War And The Law Of Unintended Consequences
Politics / GeoPolitics Oct 24, 2014 - 05:37 PM GMTBy: Andrew_McKillop
Upping the Ante
Vladimir Putin and several of his senior advisors in published statements have recently said the only logical conclusion of the US and EU goading Russia and upping the ante in the Ukrainian imbroglio is nuclear war. Strident calls for “The Pariah” or “Vlad the Vampire” to back down and back off would theoretically have to end in all-out nuclear war. Insane comments by (of course) unidentified “senior US military strategists” quoted in 'Wall St Journal' in August claimed that first strike nuclear attack by the West could prevent nuclear retaliation by Russia.
No further comment was supplied by the military strategists as to how post-holocaust management of Eurasia and east Europe would be operated. Presumably the civil nuclear power plant fleets of Russia and Ukraine would function “as normal” after a nuclear war. No unintended consequences would occur and the prize of anchoring Ukraine to the European Union would be won.
The economic war against Russia – and all oil exporters – has moved on and up to Saudi Arabia reportedly selling oil at $50 - $60 per barrel with the specific political aim of weakening Russia (also by taking Russian oil customers in Asia) while Genel Energy buys Kurdish oil at $50 a barrel and unidentified Turkey-based buyers take the Islamic State's stolen Syrian and Iraqi oil at $33 a barrel. Western media reports give a high barrel price needed for Russia to balance its national budget, of close to or above $100 a barrel, as for Iran, Venezuela, Nigeria and several other OPEC members. With the delayed but coming rise of global interest rates the potential for pushing Russia and other oil exporters into deeper budget deficit, more borrowing and inflation-plus-recession is rising.
The unintended blowback on an already fragile global economy would be fast and negative, but the real problem is the west has no exclusive operating licence for bizarre and aggressive, illogical, eccentric or self-defeating political, corporate or individual social behavior.
Beware of the Butterfly
Coined by the American meteorologist and mathematician Edward Lorenz, a pioneer of chaos theory, he used “Butterfly Effect” to highlight one key feature of a chaos system, that is its extreme sensitivity to initial small changes in a complex web of causes and effects – like a butterfly beating its wings. From these first small changes very large final changes can be triggered. Lorenz used examples such as hurricanes whose path and amplitude can be dramatically changed by small or tiny initial local changes of heat, air pressure, winds or humidity. By extension, and the title of a talk he gave in 1972, a butterfly beating its wings in Amazonia might cause an initial tiny change in local air pressure or wind direction, finally triggering a tornado in Texas.
Chaos theory was heavily developed from Lorenz's early work in the 1960s, and also popularized as so-called ripple effects, cascade and domino effects, and development of the “law” of unintended consequences. This “law” can for example be applied to human society as the “cusp effect”. Public opinion and behavior can tilt one way or another and radically change, due to only small changes of factors like the information, views and opinions available to society, and divulged or released into the public domain with no prior intent to change public opinion. At a specific moment, people are sensitized to new information.
Public opinion can then radically shift as it writhes in a struggle of unwanted new knowledge versus self-willed ignorance and inability to understand. Reasons why the mainstream media has not developed the theory of first strike nuclear attack against Russia, to win the shaky prize of Ukraine, are as simple as that. If the NIMBY factor makes civil nuclear power plants unwelcome in the back yard, a nuclear war in Europe's back yard is rather certainly even less consumer-friendly!
For various reasons the fictional and dramatic representations of chaos theory have mainly concerned space and time travel, and “science error” due to unintended or initially unknown causes, for example the 1986 film 'The Fly' directed by David Cronenberg. Little application of the theory has gone to so-called “slips of the tongue” by politicians, diplomats, corporate leaders or editorialists which “let the cat out of the bag”. It is certain that from the 1970s and 1980s onward, western leaders and opinion managers and controllers such as leading editorialists and TV producers have “multiplied the gaffes” causing small but constant changes in the “scripted narrative” with possible major downstream impacts on public opinion, on the understanding of government, politics, and key social values such as “progress” and on how other nations and societies react and respond to the “gaffes”.
Do Not Fold Spindle or Mutilate
For nearly a quarter-century since the Kuwait liberation war the “designer war paradigm” has been operated by western political, military and media elites, but has always featured Surgical Military attack on small non-western states without nuclear weapons or any ability to hit back. Primetime news will show the smart missiles raining in with impunity. Civilian deaths – called “collateral dead” - among these non-western chaff victims of war crime are less interesting than what topping the news show watchers are going to choose for their takeout pizza. The 2003 Iraq war, for example, like the Kuwait war showcased depleted uranium weapons and killed around 100 000 to 150 000 civilians.
