Tag: war

Are we just now entering the fourth turning?

I had a very interesting discussion with Thomas Umstattd Jr. recently, about George Friedman’s recent book The Storm Before the Calm and the general state of the zeitgeist. My theory has been that the current fourth turning will not end with a first turning high in the 2030s and 2040s, as Strauss-Howe generational theory predicts, but will skip that stage and go straight to the awakening instead, as it did with the anomaly in the Civil War cycle. This awakening will ultimately give us a major Christian revival, such as we haven’t seen in more than 100 years.

Thomas has a very different take on it, though. He thinks that we may just be entering into the very beginning of the fourth turning right now—that all of the chaos of the last ten years was really just the closing half of the third turning “unraveling” era, which ran unusually long (about 35 years instead of the normal 22ish years). He thinks that the fourth turning began with the assassination of Charlie Kirk, and will likely involve a major civil conflict here in the United States.

The more I think about it, the more his take makes sense. Strauss-Howe generational theory is based on the four phases of a human life (childhood/adolescence, young adulthood/parenthood, middle age, and elderhood), and the Great Recession was a major disruption that forced a lot of my fellow millennials to put off getting married and starting a family. Same thing with the boomers, who postponed their retirement for an extra decade. So it makes sense that the result would be an extra-long third turning, with most of us putting off that next phase of our lives.

It would also explain why none of the recent wars have exploded into hot global conflicts until now. The Russo-Ukraine war, the Gaza war, the Syrian and Yemeni civil wars, and even to some extent the current Iran war have all mostly been confined to small regions. Yes, the major powers all have a hand in them, and are jockeying for position against each other, but it hasn’t yet escalated beyond a proxy conflict, and/or economic and financial sanctions.

In other words, up until now, most of the geopolitical conflicts have been limited to the sort of thing you’d be likely to see during a third turning. President Trump has been less of a Roosevelt or a Lincoln or a Washington, leading our newly-unified nation through a major existential crisis, and more of a Zachary Taylor or a James Buchanan (or his own personal favorite, Andrew Jackson) imposing his vision on a fragmented country with only limited success, as everyone kicks and screams to get off the train. That’s much more typical of an unraveling era president than a crisis era president.

So what does this mean? If Thomas is right and we are only just now entering into the opening phase of a fourth turning, things are likely to get very, very bad in the next few years. Our country (and indeed, most of the rest of the world) is likely to face a major existential threat in the form of an armed conflict. A hot civil war here in the US could be a major component of this, though it could also be a global nuclear or biological war. But the big thing is that the war itself is going to eclipse basically everything we’ve seen in the last couple of decades, including 9/11 and the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.

I think there’s a very high likelihood that the Russo-Ukraine war and the US war in Iran merge and become one conflict, especially since the US is a major supplier to Ukraine and Iran is a major supplier to Russia. I don’t know if China will attempt a military invasion of Taiwan, but I do think they will continue to push psyops here in the US, both to disrupt our data center buildout and to push more radical left-wing politicians into the mainstream (though to be clear, that’s not just limited to China). We could also see some major acts of sabotage, both from China and the Iran/Russia axis.

The big wild card, of course, is how AI will play into the coming conflict. All of the major players are convinced that whoever controls the emergent AI technology will ultimately control the world, so the AI arms race is likely to turn into even more of a sprint, with very little regard to AI safety. I’m still quite skeptical that this will result in a Skynet-style robot apocalypse, or the worst fears of guys like Eliezer Yudkowsky and Nate Soares, but it could.

Point is, as bad as things seem right now, if we really are just now entering into the current cycle’s fourth turning, things are going to get much, much worse than anything we’ve seen until now. And the coming conflict will probably extend well into the 2040s, since that’s about as long as it takes for a generational turning to resolve. Which means that right around the time when we are due to resolve the conflict and enter into a generational high, we will instead be facing the unavoidable consequences of the fertility crisis and demographic collapse. So it may turn out that Thomas and I are both right, and we never see a first turning high.

Grim stuff. But fascinating. What do you think?

Fantasy from A to Z: O is for Orcs

Is anyone in this world inherently and irredeemably evil?

