All This and World War, Too

by James Howard Kunstler

“To all scholars who teach jihad… to all who teach and learn, this is a moment for the application of theories.”
— Khaled Meshaal, former Hamas leader

It’s less than a week since the skies over the Negev Desert filled with something eerily like the flying monkeys of Oz upgraded to Hamas Road Warriors in motorized paragliders, kicking off that third world war we’ve been hearing about all our lives, and not at all the way we expected either, which was more Dr. Strangelove style, with the mushroom clouds billowing everywhere — though, who knows, it might come to that, too, before long.

This new catastrophe, quickly globalizing, makes the War in Ukraine seem as comfortable as an old sweater. For now, the question of intel failures must be put aside. There will be no official inquiries while US carrier fleets sail into position, and Hezbollah does a war dance on the northern frontier with Syria, and the Israelis struggle to strategize an extremely sticky hostage predicament, even as their air force blows up whole blocks of Gaza City.

Meanwhile, former Hamas chief Khaled Meshaal has called for a worldwide jihad this very day, Friday the 13th, as it happens, by which he means disruption within the entity known as Western Civ, where Jihad’s most dogged enemies dwell. For years, footloose emigres have been flooding into Europe and across America’s border with Mexico, mostly young men, hardly vetted, the sort of humans most likely to act-out warrior scripts in a zeitgeist gone sour, and I guess we’ll find out pretty soon whether some of them were sent to be activated against us.

The world is periodically subject to a mighty release of tensions. That’s why there are great wars. We’ve been well aware of these tensions building into the new millennium and now here it is. The elaborate systems we’ve allowed to evolve — our gigantic manufacturing and resource supply lines, the financial scaffold that has turned capital formation into a freak show of scams and wishes, the grotesque behemoth governments of a zillion regulatory impulses turning more tyrannically against their own citizens every day — all add up to a general condition of fantastic fragility. So, you see, a global release of tensions is liable to bust up a lot of those arrangements.

Western Civ has been expecting this for a while. All the years of clever work-arounds and kicking cans down the road tells you that. The big question is: can we carry on as before? And anyone with half a brain can see the answer is: probably not. That is, not enjoying the many comforts, conveniences, and luxuries we’ve grown used to, all of which hinge on our energy supplies, enough of which is centered in the Ummah of Islam so that when it is interrupted or cut-off, there goes the cushy life for us. (And let’s note that for many in Western Civ life has already and stealthily turned into a serious struggle lately).

So, whichever way these new events may go, things have changed. There will be more intense conflict over the remaining oil in the Middle East. Europe may finally discover that it does not relish being turned into one big mosque. And the USA is so lost in self mind-fuckery that we can’t even get our House of Representatives in order. The American students (and faculty!) cheerleading for Gaza’s Road Warrior executioners might represent the last stand of Woke derangement. This degenerate nonsense has run its course. It may dawn in our centers-of-learning — and every other collaborating institution — that we have more important things to think about than the etiquette around men who dress-up as women.

One naturally wonders what role the shadowy Globalists have played in the build-up to all this, and how things will go with them. I can imagine Europe plunged into political chaos that would lead to scenes like a mob riding Klaus Schwab out of his Swiss redoubt on a rail, and the German government falling, and Paris on fire, and street-fighting in Stockholm. Chaos is as chaos want to do. One thing seems certain: it’ll be a cold winter there for most everybody.

It’s probably safe to say that Mr. Zelensky will not be getting additional bowls of gruel out of Uncle Sam. No one is paying attention to Ukraine now, and that sudden neglect by the once-solicitous NATO alliance could go on indefinitely with wider conflict breaking out elsewhere — meaning that Russia will be left to methodically restore the status quo ante that allowed Ukraine to be a quiet backwater in Russia’s sphere of influence since the end of the previous world war, until our wicked and reckless neocons moved to wreck the joint.

China is the joker in the deck now.

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