A Few Shiny Pebbles

This is Part One of a multi-part consideration of the World at War.

There’s a lot going on right now.

The 2008 Presidential Campaign is already afoot, with candidates and potential candidates giving speeches and writing op-ed pieces right and left, vying for our attention, our allegiance, and our money. This political campaigning is vehement and venomous, and promises to get even worse as it goes on. Senator Clinton has given major policy speeches at the Manchester School for Technology and in Silicon Valley. Senator Edwards has spoken on “The Two Americas”, ex-Senator Fred Thompson has been writing opinion pieces almost daily, Governor Romney is writing, and so forth. Surprisingly, these are not the usual non-specific messages the candidates give; rather, they are clear statements of their views, with important implications for their possible presidencies. In order to do them justice in any discussion or debate, I need to set the stage, so to speak.

I also have to consider the fact that some say there is a War on Terror being waged, some say that there is a Culture War going on, some say both, and some say such statements are war-mongering, fear-mongering, outright lying, and even hate-speech. The Left pretty much downplays it all, and the Right pretty much makes a fuss, and each side hates and sneers at the other.

Meanwhile the Islamofacist jihadists, or Terrorist fanatics, or Radical Islamists, or whatever you want to call them, are on every continent and in most countries of the world, murdering large numbers of civilians and even each other. The fighting that is of most concern to the political campaigns in the United States of America is going on specifically in Iraq and Afghanistan, and more generally in the entire Middle East area. And, yes, of course there’s also Russia and China and Iran and North Korea and China and Sudan and Thailand, and Europe and what used to be known as Eastern Europe, not to mention Venezuela and Cuba and, we can’t forget Mexico and Colombia, can we? And well, pretty much the whole wide world, actually.

And then we have the so-called peace movements, and the anti-globalization movements, and the environmentalist movements, and the global warming bandwagon, and alternative fuels, and so on, and so on, and, in all, a lot of sound and fury.

It sounds like we’ve been here before, but I would like to suggest that we haven’t. Not ever.

As a matter of fact, we have the hardest fight of our lives ahead of us, and the outcome of that fight is going to determine the success or failure of America itself, and, in turn, the whole world. I am speaking of both the “Great War on Terror” and the “Culture War”.

That sounds like a pretty grandiose statement, but there really is something different, something new, going on. And there are specific reasons that it could not really have existed before this, even though there have been skirmishes in these wars in the past.

Throughout the ages, all the efforts of humankind depended on the capture and control of energy. Throughout the ages this has basically meant reliance on six things: Nature, animals, slavery, reading and writing, science and technology, and some form of money. The first is Nature’s power, which could be captured only in the lucky circumstance of a river’s run, or of providential currents in the sea, or of winds that blew on sails or a windmill’s winged arms, or some such other lucky fall of fortune’s dice. The second is the animals that came to be domesticated to the point where man could pull a heavy load or travel more swiftly than his legs alone could move him. The third was the capture and control of other members of the human race. Slavery has walked with us from the beginning of time, and no people have been immune from its effects. Serfdom, peonage, control by armies and secret police, and cooperation by extortion, bribery, and other forms of coercion have always existed and exist even now. The fourth was the ability to write information down and retrieve it by reading. The fifth, science and technology, including tools and methods, grew over time to give more and more mastery of the methods for producing the energy necessary to provide the needs of people with less and less cost and effort, including the weaponry for armies and control. Sixth, some form of money, credit, the ability to move funds to where they can be used by using information written down and transported in faster and faster ways to its point of usage.

Whenever and wherever human beings lived, they took what energy and control they could in these six ways, the primary sources of power that they could find, allowing other, subsidiary needs to be met, such as farming and weaving and erecting buildings.

