The Winds of World War III
There’s a gathering storm on the horizon.
There’s a gathering storm on the horizon.
Maybe you’ve felt it on the wind? There’s something wrong but you don’t know what it is just yet. You can’t put your finger on it.
And yet all around you the world is changing.
People are marching with pitch forks and torches. They don’t talk anymore, they scream at each other. On every street corner and in every forum on the Internet a battle burns between left and right.
Propaganda has evolved into insidious new forms that make Stalin and Goebbels’ methods look like cave drawings. Phrases like “fake news”, “privilege,” “deep state”, and “false flags” are mind viruses. They’ve invaded your vocabulary and without even realizing it they’ve corrupted your argument before you even start.
It’s getting harder and harder for us to agree on objective reality, as the new wave propaganda works its way into our hearts and souls.
It all adds up to one terrifying fact:
The winds of war are blowing again.
Jordan Greenhall thinks we’re already fighting World War III . His example is Syria.
Do you know what’s happening in Syria? Is anyone winning? Did the US bomb a real gas factory? Did we save the children? Was it a backroom deal between Putin and Trump to distract from the enemies swarming around him? Did the US even really drop a bomb at all? Do you know? What do you know?
Welcome to propaganda 2.0.
You’re no longer sure what to believe. It’s information warfare, waged from near and far with the Internet, bots, Twitter, Facebook, 4Chan and Reddit. Everywhere is a battle of talking points and spin, a hardening of positions. Competing narratives swarm the airways, influencing elections and inciting people to hate each other.
In France, Macron just fired the next shot in the war. His cyber-security team actively seeded fake passwords, usernames, emails and documents so that when hackers broke down his doors and dumped his archives, the joke was on them. He controlled the narrative, calling the entire dump fake news. Within hours the stories burned out and the hacks blew back on the attackers.
Max Boot, author of Invisible Armies: An Epic History of Guerrilla Warfare from Ancient Times to the Present calls this the “battle of the narrative.” If you can confuse the enemy long enough, by poisoning his thoughts and words, outwitting and outlasting him, you can win. Others have called it “memetic warfare.”
War is now a PR campaign.
And yet I fear a real war is coming too, the old fashioned kind with bombs and guns and innocent people dying for no good reason.
Everywhere, the twin evils of history, socialism and fascism, are rising again. And not the Swiss kind of socialism, the Latin American/Italy-circa-1930’s “we buried the putrid corpse of liberty” socialism. Young people are flocking to socialism, feeling like they’ll never get a piece of the pie as their college debt mounts to a lifetime’s worth of earnings. They see capitalism as the great scam and they want to shatter it. The fascists hate democracy. They can’t deal with its messiness, its imperfections, the compromises between different people, the way it lurches forward seemingly without a higher purpose. They want a strong man to force his way onto us, to make us all march to a single drum beat.
In some parts of the world, we already have strongman storming from the chaotic ashes of their country’s rapidly deteriorating law and order.
Say goodbye to rule of law and hello to rule of man.
Philippine president Rodrigo Duterte massacres drug dealers with glee, turning cops into judge, jury and executioner. Once you cross that boundary there’s no going back. Checks and balances crumble. How long before he realizes he can kill other people too, like his political enemies? He recently warned he can be fifty times more brutal. In a world of uncertainty, do you doubt that?
Maybe there is still objective reality, the most dismal and horrific kind? Violence is it’s own kind of reality.
Turkey recently called a referendum to give their strongman president nearly unilateral power. They did everything they could to stack the deck in favor of his constitutional massacre. They killed journalists and activists, as well as disappeared and arrested thousands more. They purged judges. With terrible ease they monopolized the airwaves for 90% of the time, never letting the opposition talk in a classical example of dominating the narrative. They stuffed two million ballots.
And meanwhile they managed to win with just 51% of the vote.
Brexit. Frexit. Trump’s protectionism and nationalist agitating. Hillary’s out of touch technocracy. An actual communist who made it far in the French election.
