When our modern institutions aren’t starving retired workers to death in soiled hospital beds, they are rationing out water and air, earth and sky. They warn us that there are iceberg shortages, shortages of soil and swampland. Our rationing has gone planetary. We imprison men for filling in wetlands and cap and trade the heat of the planet. Our collectivist world state allows no sparrow to fall without charging someone with unlicensed hunting.
But their taking ownership of the planet may be a bit premature. Outside a few enclaves where the smooth and shiny still predominate, the barbarians are at the gates of the empire of tomorrow. While the West is still in love with the future, even if it is a future of rationed everything where everyone is entitled to a tofu turkey in every microwave oven and a whopping tax bill to pay for the tofu turkey’s carbon footprint, the rest of the world is in love with their past.
No sooner did mobs gather in Cairo, Tunis and Damascus than Western foreign policy analysts began dusting off their history books and drawing analogies to the 1848 European Revolutions. But there was nothing modern about these revolutions even if they relied on Twitter flash mobs and Facebook posts. It isn’t the future that the Muslim world wants, even if the modern Albert Speers fill Dubai with horrendously futuristic architectural vomitoria, it’s the golden past.
In Tunisia, the birthplace of the Arab Spring, Hamad Jebali, the new Islamist Prime Minister of Tunisia, proclaimed, “My brothers, you are at a historic moment in a new cycle of civilization, Allah willing. We are in the sixth caliphate.”
For the Islamists who inherited the Arab Spring and their eager supporters, the future was the past, a return to the glories of the Caliph and his harem, to an era where Christian and Jewish Dhimmis knew their place and he Islamic Empire stretched across the world. The Arab Spring, which began when a Muslim man was so intolerably humiliated at being struck by a woman that he set himself on fire, culminated in gang rapes and the rise of the Muslim Brotherhood. A revolution which began when a man was humiliated by a woman ended with the ritual sexual humiliation of women at the hands of revolutionaries and the regime, and the restoration of the old patriarchal order of Imams and Islamist Neo-Caliphs.
So much for the future and so much for the world of tomorrow where all men will be brothers so long as they can beat their sisters.
Western liberals are still pretending that Caliphate is just United Nations spelled backward, but their faith in the progressive future of no nations, no borders and no freedom can only be sustained for so long by Benetton ads and cheerful multicultural sitcoms. Outside their enclaves the future looks nothing like them. While they parcel out the carbon atoms of the North Pole, their capitals are being carved up into tribal enclaves where the future is as much the past as it is in Cairo or Tunis.
Our present future is defined by the spillover of violent chaos. In the throes of Egypt’s revolution, Bedouin tribes in the Sinai are violently asserting their rights and the Kurds are rising in Syria. As the fall of the Czars and the Austria-Hungarian Empire devolved sizable portions of Russia and Eastern Europe into violent chaos, a violent chaos that repeated itself several decades later when the Nazis pounded through on their way to the Thousand Year Reich, the fall of the last modern states in the Muslim Middle East has ushered in its own chaos of bandits, tribalism and terrorism.
The West has been marinating in that chaos for some time now. It is the reason why we have a police state, a massive military with no equal and social welfare spending that is through the roof. It isn’t, as the modern progressives would like us to believe, because people are living longer, but because of a domestic instability rooted in tribal violence and cultural chaos. And no amount of euthanasia set to a tune from Paul McCartney, who unlike John is still free to imagine that there’s no heaven, only an earth where they stop feeding you if your illness gets too expensive, will fix that.