Over time, the increasing ease of access to and improvements in these six things has enabled people with ideas to spread and with goals of one form or another to carry out their projects. At this point in the 21st Century, we have reached a stage where for the first time, literally on a world-wide scale, we are engaged in a World War that is being waged between and among the great competing ideologies about the nature of humankind and the potential contour of the future. These ideologies are fighting both Terror Warfare and Cultural Warfare. For the first time the true believers in these ideologies have a truly global scope: the ability of people to quickly and quietly move themselves and their supplies about the globe, to obtain weapons that can destroy large numbers of people and even whole cities, to use the Internet and cell phones and other “instant” communication devices, to use the power and portability of computers and laptops, to use easily transportable memory-storage devices, to use digital photography and videos, to get training in intensive sophisticated techniques, to use profits from products that they can control such as oil and drugs, to induce ideologically connected billionaires and multi-millionaires to fund them, to have methodologies and capabilities of a scope and scale unknown before this, and to have the logistics and the determination to fight over a long period of time with the fanatical intention to succeed in their goals at any cost.

On the whole, the world is ignoring the implications, and even the existence, of this being a World War we are fighting. An example of this is in a just-released major Report by Amnesty International. In an article about the Report, “Amnesty [International]: U.S. war on terrorism is 'eroding human rights worldwide'”, Raphael G. Satter, AP, May 23, 2007, writes (emphasis mine):

The United States is treating the globe like a giant battlefield in its war on terrorism, eroding rights worldwide, a leading human rights group said Wednesday.

Just this morning, as I write this, I am listening to the Fox News reporting that the authorities have stopped a massive terrorist plot involving New York’s JFK International Airport and a jet fuel pipeline that would have caused devastating destruction throughout a large area of New York State. The terrorists involved have roots in the USA and in Trinidad and Guyana. The globe is a giant battlefield! Ask the People in Darfur, in Thailand, in England and Spain, in Bali, on the high seas, in the air above our heads, and anywhere a weakness is observed and deemed a target.

These terrorist and culture war battles aren’t separate fights, except in the way that the War against the Japanese and the War against the Germans were different in World War II. Instead of battling nations, we are fighting ideologies. We separate them verbally when we speak of them because their methods are so different that it takes a bit of time and thought to recognize that they have an intrinsic relationship to each other as differently proposed solutions to the questions of how to live the best life. That is what this is all about. We need to find out about complex issues and we need to work out the practical, practicable, and potentially successful ways to deal with them. Infrastructure, structure, superstructure. Motives, methods, and means.

If a man stands before you, you can see that his hand is totally different from his head, but they are both important parts of his organism. Every cell carries the same DNA, the physical signature of that individual man. He shares important and traceable parts of this DNA with his parents and brothers and sisters. I want to try to discover and propose some various ways of looking at history and at current events so as to discover the underlying DNA that makes the worldwide groups, the “organisms” involved in this fight, ideological kin.

To paraphrase the Classical writer, Terence, We are human, and nothing human is alien to us. We are fighting a vicious and imperative family feud in the Family of Humankind, and that is why none of us can avoid it—and that is why we need to understand it.

Tuesday, World at War: In Depth Part Two will discuss this further.

Trackposted to Outside the Beltway, Perri Nelson's Website, 4 Time Dad?, The Virtuous Republic, Right Truth, Big Dog's Weblog, The Pet Haven Blog, Shadowscope, The Amboy Times, Leaning Straight Up, Pursuing Holiness, Pet's Garden Blog, Rightlinx, third world county, Right Celebrity, Wake Up America, Woman Honor Thyself, Stageleft, stikNstein... has no mercy, The Uncooperative Blogger, Pirate's Cove, The Right Nation, Nuke's news and views, The Pink Flamingo, Dumb Ox Daily News, Right Voices, Blog @ MoreWhat.com, A Blog For All, The Random Yak, DeMediacratic Nation, Maggie's Notebook, Adam's Blog, Webloggin, The Bullwinkle Blog, Cao's Blog, MY Vast Right Wing Conspiracy, Colloquium, , Conservative Cat, Jo's Cafe, Diary of the Mad Pigeon, Allie Is Wired, The Crazy Rants of Samantha Burns, The World According to Carl, Blue Star Chronicles, Gulf Coast Hurricane Tracker, High Desert Wanderer, The Yankee Sailor, and Gone Hollywood, thanks to Linkfest Haven Deluxe.