Moving on the designer war paradigm to beating the drum for attacking the second-biggest nuclear weapons possessing country on the planet shows the intense shuffling, folding and mutilation of dominant and secondary paradigms or “major social values” in western society, today. This results in ubuesque reversals and negation of previous automatically-accepted values and their implied logic, with totally unintended and unforseen consequences.
Always unstated as a motivating force in the attempted reheat of the Cold War over Ukraine, the supposed defence of Christian values by western society is met by exactly the same, but sometimes openly stated motivating factor in post-communist Russia . Ukraine is also a red line in the sand, for Russia, for reasons which include the defence of Christian values. One cited example of this is western support to the flash mob overthrow in early 2014 of Ukraine's constitutional and democratically elected government. Russian media openly accuses the west of flagrant hypocrisy on human rights, the rule of law and humanitarian conduct, accusations which intensified after the MH17 false flag airplane atrocity and resulted in the Russian conclusion that the west I seeking nuclear war.
The problem for accusing western society of hypocrisy is that hypocrisy needs conscious intention and desire to deceive. There is a difference between confusion on one hand, and hypocrisy on the other although of course the borderline is “fuzzy-edged”. The apparent hypocrisy of today's western society can more easily be attributed to to a layering of older and newer paradigms and values that are starkly different, in fact irreconcilable – that is antinomic. The right name for this is schizophrenia – which is a mental disease - not rhetoric and hypocrisy. This schizophrenia can apply at the collective level of society, as well as the individual level.
Game Playing Isn't For Real
One of the greatest problems facing the “ludic” or “game-playing” mold of today's western society, shown by its love of entertainment, spectator sports, celebrity “people”. and game-playing in the operation of the economy is that others can play the same game. Any claim by western society of “attachment to cast-iron values” like the preservation of human life and interest in the future can easily be met with scorn, as it is on an increasing basis not only by Russia but also for example by the leaderships of China and India. On the world stage, today, this game playing is now wider spread than the Ebola epidemic.
Pepe Escobar, the author of “Globalistan: How the Globalized World is Dissolving into Liquid War” (Nimble Books), highlights the strange case of the Islamic State's ruling elite headed by self-named Abu Bakr al Baghdadi who was described by the UK Guardian, 3 September as having no fear of the Arab world's armies. By tapping into into a ruined body politic across much of the Arab world that has spectacularly failed to share power or respond to the will of the street, al Baghdadi and his ISIS cronies feel almost certain they will not be realistically confronted by the US and other “Crusader enemies” who will not be able to mobilize hopelessly divided local opponents.
Al Baghdadi is invincible. He beheads. He smuggles stolen oil. He conquers. No Tomahawk or Hellfire missile can touch him. Even when he loses, as provisionally in the fight for Kobani, he wins in Tripoli Lebanon and Tripoli Libya. Al Baghdadi says he will overthrow the House of Saud and go on to behead Vladimir Putin, who with Saudi help he will punish here and now by dragging down oil prices.
As a highway robber baron. Al Baghdadi and his goons already control a network of major highways inside or linking Syria, Iraq, Jordan and Lebanon. Iraq's Highways 1 and 12 in Anbar province are now Caliph territory controlling all road links between Baghdad, Syria and Jordan. Along these now forlorn and dangerous highways there are bombed-out schools, hospitals, homes, mosques, filling stations and bridges. In cities such as Fallujah residential streets are almost deserted. Approximate estimates of displaced and refugee persons, in Iraq, are now more than 600 000.
Only in Kobani, formerly the third-biggest town in Syrian Kurdistan, al Baghdadi the Caliph has chased about 300 000 persons from their homes.
Edging faster into even the mainstream media, the “unhelpful” attitude of Turkey's leader Recip Tayyip Erdoan is quickly explained. Tolerating ISIS keeps the Kurds of Turkey and Syria at bay. ISIS has to export its stolen oil out of Syria and Iraq – through Turkey. The Kurds, unable to export south through Baghdad, must also export their cheap oil through Turkey. Erdogan's ego is big enough to nurture Arabian dreams of what might befall to Turkey, into its lap so to speak, if the House of Saud were to fall to ISIS. Erdogan's formerly friendly, but now jilted and spiteful relations with Tehran also helps him tolerate ISIS which is called what it is – a terrorist network – by Iran's mollahs. Whether or not Syria's Bashr al Assad can hold on and not be killed or flee his ruined country is of little interest to Turkey for as long as the cheap oil flows in from Syria. For as long as the “ISIS emergency” endures, Turkey can run episodic curfews on all major towns and cities in southeastern Anatolia, and Turkish riot troops can gun down Kurdish protesters with impunity.
