Tag: war

Delusion and deterrence

Mr. Smith has a rather unusual theory about the Charleston church shootings:

Adam F. Smith ‏@Adampdx Jun 18
Haters like @castaliahouse  Theodore “Vox Day” Beale are the cause of massacre at SC AME church #SadPuppies #hugoawards

I look forward to the SJWs at File 770 being as horrified and outraged by this ludicrous accusation as they pretended to be by Mike Z. Williamson’s “too soon” joke. It’s particularly bizarre since I am not Castalia House and @castaliahouse has never taken any position on any American racial or religious affairs.

It’s rather amusing to see the many attacks by their own side the SJWs resolutely ignore as they go about their daily posturing and strike their latest outrage poses. Tor employees attack Tor’s authors and customers alike, Castalia House has undergone six straight months of cracking attempts, Vox Popoli is now into its third straight day of a DDOS attack, hundreds of people emailing Tor Books have been accused of being bots by Tor employees even as as Tor supporters create fake tweets to feign public support for Tor, and yet science fiction’s SJWs still preen and posture as if they’re the good guys because a few hundred science fiction readers followed the rules and violated an unspoken gentlemen’s agreement to which we were not privy and to which we never agreed.

And yet, some of those on our side still want to pretend this decades-long cultural conflict is some sort of white-glove affair. There is a fundamental disagreement between the noble defeatists and those who are less willing to continue to submit to the SJWs attempt to claim cultural dominance at Sarah Hoyt’s post on The Marquess of Queensbury’s rules:

thewriterinblack  
Another observation I have made in the past is that our enemies often not only know that we don’t play by the same “rulebook” as they do, they count on it. Those among the Jihadis who have even a ghost of a clue know that if we were really as bad as they make out, well, it would be easier to pray toward Mecca–just face the blue glow.

Apropos of nothing, I am reminded of a scene in an old Fantastic Four comment. Sue Storm as the Invisible Girl (I think this was before she started calling herself the Invisible Woman) facing Dr. Doom. “Doom, do you have any idea how dangerous my force fields would be if I decided to play by your rules?”

That’s us all over.

Dorothy Grant
And this would be why they hate and fear Vox Day above all others: because he does play by their rules.

RES
If we played by their rules the earth would be scorched. But playing by the Devil’s rules would be to concede defeat — what we fight for is ordered liberty, constrained government, rational argument over insanity.

Batman does not become the Joker, Superman does not accept the values of Luthor, Spiderman does not become Doc Octopus.

RES is completely wrong for the obvious reason that SJWs are not the Devil, they are merely his unhappy, not-very-bright children. And the vital point that RES completely misses is that you do not defend ordered liberty, constrained government, and rational argument over insanity with unconstrained liberty, government inaction, and talk. You defend it with force, and you defend it successfully with force that exceeds that of your opponent at the point of conflict.

The Romans did not become the Britons by defeating them with superior force. The USA did not become Nazi Germany by invading Normandy (although it may as a result of the 1965 Immigration Act). The Soviets did not become the Afghans and the Coalition of the Willing has not become the global jihad. Batman would not become the Joker even if he snapped the Joker’s neck, but he would certainly save the lives of all of those who would have been killed by the Joker in the future.

What frustrates me about the noble defeatists is that they are like a football team who refuses to accept the newfangled rules that permit the forward pass. They insist on playing the game in the outmoded way they believe to be the correct way, run the ball every down against a defense with 11 men stacked in the box, and inevitably lose when the other team passes for ten touchdowns and wins 70-0.

The problem is a conceptual one at heart. Even those whose devotion to free expression is unquestioned, such as Ken and Clarke of PopeHat, fail to understand that their efforts are doomed to failure so long as they confuse the objective with the methods used to defend it. This is not a “by any means” argument, it is a straightforward argument for Chicago Rules deterrence.