That is the moral question at the heart of the fantasy race known most often as “orcs.” They are occasionally called by other names, of course: goblins, tuskers, blackbloods, etc. Sometimes, you will also find different but similar fantasy races filling the same niche: trolls, kobolds, trollocs, ogres, etc. But the thing that ties them all together is that they are both inherently and irredeemably evil.

…or are they? In some iterations, the orcs aren’t necessarily evil, just savage—kind of like Robert E. Howard’s Conan, or his many stories extolling the barbaric hero who stands against the corrupt forces of a decadent civilization. I played around with that myself in my novelette “A Hill On Which To Die.” More recently, such as in Amazon’s Rings of Power series, the orcs are played up as sympathetic creatures, whose only true fault is that they come from a different culture than our own.

Here’s the thing, though. While I enjoy a good redemption arc, or a heel-face turn when it’s done really well, I also believe that there are some people and some cultures in this world that are wholly and irredeemably evil. They may not have started out that way—indeed, my faith teaches me that we are all children of an eternal Heavenly Father who loves us—but my faith also teaches me that evil also exists, and that there are some in this world who cannot be saved, because they have become sons of perdition.

Traditional publishing (and the entertainment industry more broadly) is currently dominated by people who skew to the left in their politics and their cultural values. As such, they are heavily influenced by the philosophies of thinkers like Rousseau, who posited that all people are inherently good, and that evil originates from social structures and institutions. That’s why they are so obsessed with “systemic oppression,” or with stories that obsess over victimization and victimhood—as if being a victim (especially of “colonization”) makes one inherently virtuous.

I don’t think that’s true, though. I think that some cultures are more virtuous or morally good than others. For example, when Columbus discovered the truth about the Amerindians he’d first made contact with—that they were the remnants of a tribe that had been conquered by cannibals, who had slaughtered all their men, put their women on an island, and were now farming them out for meat, visiting them once a year to devour all their infant children, then raping and impregnating them again before leaving—I believe that Columbus was justified in concluding that the culture of this vile cannibal tribe was inherently and irredeemably evil. And I believe that the world was made a better place after this culture was exterminated.

The term “orc” has its origins in Old English, especially in the epic poem Beowulf, where the word “orcneas” refers to monstrous beings who make an appearance in the poem. Tolkien was a scholar of Old English, so when he needed a name for his race of inherently and irredeemably evil creatures, he came up with the name “orc.” Tolkien also saw action in the trenches of WWI as a British soldier, and that undoubtedly influenced him as well.

It is an unfortunate reality of war that in order to fight effectively, you need to dehumanize the enemy. This is true, whether or not the enemy deserves to be dehumanized. World War I was perhaps the most senseless war in history, where the cause that everyone was fighting for was ultimately a suicide pact made by the incompetent and incestuous European royal branches. I honestly don’t know that the Germans were the bad guys in that war (though WWII is a very different story). I honestly don’t know if there were any bad guys—or any good guys, for that matter. The whole war was just a senseless cluster of a catastrophe.

So even though I do believe that some cultures are inherently evil, I can also sympathize with those who take a principled anti-war stance and say that we should all take a step back and focus on the things we have in common before rushing off to war. In our own day and age, there are many corrupt and evil warmongers who are working very hard to dehumanize the various groups that they would have us go to war against, whether those are Jews, Arabs, Russians, Ukrainians, Christians, Muslims, immigrants, or Trump voters. In such a complex world, there is a very real temptation to listen to such voices, and embrace the view that the other side is inherently and irredeemably evil.

And yet, there is such a thing as pure evil. There are some people who cannot—or will not—be redeemed. For that reason alone, I think there is still a place in our fantasy literature for creatures like the orc, who are inherently and irredeemably evil.

Restored footage from just after WWI

I don’t know how the YouTube algorithm decides what to show me, but every once and a while something really fascinating shows up in my recommends. This was one of those times. Really excellent job restoring this old footage.

Fantasy from A to Z: B is for Battles

One of the things about fantasy that I love the most are the epic battle scenes, where the good guys and the bad guys face off across the field of battle in a conflict that will determine the fate of everything they hold dear. My favorite scene in the Lord of the Rings movie trilogy is the ride of the Rohirrim, where Theoden comes to the aid of Gondor and gives his rousing speech before his men charge into the fray, shouting the battle cry “death!”