The New Versailles Conference
Time was in 1917-23 when the US, France and UK could shuffle the Versailles Conference venues from the Paris suburbs to the Swiss watering hole of Lausanne. Today's version could shuffle between Ankara and Riyadh with the same goal – elite map drawing exercizes for carving up and shuffling slices of the Middle East to diplomats and the major oil corporations with consolation prizes like control of the Holy Places, Mecca and Jerusalem for special local interests, As in the 1920s, but with a much shorter fuze this time, the result will be local regional and civil wars in a region whose population has grown five-fold since the 1920s and is saturated with weapons.
The self-styled and reborn Sultan of the New Ottoman Empire, Turkey's Erdogan is adamant that Bashr al Assad must go, but not quite yet, and what remains of Syria should then fall under Turkish control - or perhaps joint rule by Turkey and ISIS. The problem is that Saudi Arabia, Qatar, the UAE and other interested players want the same thing – without Turkey taking control. Because ISIS was originally a plaything of KSA's security supremo Bindar bin Sultan, among other early supporters and financiers of ISIS, a “modus operandi” between the Punk Killers and their Gulf state Arab friends would probably be easy to arrange. Israel, it would seem, is happily backing all sides in the conflict, in compliance with the Oded Yinon principle of divide and rule!
The Middle Eastern butterfly is beating its wings in frenzy but western minders continue to treat the unfolding regional war as “local insurgency”. Unable to understand the madness of calling for nuclear war against Putin to win control of Ukraine, it is “logical” that western war hawks sympathetic to Israel and KSA should regularly call for goading Iran into “stepping over the red line” and occupying south and east Iraq to protect shia communities, enabling all out war against Iran. Initial warm up to this mega production might include a Syrian “no fly zone” and occupation of eastern Syria but Turkish Nato troops - Nato's new secretary-general Jens Stoltenberg is now a visitor to Ankara.
Nato chatter relayed by the US extreme right is that building a proxy "rebel force” to fight The Caliph(with no US or other Nato boots on the ground is stymied. That “rebel force” could only be fanatic Wahhabis and assorted paid mercenaries, a real carbon copy of ISIS and how do we fund the several-million-dollars a day they will need for their lifestyle? Supposedly, the Pentagon could or might have its proxy on the ground in Syria by about late 2015, with firm instructions not to hand their weapons over, or sell them to ISIS, and “for the moment” not overthrow al Assad.
Game Playing is Dangerous
Trivialization is a key result of western hypocrisy-democracy, and is a key method for shredding society's paradigms, even including the sanctity of human life and of course the “inviolability and integrity” of nation states. Designer wars and the drone war of Barack Obama have gone a long way in establishing a new western value paradigm which says that as long as it is somebody else in a non-western society who dies far away in the smart missile video clip, or the ISIS decapitation video clip, the “innocent consumer citizens” of western society can ingurgitate this spectacle and treat it as entertainment. Death pornography to safely consume in your own home with a takeout meal!
In today's downsized western world described as “permanently in crisis”, dysfunctional political leaderships have transformed government into a spectator sport, appealing to the notions of competition sport but certainly not fair play. With no surprise, international relations and foreign affairs, and even the sombre subject of war-making have suffered similar dumbing down, play making and “fragilization”, creating the related thaumaturgic belief in the capacity of leaders, celebrities and stars of various kinds such as star stock market brokers and traders and other Special People, to work miracles on a daily basis. An extension of this is conspiracy and plot theory, which is also often thaumaturgic or magical, and becomes the default choice for “the masses” who are imagined by the elites as child-like and utterly devoid of reason. Swirling fogs of conspiracy suit their reading habits like burgers suit their eating habits - and ingurgitating plot theory needs no taste buds at all! When they regale themselves with downloaded video clips of ISIS decapitations, the pretense is made that “I watch it because it is there”, but all that is needed is the bestial urge to watch other people die. The supremacy of western society founded on Christian values and morality!
Death-tweaking of “mass opinion” is dangerous and operates its own unknowing. Showing the consumers enough gore-war would supposedly get them slavering for more. The elite rationale is clear. This is because the “middle classes” are animals. It appeals to their sadistic streak. It appeals to white supremacist racism and it appeals to nihilism. However, Lorenz's chaos theory and the “cusp effect” also apply - death pornography constantly distances its viewers and consumers from the real world. The high gain positive feedback effect is also present. More and higher doses of the same pornography are needed to excite “the dumbed down masses” to war fever, but even further doses can turn them off. They dumb down into their shell of Mass Apathy, and forget all about it.
