Dance Macabre

"Syrian President Bashar al-Assad told the Syrian military on Monday to raise its readiness, pledging not to abandon support for Lebanese resistance against Israel".

With this development, the movement takes a step closer to its crescendo. Some have compared the times to July 1914, when Europe waited with bated breath after Archduke Franz Ferdinand's assassination. Others have compared it to the Winter War of 1939, when the Germans and Allies waited and exchanged taunts and insults but little else across the Maginot Line. As we know with the benefit of hindsight, in both cases the waiting was not for long.

But there is something different about this orchestration. It is not simply the existence of weapons the like of which the world had not yet imagined in 1914 or 1939, nor is it the geographical placement of the progression and its connotations of Armageddon. It is something else. Something inexorably destined, something relentlessly savage.

As I said elsewhere, the precursors of the coming war seem to resemble a global vortex, a sort of slow gyration characterized by swells and eddies sucking ever more of civilization into its maelstrom. It is more than a disagreement between religions, more even than a clash between civilizations; it is a confrontation between peoples, the history of which reaches back almost to the genesis of Islam and its first contact with Bysantium and Iberia. And it is a confrontation without the possibility of compromise because it is, at its root, tribal in nature.

The implications for the West of the coming explosion are stark; the glorious dream of multiculturalism once held aloft as the next evolutionary step will certainly fly apart of its own volition as its tribal components gravitate toward their own. What might once have succeeded through moderation will fail through the weight of sheer numbers and we can only hope it will not enter its death throes in a river of blood or sweep away all of Western civilization with it. But die it will, for decades if not centuries.

The prognosis for Islam is starker still because it will lose its gamble for hegemony and in the process tear and rip itself to pieces along with half a billion of its followers. The hounds of war will do the rest, and we cannot yet imagine what those hounds will look like. One can't help but think of Einstein's famous words "I do not know how the Third World War will be fought, but I can tell you what the Fourth World War will be fought with – stone clubs." The weapons of the coming war remain sheathed for now, and we have never yet seen them unsheathed.

In the First World War it was Sir Edward Grey who spoke for his generation when he said "the lights are going out all over Europe; we will not see them lit again in our lifetime". In the Second World War it was Chamberlain who gave voice to the disbelief of his generation when he cried "how horrible, fantastic, incredible it is that we should be digging trenches and trying on gas-masks here because of a quarrel in a far-away country between people of whom we know nothing!”. In our own day we have been through enough that there are few educated intelligent people of this calibre who still believe that Reason is universal currency and so we are left with a pale reflection of the Greys and Chamberlains, embodied by the yowling fools of Code Pink.

We are on the eve of the greatest conflagration in history; God willing we are not on the cusp of a second dark age.

Crusader