Predicting the future of a civilization

“It never pays a prophet to be too specific” – Robert A. Heinlein

First of all, for those of you who are interested in the issues raised in the previous post, and a lot of others previously, I want to draw your attention to a listserv, Fight for Liberty! run by a friend of mine.

http://groups.yahoo.com/group/fightforliberty/

Description: Fight for Liberty! is a place where libertarian supporters of the War on Terror can share info, discuss aspects of the War on Terror and how best to support it. We generally support the U.S.-led efforts in Afghanistan and Iraq, but not U.S. imperialism or the unnecessary reduction of civil liberties in the name of fighting the War on Terror.

Criticism is welcome, so long as it is constructive, but this is not a place for debates between supporters and opponents of the War on Terror.

Secondly, I’d like to draw your attention to this chilling little short story by SF author Dan Simmons, available online here:

http://www.dansimmons.com/news/message/2006_04.htm

I’d like to get some discussion going about this. I might also recommend that you hop over to NRO Online to the Uncommon Knowledge video archives to have a look at the series of interviews with Bruce Thornton, author of ‘The Decline and Fall of Europe.’ here:

http://tv.nationalreview.com/uncommonknowledge/archives/?q=MjAwODAz

They’ve also got a series of interviews with Thomas Sowell, who I’ve written about here:

http://rantsand.blogspot.com/2007/04/review-conflict-of-visions-by-thomas.html

And Victor Davis Hanson, who I wrote about here:

http://rantsand.blogspot.com/2007/08/victor-davis-hanson-historian-of-war.html

Posting here has been a bit slow these days. My apologies, when you read and write for a living it leaves you precious little time to read and write!

In the near future I’m going to explore some ideas about courage, cowardice, demography and why the third is related to the first two.

In these, I’m going to say some pretty awful things about specific people (names redacted of course) some of whom I generally like very much, and about a certain continent, the birthplace of my civilization.

Why?

Well among other things, because the suspicion has been growing in me that the previously unthinkable may be in our future. Another generation of Americans, maybe the next one, my children’s, will be fighting in a European war.

What kind? Dunno.

Covert black ops? Urban guerilla? Conventional battlefield? Nuclear (God help us all)? I don’t know. (Though if I had to guess, I’d say the second. Like Baghdad except in the streets of London and Paris. Joy forever unconfined.)

“You’re mad, you’re insane, you’re a monster!” I think I hear.

Perhaps. Or perhaps I’ll wind up as all three. None of which necessarily makes me wrong.

And believe me, I desperately want to be wrong.

Now please try and maintain this distinction in your mind. As in the present phase of the “War on Terror” (and see that Dan Simmons story for an elegant explanation of why that’s an incredibly stupid term) it is NOT a question of being “pro-war.”

Pro-war? Nobody but a Nietzchean lunatic is “for” war. My point is not that war is somehow desirable, but that it is not within our power to avoid it.

Pleasant dreams.