The best defense for free expression is not to permit the other side to freely libel and slander and calumniate and defame and lie while responding with few feeble protests that what they’re saying just ain’t so. The reason poison gas has made very few appearances on the battlefield since WWI is not because the French, English, and Americans set the Germans a good example, but because they promptly responded by manufacturing and using even more gas than the Germans did. The only reason the USA has not dropped an atomic bomb since 1945 is because the Soviet Union obtained their own in 1949.

Has the assault on free speech waxed or waned since Belgium introduced hate speech laws in 1981? The high-minded non-deterrent approach has failed, continuously failed, for the last three decades. The SJWs find speech-policing to be a useful weapon for marginalizing, disqualifying, and destroying their enemies and they are not going to give it up until they find themselves suffering from it to a greater extent than the free speech advocates do.

If you seek to defend free expression, you can do no better than to follow the lead of Lieutenant General Sir Charles Ferguson, who said of poison gas, which he deplored as a “cowardly” and un-English form of warfare:

“We cannot win this war unless we kill or incapacitate more of our enemies than they do of us, and if this can only be done by our copying the enemy in his choice of weapons, we must not refuse to do so.”

This does not mean we must blindly imitate the other side, particularly not in their instinctual resort to stupid and petty lies, transparent psychological projection, and a foolish insistence on defending the indefensible. Nor should we seek to be as blindly ignorant of them as they are of us. What it means is that we should adopt their more effective tactics, and, as the Allies did with gas in WWI, make even more effective and extensive use of those tactics until they agree to abandon them.

It would be more efficient

It’s a sad day when the parodies are more sensible than the actual policies:

Recognizing the need for a new strategy to fight ISIS, the Pentagon announced today that it would no longer supply the Iraqi Army with American vehicles, artillery and rifles, and instead would supply materiel directly to ISIS.

CENTCOM spokesman Air Force Col. Patrick Ryder says the idea “would be a game changer.”

The plan has its roots in Army Capt. Noel Abelove’s PowerPoint briefing, which was hailed by the Joint Chiefs of Staff, sources said. Abelove, a supply officer on the Joint Logistics Staff (J-4), realized that cutting out the Iraqi Army middlemen had numerous advantages.

“They taught me at West Point that ‘amateurs talk strategy but professionals talk logistics,’” Abelove told reporters. “The most important advantage is, we only supply about 40 percent of each ISIS requisition.”

Abelove continued: “Before, when we gave the [Iraqi] Army 100 percent, then we had to fly strike missions to destroy a lot of it a week or two later. This way we immediately degrade ISIS by over 60 percent, without having to use our increasingly scarce missiles and JDAMs, and more importantly, without having to put any airmen into harm’s way.”

Other sources indicate that supplying ISIS also reduces the risk of sensitive equipment being passed to Iran by Shiite commanders in the Iraqi Army, or being sold on Craigslist.

“A lot of these guys were piling a lot of cash into banks in Qatar and the Caymans,” according to an analyst who requested anonymity. “Well, screw that. ISIS will literally burn anyone selling our gear.”

Counterinsurgency is difficult enough in the best of circumstances. But it’s even harder when you’re stupid. And that’s the best case scenario. Worst case, “my Muslim faith” wasn’t the inadvertent slip of the tongue everyone, including the interviewer who had to catch and correct him, assumed it to have been.

The first to die

But it is very unlikely that Keith Broomfield will be the last American to die fighting the neo-caliphate of the Islamic State:

Hundreds of people turned up in the Kurdish town of Kobani to bid farewell to Keith Broomfield before his body was handed over to family at the Mursitpinar gate, said Idriss Naasan.

Broomfield, from Massachusetts, died on June 3 in battle in a Syrian village near Kobani, making him likely the first U.S. citizen to die fighting alongside Kurds against the Islamic State group.

He had joined the People’s Protection Units known as the YPG on Feb. 24 under the nom de guerre Gelhat Rumet. The YPG are the main Kurdish guerrilla battling the Islamic State group in Syria.

It wasn’t even two years ago when the usual anklebiters were scoffing at the idea of a revived caliphate. And yet, an American has already died fighting it.

