In recent months I've turned a fuller gaze onto warfare, not least because I think general war is ascending. Previously it was a fuller gaze on money and capital, and of course I'll get back to that subject in good time. After all, war and money are intimately connected. But ah, one thing at a time here.
At a smaller scale there is always a war on somewhere, but then the great wars - like the great storms - are supposed to be rarer in that the conditions for their perpetuation must be just right and widespread in their rightness.
We've had a hundred years or so to watch those conditions develop once again, just as the Europeans had a hundred years or so to watch conditions proceed towards the World Wars after the Napoleonic Wars.
It seems difficult to imagine another great hot war given the deep interpenetration of the modern world and the prevailing division of labor, but then the Tom Friedmans of the late19th/early 20th century were assuring everyone that the great powers, given their elaborate trade arrangements and mutually destructive entangling alliances, would never jeopardize their collective golden egg-laying goose.
We know now that they did in fact jeopardize the goose; indeed they went so far as to throw it in the meat grinder and then scatter the giblets all about Western Europe, to the unpleasant surprise and universal shock of everyone involved. That shit grows back I guess, as we know now as well, just taking a look around.
But then the character of warfare had radically changed, attributable to that hard transition from the pre-modern to modern era, and it is easy enough to see that it has radically changed yet again going into the postmodern era, especially given MAD.
Who knows what will happen? But one can speculate. I'll get a little more into some of this stuff soon.
