http://www.brusselsjournal.com/node/5043
The Coming Conflict
From the desk of George Handlery on Mon, 2013-03-04 07:04
An unkind reminder of what is ignored by common consent.
New documentaries are about to hit us. Some of these are already running. What is the occasion? We prepare to remember the outbreak of World War One, for long known as the “Great War”. That nametag did not outlast the eternal peace naively proclaimed after a conflict waged to make the “world safe for democracy”.
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A new era or human experience has started with the outbreak of “The Great War”. Alas, this period will not be concluded with the event’s well-behaved centenary celebrations. The age of global conflicts is not a closed chapter filed to gather dust in the archives. The likely repetition of wars waged to rule the world, make global conflict into a “current” topic. This is so even if the probability is denied and ignored by the political class that controls our democracies.
The inconvenient question we face is not whether the powers of the past that, due to their political DNA, waged total war to dominate the world, are defeated and gone. The issue to cause concern is whether there are forces left that perceive themselves as carriers of a global mission to be imposed by force once, as expected, persuasion fails. An aspect of this is whether such movements are capable to gain control over a sufficient territorial and population base to develop the needed means of destruction and to challenge the world order they wish to replace with their construct.
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The reader will easily identify ideologies, internationally active movements and their already captive states that fit the foregoing description. Their intolerant inability to accept a world order based upon pluralism and their developing technical means that support the temptation to change it violently are ripening.
It is misleading to talk here about a “coming conflict”. The fight is already upon us. It can be ignored because our political classes are doctrinally committed to overlook it. This ability issues from the fact that, while the preconditions of the foreseen major unlimited war are maturing, the struggle must for the moment be waged with limited means. Wisely, the ultimate strategy of the totalitarian challengers is camouflaged by a shrewd tactic. It combines low level (asymmetric) violence with the unlimited propaganda of victimhood. Their astute combination sedates those that are marked to be the ultimate victims of deception followed by aggression.