Transcript available

From last weekend’s Brainstorm event with Dr. Martin van Creveld, Israeli military historian and the author of The Transformation of War and A History of Strategy: From Sun Tzu to William S. Lind:

VOX: Speaking of the US, I am curious to know what the general opinion in Israel is of the American neocons who, like you said, have been trying to overthrow Assad. They have overturned the Ukrainian government, the Libyan government, the Iraqi government, etc. What is the general view of the neocons in Israel?

MVC: Oh, we love them. The Israelis are very happy to fight the Arabs and the Iranians with American blood. During the first Gulf War, Israel was then under Yitzhak Shamir and did whatever it could to encourage an American invasion of Iraq. I wouldn’t say that this was decisive but they tried. It was the same when the Americans invaded Iraq for the second time. It was the same when Americans clashed with Iran over nuclear weapons. Each time you can see this very consistently. You can see the Israeli Right and, to some extent, even the Left say okay, this is lovely, we are going to let the Americans put the chestnuts in the fire for us.

Myself, I must say, that I dislike this policy very much. But certainly most Israelis like it. They like to be on the side of the strong as I see it. They push America as much as they can into these ventures. Just today I saw a famous t-shirt that says “Don’t worry America, Israel is behind you.” I also know that some Americans, like Pat Buchanan, have been writing that these lousy Israelis have been trying to use American for their own purposes and have unfortunately they have succeeded. So, personally I am not happy about this policy. I think that it may well one day act as a boomerang.

 VOX: Do you think it is bad for Israel to be dependent in that way?

MVC: Yes, because, as we say in Hebrew, “the one who’s got the money has the say.” It’s bad in several ways, it is bad in the sense that we are tilting too much in the Republican direction. That is a bad thing in my view. It’s not bipartisan. There is a danger that one day support for Israel will probably fade and people will say enough of this. They will say Israelis are exploiting us with American-Jewish help. They are exploiting us for their own purposes. Let them go and fight their own wars. I have been warned more than once by my American friends that this is one day going to happen. It hasn’t happened yet but it is going to happen one day and it worries me. Frankly, it worries me.

VOX: Yeah, you don’t want to use your allies on a war that you don’t need and then not have their support when you actually need it.

MVC: Exactly.

In the event you are not a Brainstorm member but happen to be interested in obtaining a transcript of the interview with Dr. Martin van Creveld, it is available in EPUB and MOBI format at Castalia House.

We haven’t scheduled the times yet, but William S. Lind has agreed to do a future event, as has Dr. Helen Smith. I’ve also contacted Ann Coulter’s publisher and am expect to arrange an interview with her at some point about her new book, Adios America. If there are others you might be interested in seeing on Brainstorm, feel free to make suggestions here. The objective is to maintain a consistently high level of intellectual discourse for the open and closed events alike.

You can join Brainstorm as an Annual or Monthly member
to receive free transcripts as well as taking part in the closed
events. Now that we have 500 seats in the virtual auditorium, there
isn’t much risk of not being able to attend the open ones. On which
note, I should mention that there are still 240 seats left for next week’s event with Roosh V.

A juxstaposition

If there is one lesson, just one, from all of Martin van Creveld’s books, it is that technology does not guarantee military victory. Here is a vivid comparison that shows why things are looking rather grim for the US military if it is ordered to intervene in the Middle East for a third time in three decades in order to take on the Islamic State there:

  1. Let Transgender Troops Serve Openly by THE EDITORIAL BOARD. The Pentagon’s ban on transgender troops is based on obsolete policies and must be rescinded.  The Williams Institute at the U.C.L.A. School of Law, which researches gender issues, estimates there are about 15,500 transgender troops serving in uniform.
  2. Using Violence and Persuasion, ISIS Makes Political Gains. Amid punishing American-backed airstrikes, the Islamic State militants have advanced in Iraq and Syria using a dual strategy of purporting to represent Sunni interests and attacking any group that vies to play the same role.

Military history clearly demonstrates that the side that executes homosexuals, whether throwing them off buildings or having their fellow soldiers beat them to death, reliably defeats the side that allows its soldiers to dress up and pretend they are women.

