Virtual Militias

[Hacksaw]

Taken from the back cover of "An Empire Wilderness"...

"Everywhere Kaplan travels - from St Louis to Portland, from the fouty-ninth parallel to the banks of the Rio Grande - he finds an America ever more fragmented along lines of race, class, education and geography. An America whose wealthy communities become wealthier and more fortress-like as they become more closely linked to the world's business capitals than to the desolate ghettoes next door. An America where the political boundaries between the states - and between the US and Canada and Mexico - are becoming increasingly blurred, betokening a vast open zone for trade, commerce, and cultural interaction, the nexus of tomorrow's transnational world..."



This was written 10 years ago.

Live well and row

[Ken White]

or most of it anyway (Gated communities were rare...) over 30 years ago. A lot was written on that wall in the 1965-75 time frame. Including AQ (generic version) et.al. and todays hot spots. Anyone who paid attention picked up on it. I sure wasn't alone in seeing that at the time, I can recall a number of others who spotted those sorts of things before I did.

Perhaps surprisingly, the US did pick up on it. State informed Nixon after the Munich Olympics in 1972 that terrorism was going to be a problem. Nixon set up both the National Intelligence Council and the Cabinet Committee on Terrorism which in 1977 produced a report that was highly predictive of the coming fragmentation of States, notably, IIRC, predicting the demise of Yugoslavia -- not much was done about it. Carter figured out that oil dependency needed to go due to potential fragmentation in the ME. There were others over in many fields the years, mostly ignored due to domestic politics. So a lot of people realized what was coming -- even before Kaplan wrote that.

A massive number of folks can spot trends; not all of them are academics, writers, pundits or politicians.

Only politicians seem to diligently ignore said trends...

And I suspect I and some others also beat Kaplan in 1979 when the Tehran Embassy was seized or in 1982 when all the bad stuff happened in Beirut and we agreed that bad things would come of those events and our failure to respond...