget, the shock of two
skyscrapers pancaking into the morning bustle of lower Manhattan. Interesting
to see how the West tortures itself psychologically into a state of
neurasthenic fecklessness.
The automatic cries for “unity,” only beg the question: for or against
what? The same cries went up in the USA after the Ferguson, Missouri, riots
and the Eric Garner grand jury commotion, pretty much disconnected from the
reality of ghetto estrangement, as if unity meant brunch together. The
demonstrators quickly reminded everybody that Homey don’t play brunch.
If French politicians think that some magical overnight state of fraternité
will congeal between the alienated Islamic masses and the rest of the
citizenry, they’re liable to be disappointed. If anything, mutual distrust is
only hardening on each side, and, anyway, I think that is not the kind of
unity they have in mind. Over in Germany, they don’t have to travel very far
psychologically to recall the awful efficiency of Hitler in purifying the
social scene according to some dark cthionic principle that remains
essentially unexplained even after all these years and ten thousand books on
the subject. It happened that he picked on a group that wasn’t disturbing the
peace in any way; if anything, the Jews were busier than anyone contributing
to Western culture, knowledge, and science.
It is at least well-understood that there are seasons in history, but they
seem to have a mysterious, implacable dynamism that mere humans can only hope
to ride like great waves, hoping to not get crushed. In the background of the
present disturbances are not only the rise of Islamic fundamentalism,
but the imminent collapse of the machinery that boosted up the greater Islamic
economy of our time: the oil engine. It was oil and oil alone that allowed
the populations of the Islamic world to blossom in a forbidding desert in the
late 20th century, and that orgy of wealth is coming to an end. So
will the ability of that region to support the populations now occupying it.
The violent outreach of Islamic wrath is actually a symptom of the
region’s death throes, already obvious in the disintegration of one
nation-state after another across North Africa and the Middle East. Saudi Arabia
will only be one of the last dominoes to fall because it is so stoutly girded
by desperate American support. The current theory is that Saudi Arabia can
ride out $40-a-barrel oil because of its built-up cash reserves. But that
seems mostly a schematic idea. Long before Saudi Arabia goes absolutely
broke, it will face terrible internal political strife between the clans and
the princes who happen not to be descendants of Muhammad ibn Saud — which
represent only 15,000 of the roughly 29 million in the kingdom, and only
about 2,000 of those actually in the power loop. King Abdullah is past 90
years old, a mere bit of fragile baling wire holding the whole thing
together. Islamic violence is fierce as it is because the Islamic world is
actually losing its mojo.
These are the stresses that are boiling over into the West these days. The
West itself faces desperately terminal problems around its oil supply, too,
mostly having to do with 100 years of the relationship between oil and
finance in debt creation. The banking armature that is the dwelling place of
all that debt is coming apart just as surely as the 20th century
Muslim nation-states that were largely a creation of the West. The long war
underway is a race to the bottom where the human project has to re-set the
terms of a life above savagery.
