I ’m not persuaded that world opinion will ever “make sense” of the Paris
attacks. The non-linear rules the day. So-called Fourth Generation Warfare
works because there are so many small arms loose in the world and any band of
maniacs with a few machine guns and a pound of Semtex plastic explosive can
create the equivalent of a war zone in a given locality.
As for the French military, the obvious first move was to bomb the ISIS
“stronghold” of Raqqa. But haven’t the US and Russian air forces been doing
exactly that for some time now? Either they’ve already bombed the place and
everything in it to gravel, or air power is not what it’s cracked up to be —
and we have plenty of reason to believe the latter after a decade of
selectively pounding jihadists from Afgahnistan to Libya with nothing to show
for it except a refugee crisis.
One thing seems assured: hard-line governments are coming soon.
Politically, the West had boundary problems that go way beyond the question
of national borders to the core psychology of modern liberalism. When is
enough of anything enough? And then, what are you really willing to do about
it? The answer lately among the Western societies is to do little and do it
slowly.
The behavior of college administrators and faculties in the USA these days
is emblematic of this cowardly dithering. Intellectual despotism reigns on
campus and the university presidents roll over like possums. They don’t have
the moral strength to defend free speech as the campus witch-hunts ramp up.
The result will be first the intellectual death of their institutions (brain
death), and then the actual death of college per se as a plausible route to
personal socioeconomic development. The financial racketeering that has
infected higher education — the engineering of the gargantuan college loan
scam in tandem with the multiplication of “diversity” deanships and tuition
inflation — pretty much guarantees an implosion of that system.
The cowardice in the college executive suites is mirrored in our national
politics, where no persons of real standing will dare step forward to oppose
the juggernaut of Hillery-the-Grifter, or take on the clowning Donald Trump
on the grounds of his sheer mental unfittedness to lead a government. In case
you haven’t noticed, the center not only isn’t holding, it gave way some time
ago. The long emergency is showing signs of morphing into something like
civil war. The Maoists on campus apparently want to turn it into race war,
too.
So many forces are in motion now and they are all tending toward
criticality. The European Union may not survive the reestablishment of
boundaries, since it was largely based on the elimination of them. Spain and
Portugal are back to breaking down politically again. The Paris bloodbath has
discredited Angela Merkel’s plea for “tolerance” — of what is proving to be
an intolerable alien invasion. The only political figure on the scene who
doesn’t appear to be talking out of his ass is Vlad Putin, who correctly
stated at the UN that undermining basic institutions around the world was not
a good idea.
None of this is good, either, for a global economy constructed around
long, hyper-complex, and fragile chains of obligation, the most critical
being global finance and global energy lines. You think the Paris attacks
were bad? Just wait until a few maniacs lob some explosives at the giant Ras
Tanura oil refinery and shipping terminal on Saudi Arabia’s Persian Gulf
coast. Imagine if that happens in the middle of winter, when Europe is
freezing. Do you suppose the Big Brains in the Pentagon think about that? The
West itself, including America, is a circus of soft targets. The softest ones
are between our ears.