It’s all pointing to a bigger pattern.
Not everyone agrees of course. Career contrarian and iconoclast Nicholas Taleb thinks that history is populated by long stretches of peace punctuated by short spasms of violence. Historians, he argues, are biased to a fault. War is a good story. Peace is not. Stories are nothing without conflict so that’s what they write about all the time. But even if this is true, it’s not much help in a time like this when history’s pattern starts to point back to one of those spasms. It’s also not much consolation if you’re living through one of those human disasters.
Artificial Intelligence luminary Francois Chollet says that “history is made of random events.” There’s no pattern.
But it’s looking a lot like a very familiar pattern from where I’m sitting.
The most popular article on Medium in 2016 said it best:
History Tells us Next What Happens after Trump and Brexit.
“We humans have a habit of going into phases of mass destruction, generally self imposed to some extent or another.”
The roots of it are everywhere: A massive divide between rich and poor; rising inflation; a culture war; globalism and its reaction, protectionism; big money; nepotism; religion; plutocracy. This is always the way of the world. But sometimes it gets so far out of balance that there’s no way out but a massive spasm of violence and bloodshed.
Everywhere, people are turning inward. They’re closing doors and locking them, building walls in fear against immigrants and refugees and travelers. They want to shut down imports, slap tariffs on foreign goods. They grow tired of pesky “due process” and want to take matters into their own hands.
Delusion is growing. People are great at imagining demons at their doorsteps.
On the far right, they see caricatures of immigrants on rape and murder sprees, not playing by the rules, not paying taxes, subverting the dominant culture, poisoning and corrupting it. On the far left, they see caricatures of corporate fat cats laughing while little people die on the streets from debt and lack of health care.
But reality is made of shades of grey, not the cartoon colors of black and white.
I’ve met just as many conscientious super-rich people as I have hideous monsters, back when I worked for some of the wealthiest folks in NYC, as a tech consultant in my youth. The rich are like anyone else, there are assholes and awesome folks. There are certainly immigrants who commit crimes, but there are many, many more eking out a living, working a job no American would want, wondering when there’ll be a knock on their door and ICS will storm through with combat rifles.
When people are hurting, they want someone to blame. They want an enemy. What better enemy than one who can’t stand up for themselves, who have no voice? What better enemy than someone they don’t know and have never met?
History is not a series of random events. There’s a metapattern to history. From the smallest atom to the tallest skyscraper, the patterns reoccur like an endless fractal that goes up and down forever and ever. History follows a grand arc and it always has since fish first crawled out of the primordial muck and started to walk. Occasionally we even lurch forward with real progress, but don’t bet on black swans.
I recently went to the House of Terror on my trip to Budapest. It’s a museum about the history of Nazi and then Communist rule in Hungry. It’s not a fun trip but it’s one that everyone should make, so we don’t forget that life can turn ugly fast if we’re not careful and sometimes even if we are. It’s in a former secret police headquarters that looks like any other building. They took people there to disappear them. In the basement are tiny concrete cells with the faces of those who died there, everyone from priests to politicians to activists to former communists who didn’t prove red enough as the Party hunted for new “enemies of the people,” another insidious mind-virus phrase we toss around with increasing ease and ignorance as to what it means in history. All of them died in ways no one should, hung in the gallows with no due process by judge, jury and executioner police.
Life is a pendulum that swings back and forth forever. War and peace. Back and forth.
Now the winds of war are blowing again.
I hope I’m wrong. I want to be. Badly.
But just in case I’m not, get your umbrella ready. Have a plan. Put some money in a mattress. Have an emergency pack. Buy some crypto currency and back it up.
Humans are resilient. We survive, somehow, against all odds.
Whatever happens, don’t lose faith.
I called my grandmother and asked her how they got through WWII?
“Day by day,” she said. “We stuck together. We found a way.”
The memories of the horror of those time are dying with that generation. And when memories die we have to learn our lessons again the hard way.
But I believe my grandmother. We’ll find a way.
We’ll weather the storm.
Together.
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