Yes, wealth and technology are on the side of the crossdressing military. But attrition, geography, and history are on the side that does not tolerate effeminacy.

It’s true that the US military roundly defeated the Soviet-trained, Soviet-equipped Iraqi army twice, the second time largely without a fight. But then, the Islamic State has defeated the US-trained, US-equipped Iraqi army.

Neocons attack Paul, the sequel

Now the people who brought you failure in Afghanistan, failure in Iraq, a puppet government in Ukraine and the Islamic State are gunning for Rand Paul because he is willing to tell the truth about them and the foreign policy failures of the last Republican president. Roger Simon is running around claiming that Paul has “shown his true colors” and “destroyed himself”:

Alas Rand (I had higher hopes for him), like father Ron, has a mega-chauvanistic view of the world.  The USA is so big and strong it causes everything, including, at one point, 9-11, and now ISIS, if you can believe that. Never mind that the Islamic State is just another avatar of Islamic imperialism’s desire for a world caliphate that has been going on for centuries, long before our country was in existence — the Battle of Tours (732), the Siege of Vienna (1683) and on and on. The violence has been there forever, too.  As any literate person knows, it’s in the Koran and the Hadith.  Beheadings were part of Mohammed’s game plan. It’s what he did and what he called for. This was not invented by a cabal of neocons in Chevy Chase, Maryland, in 2003.

And of course ISIS is part of a straight line that goes from the Muslim Brotherhood (founded in Egypt in 1928, long before the current crop of Republicans were even alive) to Al Qaeda via Zawahiri and on into the modern age with ISIS, all working from the same ideological playbook, as are Boko Haram, Hamas, al Shabab, al Nusra, etc., etc.

Rand, again like father Ron, is essentially racist in blaming this on America and not recognizing other cultures have belief systems to which they truly adhere and that those belief systems may be dangerous, even evil.  America did not evolve Islamist ideology anymore than it did Nazism, but the Islamists have the potential to wreak just as much havoc if they are not stopped.

And what did Paul actually say?

The freshman senator from Kentucky said Wednesday that the GOP’s foreign policy hawks “created these people.” . . .  “ISIS exists and grew stronger because of the hawks in our party who gave arms indiscriminately,” Paul said on MSNBC’s “Morning Joe.” He continued: “They created these people. ISIS is all over Libya because these same hawks in my party loved – they loved Hillary Clinton’s war in Libya. They just wanted more of it.”

That’s absolutely true. Simon and the other neocons can sing and dance all they like, but the fact is that the US invasion and occupation of Iraq created ISIS. Military experts like William S. Lind even predicted it back in 2003:

The current phase of the war in Iraq is driven by three different
elements: chaos, a war of national liberation (which is inflicting most
of the casualties) and 4th Generation War. In time, the 4th Generation
elements will come to predominate, as they fill the vacuum created by
the destruction of the Iraqi state.

He then pointed out how it would proceed in  2004:

An article in the Friday, March 29 Washington Post pointed to the long-expected opening of Phase III of America’s war with Iraq. Phase I was the jousting contest, the formal “war” between America’s and Iraq’s armies that ended with the fall of Baghdad. Phase II was the War of National Liberation waged by the Baath Party and fought guerilla-style. Phase III, which is likely to prove the decisive phase, is true Fourth Generation war, war waged by a wide variety of non-state Iraqi and other Islamic forces for objectives and motives that reach far beyond politics.

    The Post article, “Iraq Attacks Blamed on Islamic Extremists,” contains the following revealing paragraph:

    In the intelligence operations room at the 1st Armored Division’s headquarters (in Baghdad), wall-mounted charts identifying and linking insurgents depict the changing battlefield. Last fall the organizational chart of Baathist fighters and leaders stretched for 10 feet, while charts listing known Islamic radicals took up a few pieces of paper. Now, the chart of Iraqi religious extremists dominates the room, while the poster depicting Baathist activity has shrunk to half of its previous size.

The article goes on to quote a U.S. intelligence officer as adding, “There is no single organization that’s behind all this. It’s far more decentralized than that.”

