The Desire to "Wind it All Up"

The inimitable Wretchard over at Belmont Club has one of his brilliant posts this morning, built round a suicide bomber attack on the India-Pakistan "Friendship Train" between Delhi, India and Lahore, Pakistan. The attack on Sunday night killed 67 people. As Wretchard points out in his post "Passage From India" attacks on innocents are now "part and parcel" of what he calls "extended negotiations" between "terrorist entities" -- barbarians by any other name -- and civil society.

Because we don't want to admit that barbarians exist (it might take us away from worrying about Britney's haircut or whether Al Gore's gonna run), we have to blame these problems on something else, and no doubt Wretchard is correct when he says that it is inevitable that someone will blame this on the "bad international atmospherics created by the United States." (John Kerry, Howard Dean call your offices).

But the most arresting portion of this post is a comment, also by Wretchard, which I reproduce here in full:

Perhaps the idea of War and Peace as a binary state has passed. It would be interesting to see whether an equivalent concept exists among rival tribes in parts of the Middle East or whether they are accustomed to living in a twilight state of neither war nor peace, the condition depending on the time of day.

If, as now seems, the Tribes have imposed their way of war upon the West, then we will long for a definite peace the way Redcoats in North America hankered after the clash of orderly ranks in the open field. Long will we seek it, but seek it in vain.

Then Israel will have proved not the exception, but rather the new rule. And the landscape though apparently open, may little by little come to be divided into besieged demesnes; a new Dark Age arising on the foundation of the new tribalism. And the wonder of it all is that it will have been built in our faces. Perhaps this is the way civilizations finish; when the consensus to go on ends. If the West does not have the inner desire to continue then perhaps it has taken the subconscious decision to wind it all up

Wow. Through a glass darkly. Although Wretchard is far more intelligent than yours truly, I don't necessarily agree. Civilization isn't going to finish, not yet, but you can bet your bottom dollar it's going to change some. If the chattering classes have indeed taken the subconscious decision to "wind it all up:" to prosecute Border Patrol agents protecting our frontiers; to loudly bellow that they "support the troops" while they do everything possible to destroy public support for the cause for which the troops fight -- all so that they may have a few more years of uninterupted conspicious consumption and enjoyment of hairless Britneys -- then we will soon dispense with chattering classes. Peace and physical security for our children are going to be provided for -- one way or another. How will this happen ? Orson Scott Card has an idea.

So the "Tribes" as Wretchard puts it, have imposed their way of war on the West ? Maybe, but the necessary wealth and military power exist to stop Wretchard's tribes. I still think the will is there too -- once the chattering classes are got out of the way or reeducated. If the Tribes have indeed imposed their way of war on the West: woe to them when the West adopts their rules. Civilization will still exist, for members of the Western "tribe," although some of us might not like the rules much. As for Wretchard's "tribes," who have given us suicide bombers and airplanes into buildings, they're going to get all the barbarism they want.