The Extinction of Logical Behavior
The sheer idiocy of this pernicious “reasoning” underlines that the unknowing process has shredded the concept and practice of “international relations”. One example is “Who do we take out after we destroy Putin?”. This is interesting. The mainstream media has not run its Putin-the-Monster number on the Chinese. Never stated but a fact, they would react and respond with military force a lot earlier and more brutally, than Mr Putin. China has rapidly become distant and unknown to the west, and India is also teadily “moving out of focus” due to a host of different factors.
For the Chinese elite, national identity and unity are critical life supports for their own continued existence, and they will quickly snap that China suffered 70 years of Western imperialism and wealth-sucking from about 1870 to 1940. They know exactly who is to blame. They don't respect White Muppets or their so-called “public opinion”. China will not waste time on games and ruses like the game of sanctions, before kicking back hard in the face of what the Chinese press and media increasingly says, not hints, is a world in which Western consumer society and its leaderships have lost their minds and gone lobo. The Chinese message is: “Don't try that on us, Whitey”.
For the moment, the minders of consumer muppet society in the west can only foment and probably arm the Uighur Muslim revolt in western China with their so-respectable friends in Saudi Arabia, and gloat over civil strife and mass killings in Chinese cities. Divide perhaps – but certainly not rule. The intention to do harm is amazing, but this is easily explained by western schizophrenia.
The excuse for “foreign policy” dished out or hinted by the muppet media has been so shredded that we can read fatuous “analyses” telling us that even the ISIS movement is under western security service control. If ISIS has not yet expanded into Lebanon (which it's doing), this is because it was told to wait by The Minders. Since the dearly departed Osama bin Laden officially departed from his Abbottabad compound, there is no longer any reason for the American war in Afghanistan. But the all-knowing US military-industrial complex has moved on and up to the entire Middle East. Its all planned!
Reality Denial
Chaos is the only term which fits – a key definition used in chaos theory being that events and conditions classified “chaotic” are always sensitive to the initial conditions or causes bringing them about. These initial conditions and causes may be totally unrelated by scale or type, with the chaos that ensues and in human behavior terms can be compared with the results of schizophrenia. Apparently anodine or trivial causes can produce extreme results for persons affected by schizophrenia locked into their world of fantasy.
Reality denial, for the muppets, is made easier by mass schizophrenia, which for war making features causes that are totally disproportionate to the results. As we know, schizophrenia was first fully defined by Bleuler about 100 years ago, and is usually self-willed, but can also be due to biomedical causes like certain kinds of medication – although it is not yet formally linked with a diet of pesticide riddled foods, Twinkies or McDonalds washed down with 24/7 news shows and Coca Lite.
Conspiracy theorists can ask us if we know what The Minders put in the Soylent Green stuff they feed to the masses in the fast food outlets?
Mass schizophrenia, like apocalyptic cults and thaumaturgy denies and rejects any conception of time, history or normal-and-boring causes for nearly always catastrophic events. In the Muppet World, there is no past, and as Mrs Thatcher told the western middle classes who trooped out to vote for her, an awful long time ago, there is No Future. In her case and for good measure she also added that Society Doesn't Exist. We could surmise that her Paradise Now would only feature muppets running round like witless lemmings “pursuing their vital interests”.
The dangers of flirting with chaos and encouraging mass schizophrenia until they both become real are easy to prove. Neither Hitler nor Stalin ate Twinkies or used Internet but they really did bad things. In their madness they bought any conspiracy theory which was going. They thrived on them and even paid creative persons to invent new conspiracies for them. This is the high road to No Future but crying about the uninBy Andrew McKillop
Contact: xtran9@gmail.com
Former chief policy analyst, Division A Policy, DG XVII Energy, European Commission. Andrew McKillop Biographic Highlights
Co-author 'The Doomsday Machine', Palgrave Macmillan USA, 2012
Andrew McKillop has more than 30 years experience in the energy, economic and finance domains. Trained at London UK’s University College, he has had specially long experience of energy policy, project administration and the development and financing of alternate energy. This included his role of in-house Expert on Policy and Programming at the DG XVII-Energy of the European Commission, Director of Information of the OAPEC technology transfer subsidiary, AREC and researcher for UN agencies including the ILO.
© 2014 Copyright Andrew McKillop - All Rights Reserved Disclaimer: The above is a matter of opinion provided for general information purposes only and is not intended as investment advice. Information and analysis above are derived from sources and utilising methods believed to be reliable, but we cannot accept responsibility for any losses you may incur as a result of this analysis. Individuals should consult with their personal financial advisor.
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