Welcome to Phase III. The remaining Ba’athists will of course continue their War of National Liberation, and Fourth Generation elements have been active from the outset. But the situation map in the 1st Armored Division’s headquarters reveals the “tipping point”: Fourth Generation war is now the dominant form of war against the Americans in Iraq.

The neocons are desperate to avoid responsibility for their failures because they want to keep doing the same stupid shit that caused the current problems. Far from destroying himself, Paul is telling Americans what is necessary just to begin saving what is left of their nation. Ron Paul was right back in 2001. Rand Paul is right now.

No reason to react

There are more reports of ISIS atrocities in Syria:

Islamic State militants have executed at least 400 mostly women and children in Syria’s ancient city of Palmyra. Eye-witnesses have reported the streets are strewn with bodies – the latest victims of the Islamic State’s unrelenting savagery – on the same day photographs of captured Syrian soldiers have emerged.

It follows the killing of nearly 300 pro-government troops two days after they captured the city, now symbolised by a black ISIS flag flying above an ancient citadel.

However, keep in mind that false reports of atrocities have been used to whip up support for war for centuries. That doesn’t mean the reports are inaccurate, particularly in the electronic age when it’s easier to document events, but it’s important not to rush to judgment.

In my opinion, there is no reason to even contemplate military intervention in the Islamic world as long as Muslims reside in the West. This is the third great wave of Islamic expansion of a form that long predates the Westphalian system of nation-states and any policy that is based on Westphalian or post-Westphalian principles is bound to fail. Remember, a significant percentage of Muslims in the West openly sympathize with ISIS, and perhaps more importantly, it was Western governments that made the Caliphate possible:

A declassified secret US government document obtained by the conservative public interest law firm Judicial Watch, shows that Western governments deliberately allied with al-Qaeda and other Islamist extremist groups to topple Syrian dictator Bashir al-Assad. The document reveals that in coordination with the Gulf states and Turkey, the West intentionally sponsored violent Islamist groups to destabilize Assad, and that these “supporting powers” desired the emergence of a “Salafist Principality” in Syria to “isolate the Syrian regime.”

Yet another strike against the principle of foreign intervention. The devil you don’t know is often considerably worse than the one you are trying to cast out.

The return of Voxiversity

A number of you have been requesting a new Voxiversity, I’d been thinking it was well past time to do another one, and the potential connection with our hypothetical Brainstorm Club that we’ve been discussing turned it into a no-brainer.

On Saturday, May 16, the next Voxiversity will commence with the first quiz on Martin van Creveld’s A HISTORY OF STRATEGY, which will cover the Foreword, the Introduction, and Chapter 1: Chinese Military Thought. If you haven’t acquired a copy of the book yet, you can get it at Amazon or in EPUB format at Castalia House. The chapters are not long and you will be able to read Chapter 1 at least twice before Saturday. If you want to see what a Voxiversity is like, have a look at the left sidebar for previous ones on works by Thucydides, Dante, and Rothbard, among others.

However, one benefit of selecting a work by a living author is that in addition to the usual quizzes and online discussions in the comments, Dr. van Creveld has agreed to take part in an online videoconference with me that will be open to the Ilk. We haven’t set a date yet, but it will be scheduled sometime during the Voxiversity, which will run for the next eight weeks. I will interview him for the first 30 minutes, after which we will have an open Q&A session. In addition to being the author of EQUALITY: THE IMPOSSIBLE QUEST, as well as The Transformation of War and Technology and War, Dr. van Creveld will be a contributor to RIDING THE RED HORSE V2 and he has written an absolutely fascinating essay on a significant aspect of future war that very few have considered.

The event will be free, but because the number of places are limited (to exactly what, I do not yet know) priority will be given to the members of the Dread Ilk’s Brainstorm Club. While I’m still working out how that is going to operate, my current thinking is that in addition to being able to attend the monthly Brainstorm event, members will get first shot at attending the free online events such as these.

