The Clash of Civilizations

The 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 cthonic 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 20^th 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 20^th 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.

Note: JHK’s 2015 Forecast is available now at this link: Forecast 2015 — Life in the Breakdown Lane

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