I feel like the big set-piece battles are more common in older fantasy, which drew a lot more from J.R.R. Tolkien and Robert E. Howard. Many of these older fantasy writers, including C.S. Lewis and Lord Dunsaney, were drawing from history as they told their stories and created their worlds—specifically, the old-fashioned understanding of history, where the things that mattered most were the clash of civilizations and the great men at the head of those civilizations. 

In some ways, it’s good that we’ve moved to a much more holistic view of history, but there really is something to be said about those battles where everything stood on the edge of a knife, and the course of the next thousand years was decided in a single day. When I read about the numerous times the Muslim invaders were turned back by the Theodosian land walls of Constantinople, it takes me back to the siege of Minas Tirith and the Battle of Pelennor Fields. When I rewatch the scene from Gettysburg where Lawrence Chamberlain leads the charge of the 20th Maine, it stirs something deep within me that, outside of historical military fiction, I have only ever found in fantasy.

Tolkien and Howard were both really great at writing epic battle scenes, but the best, in my opinion, is David Gemmell. His debut novel /Legend/ is one of the most soul-stirring depictions of war that I have ever read. More than anything else, it captures the deep sense of meaning, purpose, and love that comes from staring death and the face and deciding which things (or which people) are worth dying for. In the words of Mel Gibson from Braveheart: everybody dies, but not everybody really lives.

The military aspect of fantasy tends to appeal more to male readers, which is probably why it’s more common in old-fashioned fantasy. Some subgenres like grimdark have preserved it, but with the rise of subgenres like romantasy and the increasing gender divide within publishing, it’s been dying out (not the least because of all the other baggage that grimdark brings, which I will discuss in G is for Grimdark vs. Noblebright). 

Call me old-fashioned, but I much prefer the rousing battle scenes from Tolkien, Howard, and Gemmell to much of the stuff that is coming out today. Will the market swing back? If and when it does, I hope to be a part of that. I don’t always put epic battle scenes in my books, but when I do, those are the authors who inspire me.

Fantasy from A to Z: All Posts

Did I predict it?

On July 24th, 2024, eleven days after the (first) Trump assassination attempt, I posted the following predictions:

3. Biden will be removed from office via the 25th amendment, and Harris will become the 47th President.

On this one, I was clearly wrong. I thought that the Democrats would do the right thing and remove an obviously senile disaster of a president from power, even if for the wrong reasons (such as Kamala’s lust for power). Clearly, I underestimated the political strength of the unelected cabal behind Biden’s handlers, as well as the craven disregard of the Democrats for their own country. The greatest political scandal of my lifetime is that Biden was not removed from office when it became obvious that he lacked the mental competence to fulfill his presidential duties—and I lived through the Clinton years.

6. Before Trump becomes president, NATO will become entangled in a direct war with Russia.

On this one, I was also wrong. About a month ago, it seemed that we were heading toward this outcome, but then Russia debuted the oreshnik hypersonic missile, and the neocons backed down. Turns out that when your opponent can strike any capital in Europe within minutes with a missile that cannot be shot down, that changes the calculus of war. There has probably also been some backroom dealing with the incoming Trump administration that we won’t hear about until long after the Russo-Ukraine war has been resolved. It wouldn’t surprise me to learn that Trump is using the Greenland issue to get leverage over Putin and satisfy the NATO hawks.

7. The war with Russia will not go nuclear, if only because Russia no longer has a functioning nuclear arsenal.

I was right about the war not going nuclear, though of course we have no way of knowing whether Russia’s nuclear arsenal is or is not functional—at least, no way of knowing short of fighting a nuclear war. So I’m going to give myself a point on this one, since despite the fact that the world has never been closer to nuclear armageddon, the US nuclear football has now passed hands to a man who isn’t utterly senile and suffering from late stage dimentia. I never thought I would say this, but I feel much safer knowing that Trump has the nuclear codes.

And that brings my score in the prediction game to four out of seven. Not the best, but still greater than 50%.

12 Strong

This movie was fantastic. Every bit as good as the trailers make it out to be. A sight above Zero Dark Thirty, and on par with American Sniper. I wouldn’t be surprised if it’s the best movie I see all year.

It’s really fascinating to see how combat forges bonds between people. At the beginning, right after ODA 595 gets dropped in Afghanistan, there’s a real sense of tension as they don’t know who they can trust. That clears up after a few good battles, and by the end, it’s totally gone.

There’s also a really euphoric sense of victory that can be hard to find in Hollywood war movies. It’s easy to find movies that say “war is horrible,” and this one certainly says that as well, but it can be difficult to find a movie that portrays American forces as righteous leaders and unambiguous heroes. This one certainly does, without hamming it up or going over the top in any way, because these men really are heroes.

And the scale of the victory… I mean, Saving Private Ryan was a great movie, but the victory was less about the war and more about saving a single man. Zero Dark Thirty was about killing Osama Bin Laden, but there wasn’t a whole lot of actual combat. Hacksaw Ridge was a tremendous story about the heroism of one man, but the scope was still limited to the island of Okinawa.

In contrast, the scope of 12 Strong was the entire Taliban, and the War of Afghanistan itself. To this day, the victory marks Al Qaeda’s greatest defeat. Besides all that, there’s something awesomely badass about leading an outnumbered cavalry charge against tanks, rockets, RPGs, and truck monted machine guns, and winning.

Awesome movie. Though I have to say, I think there’s a bug on Rotten Tomatoes, because they have the scores for 12 Strong and The Last Jedi switched. In any case, this is definitely a war movie worth seeing.

Thoughts on the #Alexandria shooting

This attack was a warning.

It could have been much worse. There could be more than a dozen dead congressmen right now. We could be in a national crisis as severe as 9/11, or more.

This was a premeditated and carefully planned act of domestic terrorism. It is clear that the attacker was politically motivated. Millions of Americans share his extreme views. Thousands, perhaps even hundreds of thousands, believe that his actions were justified.

It is only by the grace of God that the attack was thwarted. As Congressman Loudermilk said, “God was there.”

I believe in a God who is intimately concerned with the details of our individual lives. I believe that His hand guides the events that shape us, and that He takes a particular interest in the course of the United States.

He has given us our individual agency, the freedom to choose between good and evil. That is a gift that He will never take away. No matter how violent we are toward one another, no matter how much anger and hatred fills our hearts, He will not violate our agency nor revoke that Liberty wherewith He has made us free, but will leave us to our devices until we return on our knees to Him.

This attack was a warning. We would do well to heed it.

Several months ago, I came to the conclusion that the United States is between three and fifteen years away from an existential crisis as great as the Civil War. Will this crisis turn into a second civil war? I believe there’s a significant chance that it will. Certainly we are on that path right now.

Wake up, America! You talk of wars in far off countries, but you know not the hearts of men in your own land. Even now, the voices of evil speak louder in your ears than that which will shake the Earth. Treasure up wisdom, and remember: if you are prepared, you shall not fear.

Flashpoints by George Friedman

Some people say that Science Fiction writers are in the business of predicting the future. In fact, that’s only partially true: we don’t predict the future so much as we show people what possibilities the future may hold. But strategic forecasting is a real business, and the foremost personality in that business is George Friedman.

In a world run rampant with hyperbole and sensationalism, Friedman’s analysis consistently stands out for its calm and measured rationality, as well as its ruthless incisiveness. As cordial and softspoken as Friedman can be, he does not mince words or walk on eggshells. He calls it the way he sees it, and he sees some very interesting times coming in the years ahead.

In Flashpoints, Friedman analyzes the current situation in Europe by placing it in the context of history, beginning with the Age of Exploration and culminating in what he calls “the thirty-one years.” From 1914 to 1945, more than 100 million Europeans died of political causes, the most spectacular human catastrophe of the modern era. The question he asks is whether Europe has truly changed, or whether we are on the verge of a return to the savage cruelty that defined the 20th century.

Friedman’s take on the history of the continent is quite fascinating. He points out a number of things that most histories overlook: for example, that European unification was originally an American project, imposed on a recalictrant Europe as a means to counter Soviet expansionism. In any war with the Soviets, West Germany would be the first line of defense, and therefore NATO and the Americans needed a strong West Germany and a united continent. Thus, the European Union started as an essentially American project—something the Europeans often forget.

The thing that really made this book fascinating, though, were the numerous personal insights from Friedman’s own life. As a Hungarian Jew whose mother was a holocaust survivor and whose father was conscripted to fight in Operation Barbarossa, Friedman’s personal story is just as fascinating as the story he tells about Europe. The two weave together in a way that offers a unique and powerful perspective on the challenges currently facing the continent, providing insights that can’t be gleaned in any other way.

Friedman’s writing is remarkably clear. His analysis is eye-opening, and his predictions are compelling. By the end of the book, I not only felt like I had a better understanding of Europe, but a better understanding of humanity as well.

In my opinion, this is Friedman’s best book. The Next Hundred Years was quite excellent, but a project that large in scope couldn’t help but feel a little fantastic. The Next Decade was also good, but it had neither the grand scope of The Next Hundred Years nor the depth of focus of a book dedicated to a single geopolitical question. Flashpoints possesses both that depth of focus and the grand scope of historical context, tracing the rise, fall, and rebirth of what is simultaneously the most savage and civilized continent on this planet. It’s a fantastic book, and I highly recommend it.

Thoughts on American Sniper

Yesterday, I saw American Sniper. In a word, it was fantastic. Super intense—so much that the friend I went to see it with had to walk out in the middle—but well, well worth it.

The movie is about Chris Kyle, a US sniper in Iraq who had an incredible number of kills. He’s credited with being the most lethal sniper in US history. And yet, at the end of the movie, he states quite openly that he can answer a clear conscience for every shot he took—including the one in the trailer, which was his first combat kill.

Pause for a minute to think about that. What must it be like to have your first ever kill be a child? There you are with your finger on the trigger, wondering if you have it in you to take another human life, and instead of an obvious combatant, you’re presented with a grenade-carrying child. On top of that, add on the fact that you’re a family man. Could you do it?

And that was just the first combat encounter of the film. Things got progressively more intense with each combat tour, with some truly evil people and some truly hard decisions.

At the same time, though, the film didn’t try to dehumanize the enemy. Again and again, Chris goes head-to-head with an enemy sniper named Mustafa who is just as good as he is. Just as we see Chris with his wife and child, we see that Mustafa has a family as well. But there are evil people in the movie—truly evil people, such as the Butcher, whose preferred instrument of death is a power drill—and we see them too. Because guess what? Those people were real, and the atrocities they committed were real as well.

I can’t imagine what it must be like to kill one person, let alone more than two hundred. And yet at the end of the film, I sincerely believe Chris Kyle when he says that he can answer a clear conscience for every shot that he took. That is what made the movie so fascinating. The man was a true hero—I don’t see how you can possibly come to any other conclusion than that.

Still, I couldn’t help but think about the wider context of the war in which Chris Kyle was fighting. Men like the Butcher exist in every society, including our own. If a foreign government had set up a brutal dictator over our country, plunged us into a ten year proxy war in which millions of our people were killed, imposed a punishing sanctions regime on us for another ten years, and finished it off by invading us, would the United States be any different? Because that’s exactly what happened in Iraq. Every enemy that we have in the Middle East is an enemy of our own creation, and the harder we try to fight them, the more enemies we create.

I don’t say this to diminish Chris Kyle at all. I admire the man tremendously, and I can only hope that I would rise to the level of his stature if given the same responsibility to protect American lives. And to be fair, American Sniper didn’t try to defend the Iraq War at all. In fact, it wasn’t even about the Iraq War—it was about a soldier who struggled to do the right thing in combat and not be consumed by the war itself. In that aspect, I think that this film was outstanding. It’s probably the most empathetic war movie that I’ve ever seen, and I would gladly watch it again.

I have tremendous respect for the men and women of the US military, and this movie reminded me why. At the same time, I have very little respect for the politicians who sacrifice the lives of these brave men and women for their political ambitions. My personal views on the subject are best reflected in this 2012 campaign ad for Ron Paul which sums up the history quite succinctly. I don’t agree with Ron Paul on every issue, but on this one, I think he’s spot on:

But yeah, American Sniper was an amazing movie—well worth seeing. It’s rated R mostly for language, so even if you don’t usually see R rated movies, don’t let the rating alone scare you away.