[Editor’s note: John Boyd insisted that to succeed in conflict,

We can’t just look at our own personal experiences or use the same mental recipes over and over again; we’ve got to look at other disciplines and activities and relate or connect them to what we know from our experiences and the strategic world we live in. Strategic Game, 45

It is in this spirit that SEON offers the following by my longtime colleague, Larry Kummer, with whom I sometimes agree and sometimes don’t.]

Larry Kummer,
Editor, the Fabius Maximus website

Over the past 23 years I wrote 5,200 posts at the Fabius Maximus website (11 million views). Most were diagnostic, investigating how we got into this mess. The most useful were predictive, helping us prepare. These proved quite accurate. Here are three of my current predictions:

First: The defining characteristic of our time: We have entered another singularity, a veil we cannot see beyond. A transition to unimaginable outcomes. The process has already begun. A generation ago, who imagined that grade schools would become trans groomers, or that middle aged soccer moms would become the Left’s new street warriors? All we know is that the world will look different on the other side. The West as we know it is dying. Too many changes coming too fast: feminism, mass migrations, revolutionary politics, the crash of the Debt Supercycle, radical new technologies, and Nietzche’s “collapse of all values.”

To survive we must, as we have done before, reinvent the West with new values. The modern Left (post-1964) knows this, and logically they have become a revolutionary force. It is an open source movement (no controlling center), with next-generation values (non-Marxist). They have gathered vast resources and powerful alliances. They have effective recruitment (e.g., street warriors from Antifa thugs to middle-aged soccer moms), sophisticated tactics and strategy, and unifying doctrines. Most notably, they have played two aces. These by themselves might result in a victory for the Left:

• The Long March Through the Institutions, with so many vital institutions dominated by the Left. Leftists infiltrate institutions, then repurpose them. The press, entertainment, and education industries have become great fortresses from which they project power. Giant churches and corporations become activist machines to the point of self-destruction, gutted to serve higher goals, as lamprey eels consume fish.
• Open borders–the flood of Third World people to drastically change US demographics. NYC, Portland, Minneapolis are just the first wave of our new politics.

My greatest analytical error was a failure to see that there would be little organized opposition to the Left. Only now have the first glimmers of organized resistance appeared (e.g, Kirk’s Turning Point USA). Hence their series of mind-blowing victories. The right’s weak institutional support means their occasional wins only slow the Left. Trump discovered this in his first term and is re-learning it in his second, hence the pivot to foreign affairs.

The right might learn this when the Left recovers Congress and the White House. They will reverse all of Trump’s Executive Orders. Trump exercised vast new powers. The Left will wield and expand them to advance the Revolution.

Second: Since 1648 the West has run by the Westphalian rules, an era of warfare between nations (plus occasional civil wars). The post-WWII era was new phase of this, as the tactics of Fourth Generation Warfare allowed weaker nations to defeat powerful foreign armies. A new era is coming of Fifth Generation Warfare which will break the Westphalian mold as warfare between civilizations ignores national borders, as the Western peoples, and perhaps some of East Asia’s (broadly defined), realize that we share the same internal foes and unite to fight their common revolutionary enemies.

This evolution from the post-WW2 era will resemble 4GW and anti-communist conflicts, but cubed. No front lines, not even inside nations. Alliances will be between factions of societies. Most ideological differences will be subsumed in a larger conflict, because “the enemy of my enemy is my friend.” As for the sides and the nature of that conflict, I leave them to your imagination.

Third: The nature of war comes in part from the imaginations of participants. Americans of the post-WW2 era grew up with stories of the Space Patrol (Star Trek is one such), plus national and transnational organizations to maintain order (UNCLE, GI JOE, SHIELD, etc). The young today have little or none of that. In their stories the Federation is corrupt. Police are broken or evil. GI Joe was destroyed. SHIELD was corrupt and incompetent.

Instead they have stories like Warhammer 40,000. They see that the universe has no rules, no benign guiding hand. Only the struggle against chaos. Survival is most we can hope for. Our youth unconsciously prepare for what is coming.

IN THE GRIM DARKNESS OF THE FAR FUTURE, THERE IS ONLY WAR

“In the 41st Millennium, warring factions of an ancient civilizations fight endless battles across innumerable worlds. Humanity stands alone, beset on all sides by the heretic, the mutant, and the alien. There is no mercy. There is no respite. Prepare yourself for battle.”
 The core description of Warhammer 40,000.


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For a quarter century, Larry Kummer has been writing for and editing the Fabius Maximus website. He is a former Boy Scout Leader and retired Senior Portfolio Manager at a global investment bank. He has also written extensively for this blog, most often under his pseudonym “Fabius Maximus.” Although he hasn’t posted much recently, he has promised to reactivate his blog; I’ll let you know.