Violence, women, and war

One Owlmirror attempts to claim it is reasonable to conclude that I approve of violence towards feminist women:

I have something of a rant simmering on how it’s still reasonable to conclude that Vox Day approves of violence towards women (or more specifically, feminist women), despite the point (which you emphasized) that that’s not exactly what he wrote, but it’s long and kinda off-topic.”

It is also false. I do not approve of initiating violence period. Not towards women, not towards feminist women, not towards anyone.

Is that insufficiently clear? Do I need to type more slowly for the message to sink in?

The idea that I approve of violence against women is entirely based on false accusations. Just to give one example, despite the fact that I have never addressed the shooting of Malala Yousafzai in any detail, much less supported it, a number of people have repeated the totally false claims by Popular Science and NPR that I am “on the record as supporting the Taliban’s attempt to assassinate Nobel Peace Prize winner Malala Yousifazi”. In fact, there is not a single post about Miss Yousafzai on this blog and my only reference to her was in a passing reference on Alpha Game in a post dealing with the demographic implosion of Japan.

“In light of the strong correlation between female education and demographic decline, a purely empirical perspective on Malala Yousafzai,
the poster girl for global female education, may indicate that the
Taliban’s attempt to silence her was perfectly rational and
scientifically justifiable.”

So, in the interest of setting the record straight, let’s go ahead and look at the Taliban’s attack on the young Pakistani woman to see whether the attack can reasonably be considered rational or not. (I will address the scientific element below.) And once you take the time to actually read about the historical context of the shooting, it rapidly becomes obvious that the decision of the Taliban to attack Malala Yousafzai was not a random act of irrational violence against women, but rather the rational and purposeful targeting of an individual they correctly considered to be a traitor in the employ of their enemies.

Most people are entirely unaware that Yousafzai was no mere “innocent
schoolgirl” who just happened to attend school, she was the daughter of a pro-Western activist, she had worked as a
paid propagandist for the BBC and other Western organizations for four
years, and she had even met with Richard Holbrooke before the “irrational”
Taliban finally decided to silence her. Given that her family “ran a chain of schools”, you could even make a reasonable case for her pro-education activism having been little more than a cynical marketing device on the part of her elders.

The Taliban has been fighting to defend their traditional way of life in their own tribal lands for 36 years. They have killed tens of thousands of people, from elite Spetsnaz soldiers to unarmed young women, in order to do so. It is quite clear that they will kill anyone who threatens that way of life, and considering how they have survived two invasions and occupations by two superpowers, their ruthlessness is not only rational, but understandable and even, from a strategic perspective, necessary and admirable. Less determined forces would have collapsed and surrendered years ago.

Does that mean I support the Taliban? Absolutely not. Does that mean I share their views? No. Does that mean I want to live the way they do? No.

But unlike PZ Myers and many people who apparently consider them nothing more than a momentarily useful rhetorical device, I take the Taliban seriously, for the obvious reason that anyone who can fight two numerically and technologically superior enemies to a standstill is obviously formidable and had damn well better be taken seriously. Fortunately, unlike ISIS, the Taliban appears to wish little more than to be left alone in Afghanistan and Pakistan.

Here is the question for the left-leaning seculars in our midst. Suppose a young girl in your country adopted a strongly anti-homosexual ideology, was employed by Iraqi and Syrian agencies, met in secret with a top Syrian official, and over the course of four years was successful in convincing tens of thousands of people in your country that homosexuals should be killed by throwing them off rooftops. Suppose hundreds of homosexuals had already been killed in this way thanks to her public calls for such executions. Would you support her arrest and execution or would you oppose it?

Even if you would oppose it on moral or legal grounds, isn’t it easier to see the Taliban’s attack as being an entirely rational one when framed in that context? I see the shooting of Malala Yousafzai as being very little different than the English burning of Joan of Arc or the UK’s hanging of William Joyce. It was an act of war aimed at an enemy effective, not a random and irrational act of violence rooted in prejudice.

It is also worth noting that the Taliban have
left Yousafzai alone now that she’s no longer living in Pakistan. They don’t appear to care if she wants to take her message to foreign populations elsewhere, but they will not permit her to spread pro-Western propaganda among their own people.

Cantus asked me a few questions about this a few days ago that I did not see until now:

How do you justify the assertion that you’ve “never gone on the record
as supporting the Taliban’s attempt on her life”? Are you arguing that
an action being “scientifically justifiable” does not amount to
supporting it? 

Because I did not support the Taliban’s attempt on Miss Yousafzai’s life. I merely observed that the attempt was a rational act given their perspective, which I do not share. Yes, I unequivocally state that the fact that an action is justifiable from a scientific perspective neither makes it moral nor desirable. There are many things I consider to be scientifically justifiable that I nevertheless do not support because I do not believe science to be an appropriate or reliable guide to human behavior.

Fourth Generation disruptions

What applies to one field often applies to many. I thought this excerpt from Martin van Creveld’s Technology and War was interesting both in its own right and as it applies to the cultural war:

In practice, the difference between war and the deadliest games practiced by men consists precisely of the fact that, in war, the element of pure unbridled force is always present. Like a bolt of lightning coming out of a clear sky, it threatens to crash through the network of rules. Historically speaking, there have been many places and times when war began to resemble a game. Whenever this happened, there were people aplenty who chose to interpret the phenomenon as a sign that civilization was advancing, that eternal peace was possible, perhaps even that the millenium was about to arrive. On each of those occasions, however, sooner or later somebody came along who did not operate on the same code. Brandishing his sharp sword he tore apart the delicate fabric, revealing war for what it really was.

Nemesis, when it came, took different forms. The Hellenistic states, which had dominated the eastern Mediterranean, were laid low by the Romans who, to quote Polybius, were singularly inclined to use force (bia) in order to solve any problem. The jousts and other military games being played at the courts of France and Burgundy were rudely disrupted by Swiss pikemen and Spanish arquebusiers coming from “barbaric” countries on the fringe of civilization, nations that had never been properly feudalized. The European ancien régime was brought to an end when the French Revolution mobilized huge hordes of men and, unable to train them in the good old rules, hurled them forward at the enemy in formations that contemporaries regarded as crude but very effective. As might be expected, those who survived these eruptions often engaged in a spirited debate as to whether they involved progress or a reversion to barbarism. Though a disinterested historian writing long after the event might point out that they most probably represented both, this was scant consolation to the victims at the time.

To read the signs, our age also displays these symptoms. Partly because of the nuclear threat, partly because of the modern fascination with advanced technology per se, and partly for deeply rooted socio-ideological reasons, weapons are being turned into toys and conventional war into an elaborate, but fundamentally pointless, game. While games can be nice while they last, in our age too there is a real danger that they will be upset by barbarians who, refusing to abide by the rules, pick up the playing-board and use it to smash the opponent’s head. Let him who has ears to listen, listen: the call Lucifer ante portas already reverberates, and new forms of warfare are threatening to put an end to our delicate civilization.

It’s not an accident that there are similarities between the 4GW we are seeing throughout the Middle East and the 4GW we are seeing in the form of GamerGate. Both are reactions to overwhelming and irresistible centralized power; ISIS/DAESH could no more stand up to the US military in conventional battle than the average game player could influence the game media or the average SF novelist could expect to hit the New York Times bestseller list and be end-capped at Barnes & Noble without the support of a major New York publisher.

But technology and decentralization has allowed the Fourth Generation forces to bypass the conventional strong points. ISIS can coordinate global strikes from deep cover operatives anywhere in the world; a power not even the Emperor of Rome or the Queen of the British Empire possessed. A single gamer like Pew Die Pie has a bigger following than any game journalist. And, well, you already know about the Hugo Awards and the New York Times bestseller list has been rendered moot by Amazon’s.

This is a time of change, in both military and societal terms. As is usually the case, the change will NOT take the form that is expected by those who control the conventional forces, indeed, on the basis of past transitions, we can safely predict that those who have been most dependent upon the conventional models are the most likely to find themselves on the wrong side of techno-historical progress.