A HOLE IN THE WALL
Islamic State position taken out by Western airstrike Picture courtesy Telegraph
QUOTE:
As I write, Western countries (several, particularly the US, now with severely reduced international credibility) face a larger, more unified, capable, experienced and savage enemy, in a less stable, more fragmented region, with a far higher level of geopolitical competition, and a much more severe risk of great-power conflict, than at any time since 9/11.
David Kilcullen, Blood Year.
TEXT:
As the world drifted towards calamity, his head became more active. Military trained empaths roamed the perimeter. Two black cats, psychic animals, sat on the rooftop next door in the early hours of the morning; until he shooed them away. All the themes were coming into play. It was six months since he had finished Terror in Australia: Workers' Paradise Lost, and the story had continued to expand in the interim. The world was already transforming beyond reocgnition. 119, or was it 120, the day's reports varied, people had been killed in Islamic State bomb attacks in Syria. At the same time, the "Coalition", in itself a farce, announced there had been 38 bomb strikes in a single day. How many dead? How many injured? How many civillians? How many mujahadeen? Nobody would ever know.
Events which would have once been front page news barely rated a mention in the back of the papers. Australia's population had officially topped 24 million, that dream, vision, whatever you wanted to call it, of Malcolm Fraser, the aristocrat from Victoria who had dreamed of a big Australia. Well they had their big Australia, these so-called visionaries, but it was not a happy place. All the problems that were meant to be solved by a larger population had morphed into a whole new set of problems.
The lockout laws had created a backlash against the government, a people fed up with grotesque levels of regulation. The streets remained dangerous. Jerking ice addicts, already stricken, crippled, hobbling as if already destroyed, gathered in knots in the Cross. They made the pinned eyes or the desperate sweat of a former generation of heroin addicts look positively benign. "It's the perfect drug for the age, apocalyptic," he said at a party; people he had known for decades, sometimes it seemed for generations, so much had the world changed.
He had always said it, the world of the future will be nothing like the world we know now, in the 1950s, 60s, 70s, 80s, from child to young man to flaunted, desecrated coconut, from meandering delinquent to earnest hopeful, as if reaching for the sky could salvage the Earth. But instead the world was full of fallen angels, and now a new awakening, those who had been seeded into the timeline. Sometimes there were accidents, as in his own case, his parents marooned on the neighbouring moon after their craft crash landed, his life, his memory, beginning with that most wrenching of departures. He missed them still, would always miss them. As the Earth, that void, filled his consciousness; and he survived in the undergrowth. Nobody would ever know.
But as unlikely as it seemed, there was now the Awakening. For every action an equal and opposite reation. And even in a place as remote as Australia, dismissed, these days, as a backwater; you could feel the stirrings, the brightest of intellects, the most piercing of lights, cast against those screens of pain, the souls being harvested for a Dark Lord, Lord of All The Worlds, as they so mistakenly described him, the greater the agony the more heightened the transformation, the cruelty of men beyond description, beyond any understanding. He was reading The Great War For Civilisation; and a great war it was, if size and consequence and the number of pointless deaths, rather than the depth of the ignominy, meant Great. He remained astonished at how cruel humans could be to each other. How little they cared for the deaths of others of their own kind. How little, in the end, life meant to them.
THE BIGGER STORY:
Russia warned of “a new world war" starting in Syria on Thursday after a dramatic day in which Gulf states threatened to send in ground forces.
Foreign and defence ministers of the leading international states backing different factions in the war-torn country met in separate meetings in Munich and Brussels following the collapse of the latest round of peace talks.
Both Russia and the United States demanded ceasefires in the long-running civil war so that the fight could be concentrated against Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant (Isil) - but each on their own, conflicting terms.
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