War of the Worlds

The West doesn’t have to choose between Huxley’s dystopian future and Islam’s medieval past.

The deconstructionists are mistaken when they argue that in literature text is everything. When we come to the subject of grand strategy, however, it is correct to say that context is everything. Nothing illustrates the point better than the interventionists’ habit of presenting every situation as a replay of Munich 1938. In reality, in a world where the state is losing its monopoly both on war and on social organization, worrying about another Munich is as useful as worrying about another Defenestration of Prague. The 21st-century context is radically different from the context of Europe in the 1930s.

Conservatives in particular now find ourselves confronting vast changes in the grand strategic context, changes many find emotionally difficult as well as intellectually challenging. We were brought up in a world where the grand strategic context was easy to grasp: our country, the United States of America, represented what was good, and our country’s principal opponent, the Soviet Union, represented evil. “Us versus them” was a realistic and useful framework.

The Fourth Generation of Modern War, warfare since the Peace of Westphalia in 1648, is the greatest change in armed conflict since the modern era began. It is marked by the state’s loss of the monopoly on war it established with Westphalia and the rise of non-state elements that can fight states and win. At its core is not a military but a political, social, and moral phenomenon, a crisis of legitimacy of the state itself. All over the world, people are withdrawing their primary loyalty from the state and giving it to a wide variety of other things, of many different kinds: families, clans, tribes, ethnic groups and races, gangs, ideologies, causes such as environmentalism and animal rights, religions, and so on. Many people who would never fight for their state are willing, even eager, to fight for their new primary loyalty...

...Critics of the non-state forces of the Fourth Generation say that they represent a return to the Dark Ages. That critique is valid. Where the Fourth Generation has prevailed, in places such as West Africa, Somalia, and, thanks to an American invasion, Iraq, life is once again nasty, brutish, and short. Just as the lamps went out all over Europe in 1914, so they will be extinguished, perhaps for centuries, wherever the state fails and Fourth Generation elements come to rule. This, again, is easy for Americans to grasp.

No it's not.
It's remarkable that this even is subject to debate.

There is one element of the real Brave New World Huxley missed, and that is ideology. At the heart of the West’s assault on itself, on traditional, Christian, Western culture, is the ideology of cultural Marxism, the civilizational IED planted by Gramsci, Lukacs, and the Frankfurt School. Known most commonly as political correctness or multiculturalism, cultural Marxism holds sway over all Western elites; to deny or contravene it (without groveling apologies) is to cease instantly to be a member of the elite. It has already made vast progress toward its goals of “negation” of Western culture and the “transvaluation of all values” (stolen from Nietzsche), which means simply that the old sins become virtues and the old virtues, sins. Buggery is a fine, normal, high-principled thing, but for God’s sake, don’t smoke.
This article irritated, at first, because it seemed to embody the Hillary-an view of intellectual discussion: a litany of criticism without a shred of solution, or even a hint that a solution is necessary.
I will have to join the others who need to digest this grand meal, and try to find or to devise possible responses to the conundrums it articulates.

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