Armageddon: if you can’t hasten it, maybe you can dodge it?
[ by Charles Cameron — plus a date-setting video, awaiting The End in 2031! ]
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Armageddon. Even if you can’t hotwire it..
you may still be able to dodge it..
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From the late Israeli analyst, Reuven Paz:
Jihadi apocalyptic discourse, either by Jihadi-Salafi scholars, clerics, or supporters of global Jihad is one of the main innovations of the Jihadi-Salafi discourse that followed the September 11 attacks. Waves of what may be termed apocalyptic discourse are not new in the modern Arab Islamic world. They accompanied almost every major war or disaster that occurred in the Arab World in modern times. Such major events were the collapse of the Ottoman Empire and the last Muslim Caliphate in 1922-24; The 1948 war with Israel — the “catastrophe” (Nakbah) in Arab and Palestinian eyes — which resulted in the establishment of the State of Israel; The 1967 war — the calamity (Naksah) in Arab and Muslim eyes — which resulted in Israeli occupation all over Palestine, Jerusalem, and Al-Aqsa mosque, and marked a humiliating Arab defeat; and the first Gulf war in 1991, following the Iraqi occupation of Kuwait, which marked the first round of America’s massive military involvement in the Middle East. These wars, and some additional minor events such as the “Triple aggression” in the Suez canal in October 1956; “Black September” and the sudden death of the most admired Egyptian President Gamal Abd al-Nasser in September 1970, The Islamic revolution in Iran in February 1979; The Israeli-Egyptian peace// agreement the same time; The Iran-Iraq war between 1980-88, or the Soviet collapse in 1990-91, created waves of apocalyptic discourse.
From John Schindler:
Fifteen years ago I authored a piece for Cryptologic Quarterly, the National Security Agency’s in-house classified journal, about how close the world actually came to World War III in the early 1950s. Although this was little understood at the time, the North Korean invasion of South Korea in June 1950 was a dry-run for the Kremlin, which was obsessed with silencing Tito’s renegade Communist regime in Yugoslavia. Had the United States not strongly resisted Pyongyang’s aggression, a Soviet bloc invasion of Yugoslavia would have followed soon after.
Of course, President Harry Truman did send U.S. forces to defend South Korea in the summer 1950, resulting in a conflict that has never formally ended. More importantly, he saved the world from nuclear Armageddon, as my CQ piece laid out in detail. Lacking much Western conventional defenses in Europe, any Soviet move on Yugoslavia would have resulted in rapid nuclear release by a hard-pressed NATO. I cited numerous still-secret files and as a result my article was classified TOPSECRET//SCI.
However, NSA has seen fit to declassify and release my article, minus some redactions, and even post it on the Agency’s open website. They have omitted my name, perhaps out of fear UDBA assassins will track me down decades after Tito’s death, but I’ll take my chances.
You can read the article here — enjoy!
Sources:
Reuven Paz, Hotwiring the Apocalypse: Jihadi Salafi Attitude towards Hizballah and Iran John Schindler, Dodging Armageddon: The Third World War That Almost Was, 1950
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None of which precludes date-setting — something that both Christian and Islamic scriptures suggest is futile.
I can’t embed MI7 Agency‘s Passage Through the Veil of Time, but it’s an intriguing entry into the prediction stakes, and the first I’ve seen that confirms Richard Landes‘ contention that Christian millennial movements will be with us at least until the second millennial anniversary of the death and resurrection of Christ in the 2030s — and no doubt through the start of the next Islamic century in 2076 AD since, as Tim Furnish has also reminded us, “Mahdist expectations increase at the turn of every Islamic century.”
September 30th, 2015 at 2:05 pm
From Schindler’s article,
“Assassination efforts continued, spurred on by the USSR’s humiliating upset loss to Yugoslavia at the 1952 soccer Olympics, an event which resulted in the dismissal of senior Soviet officials denounced as having ‘dishonored themselves and the entire nation and all people working for peace.'”
This is reminiscent of the events in Ukraine after the 2014 Sochi Olympics. One month after the Russian hockey team was humiliated on their home ice, Putin invaded Crimea, and then six months later he invaded the Donbass. Russian dictators never change.
Looking at these recent events, I tend to think that Kennan, et al. overreacted. Hundreds of thousands of Soviet troops bogged down in a guerrilla war in the mountains of the Balkans right at the doorstep of the Iron Curtain would not have been a disaster for NATO. The subsequent flare-ups in East Germany and Hungary a few years later may have turned out very differently. Unfortunately, our guys were wedging everything onto their chess board instead of something more multi-dimensional.
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Speaking of dodging a bullet, a new documentary was just released about the Soviet officer whose experience with a false alarm vaguely inspired the movie “Wargames”
http://www.military.com/daily-news/2015/09/17/russian-who-saved-the-world-recalls-his-decision-as-50-50.html
Sometimes one person does make a big difference.
September 30th, 2015 at 4:39 pm
“Hotwiring the Apocalypse” is one awesome title.
September 30th, 2015 at 6:51 pm
Hi Bryan:
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Yeah, it’s a terrific coinage. Unfortunately, the idea has been widely transferred from the Sunni (“Jihadi-Salafi”) side of the street to the Shia side in Iran, where it almost certainly doesn’t fit. Tim Furnish: