The world in 2035

I wish I could say the following article is the Sci-fi plot of a new novel: it is not. The future as envisioned by the Ministry of Defence below is highly probable. Much supporting evidence is listed under 'Related' at the end of the article for those who like research.

The question which begs to be asked is this: What sort of earth could we have created if we hadn't spent most of our money on War technology and Wealth accumulation?

Revolution, flashmobs, and brain chips.
A grim vision of the future

Richard Norton-Taylor
Monday 9 April 2007
Source
Information chips implanted in the brain. Electromagnetic pulse weapons. The middle classes becoming revolutionary, taking on the role of Marx's proletariat. The population of countries in the Middle East increasing by 132%, while Europe's drops as fertility falls. "Flashmobs" - groups rapidly mobilised by criminal gangs or terrorists groups.

This is the world in 30 years' time envisaged by a Ministry of Defence team responsible for painting a picture of the "future strategic context" likely to face Britain's armed forces. It includes an "analysis of the key risks and shocks". Rear Admiral Chris Parry, head of the MoD's Development, Concepts & Doctrine Centre which drew up the report, describes the assessments as "probability-based, rather than predictive".

The 90-page report comments on widely discussed issues such as the growing economic importance of India and China, the militarisation of space, and even what it calls "declining news quality" with the rise of "internet-enabled, citizen-journalists" and pressure to release stories "at the expense of facts". It includes other, some frightening, some reassuring, potential developments that are not so often discussed.

New weapons
An electromagnetic pulse will probably become operational by 2035 able to destroy all communications systems in a selected area or be used against a "world city" such as an international business service hub. The development of neutron weapons which destroy living organisms but not buildings "might make a weapon of choice for extreme ethnic cleansing in an increasingly populated world". The use of unmanned weapons platforms would enable the "application of lethal force without human intervention, raising consequential legal and ethical issues". The "explicit use" of chemical, biological, radiological, and nuclear weapons and devices delivered by unmanned vehicles or missiles.

Technology
By 2035, an implantable "information chip" could be wired directly to the brain. A growing pervasiveness of information communications technology will enable states, terrorists or criminals, to mobilise "flashmobs", challenging security forces to match this potential agility coupled with an ability to concentrate forces quickly in a small area.

Marxism
"The middle classes could become a revolutionary class, taking the role envisaged for the proletariat by Marx," says the report. The thesis is based on a growing gap between the middle classes and the super-rich on one hand and an urban under-class threatening social order: "The world's middle classes might unite, using access to knowledge, resources and skills to shape transnational processes in their own class interest". Marxism could also be revived, it says, because of global inequality. An increased trend towards moral relativism and pragmatic values will encourage people to seek the "sanctuary provided by more rigid belief systems, including religious orthodoxy and doctrinaire political ideologies, such as popularism and Marxism".

Pressures leading to social unrest
By 2010 more than 50% of the world's population will be living in urban rather than rural environments, leading to social deprivation and "new instability risks", and the growth of shanty towns. By 2035, that figure will rise to 60%. Migration will increase. Globalisation may lead to levels of international integration that effectively bring inter-state warfare to an end. But it may lead to "inter-communal conflict" - communities with shared interests transcending national boundaries and resorting to the use of violence.

Population and Resources
The global population is likely to grow to 8.5bn in 2035, with less developed countries accounting for 98% of that. Some 87% of people under the age of 25 live in the developing world. Demographic trends, which will exacerbate economic and social tensions, have serious implications for the environment - including the provision of clean water and other resources - and for international relations. The population of sub-Saharan Africa will increase over the period by 81%, and that of Middle Eastern countries by 132%.

The Middle East
The massive population growth will mean the Middle East, and to a lesser extent north Africa, will remain highly unstable, says the report. It singles out Saudi Arabia, the most lucrative market for British arms, with unemployment levels of 20% and a "youth bulge" in a state whose population has risen from 7 million to 27 million since 1980. "The expectations of growing numbers of young people [in the whole region] many of whom will be confronted by the prospect of endemic unemployment ... are unlikely to be met," says the report.

Islamic militancy
Resentment among young people in the face of unrepresentative regimes "will find outlets in political militancy, including radical political Islam whose concept of Umma, the global Islamic community, and resistance to capitalism may lie uneasily in an international system based on nation-states and global market forces", the report warns. The effects of such resentment will be expressed through the migration of youth populations and global communications, encouraging contacts between diaspora communities and their countries of origin.

Tension between the Islamic world and the west will remain, and may increasingly be targeted at China "whose new-found materialism, economic vibrancy, and institutionalised atheism, will be an anathema to orthodox Islam".

Iran
Iran will steadily grow in economic and demographic strength and its energy reserves and geographic location will give it substantial strategic leverage. However, its government could be transformed. "From the middle of the period," says the report, "the country, especially its high proportion of younger people, will want to benefit from increased access to globalisation and diversity, and it may be that Iran progressively, but unevenly, transforms...into a vibrant democracy."

Terrorism
Casualties and the amount of damage inflicted by terrorism will stay low compared to other forms of coercion and conflict. But acts of extreme violence, supported by elements within Islamist states, with media exploitation to maximise the impact of the "theatre of violence" will persist. A "terrorist coalition", the report says, including a wide range of reactionary and revolutionary rejectionists such as ultra-nationalists, religious groupings and even extreme environmentalists, might conduct a global campaign of greater intensity".

Climate change
There is "compelling evidence" to indicate that climate change is occurring and that the atmosphere will continue to warm at an unprecedented rate throughout the 21st century. It could lead to a reduction in north Atlantic salinity by increasing the freshwater runoff from the Arctic. This could affect the natural circulation of the north Atlantic by diminishing the warming effect of ocean currents on western Europe. "The drop in temperature might exceed that of the miniature ice age of the 17th and 18th centuries."

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Video. How we got here (ahem).

Honour and the American Apocalyse

Preface: Nothing more beautiful than rhetoric with the power of wisdom and indignation that challenges monsters. From the Dark Wraith.

Manifesto in Black

I know little that is genuine truth, but of this I am most certain: the United States government, as a matter of policy set each and every day to practice, systematically and of necessity lies. Its elected representatives, its civil servants, its judges, its contractors, its instrumentalities, agencies, commissions, operatives, and private advocates lie. They lie with numbers, and they lie with words.

Most perniciously, they lie with facts.

Their reports, their pronouncements, their justifications, their declarations, their accusations, their claims, their projections, and their promises are, prima facie, lies. The fruit of this poison tree issuing forth from the seeds of prevarication are the laws of the land: by the very nature of the seed from which is born this foodstuff that nourishes our civil society may not come a rule of law that is fit for all who live under the flag of this nation.

We have, in the words of the former neoconservative favorite Francis Fukuyama, come to the end of history: the legislation enacted by the Congresses, the affirmations by the Presidents, the interpretive and legislative rules crafted by government agencies are uniformly in their effect to the end of predating upon the weak to provide foul swill to a wanting public that is appeased by hateful violence of the state masquerading as law enforcement. No further history may be written when a civil society has become a docile mob living vicariously, even while cowering in fear, ignorant of the difference between compliance and obedience, assuming the latter is a refined and civilized extension of the former.

To believe anything that emanates from this government is to be at peril of embracing a lie, whether that lie be from a conservative or from a liberal. The individuals who comprise the sentient heart of this government are liars, and they must be such in order to be a part of this government. They cannot help themselves; they cannot even so much as see that they are lost to the lies they must sustain in order to remain a part of the official instrumentation of something far greater than they and far more corrupt than they should want themselves to be.

This, I know: only the truly evil conservatives and liberals want the nation we have come to have in this degraded century; yet, none of better nature can stop it. Neither John McCain nor Barack Obama is a bad man in any materially moral sense. Although the details of their visions of this nation may differ markedly, each wants a good place for the citizenry, a safe place for the people, and a free place for the men, women, and children of this world.

Neither, however, can give us back that which we have lost; so they must lie with earnest promises, meaningful plans, serious vows, and reasoned logic about the way forward to better times. And people will believe them; people will vote for them and be excited about them, and many of those people will remain hopeful even as these men, each in his own ways, renders evidence of his intention to do other than what his acolytes think he will do.

This is the way of the foolish as they goad their putative leaders forward along the narrowing passage of perilous lies below which is the chasm of precipitous, calamitous consequences.

For example, we can stay in Iraq as an occupation force, as John McCain would have us do, or we can leave in short order, as Barack Obama would want; but these two roads converge in a wilderness, and that place is called collective damnation. If we stay, we continue the destructive imposition of military presence ruling over people who want us gone; but if we leave, we wash our hands of the horrific tragedy we—yes, we a people—created. Both John McCain and Barack Obama must lie to the American people, for each is compelled to craft a platform to hide from those who would elect them the miserable truth that we have already made monsters of ourselves, and whatever we now do is to the purpose of serving ourselves, even as we, both liberals and conservatives, find our own convenient reasons for dismissing our absolute, categorical responsibility for the wreckage we have made of a sovereign nation.

Take a long, hard look at a killed Iraqi child. Tell yourself that this is not your doing. Soothe yourself. Tell yourself you are not responsible; it's someone else's doing. It's an insurgent; it's a bad American airstrike; it's George W. Bush. It's someone else who did it, not you. Then, once you feel all better, be sure to vote for the candidate who will tell you what you want to hear: we need to leave Iraq, or we need to stay there. It's all the same: seeds from the fruit of a poison tree of lies that will, themselves, bear lies tailored to your need for self-exoneration.

This is how the valence of Hegelian historical inevitability gets assigned, and the folly of self-deception cannot long be held at bay, certainly not this time, because the same force that makes corrupt any choice we now select in our dealings in the Middle East will one day become tangibly manifest in the fire and shrapnel of embittered terrorists who will unmercifully punish us just as we unmercifully butchered their ancestors and kin.

Neither John McCain nor Barack Obama can mitigate the inevitable: lies beget consequences, and those consequences are not only the superficial catastrophes of far away places we can keep at bay by hiding in our homeland.

The United States economy cannot now be saved from tribulation because no leader could be elected on a platform of truth about that which must be done. Neither can our United States of America as a nation of free people be saved, for it is already dead: freedom has become a commercial slogan in the unrelenting program of law enforcement run amok by fearful legislators whipped forward by those whose appetite for obedience by the people has become married to the unstoppable train of technological innovations that cynically thwart the simplicity of constitutional due process.

To the extent that an engine of systematic lies is the foulest of enemies of a free people, the United States government is, then, an enemy of the American people that was once collectively free; and to the extent that collective freedom exists only when each within that aggregate is free, this government of pervasive, metastatic lies is an enemy to each and every person who is free by natural law that transcends the particulars of time, place, and circumstance.

In passing, I note that this conclusion I herewith openly publish, even as it defiantly expresses my intention to freedom, at once definitionally serves the repressive state to the end of actionable claim against me. I have no harbor in the Constitution, for it is now subservient to what the highest court of the land calls "constitutional law," which is the body of that very same court's own rulings, which are mandatory precedent upon all lower courts in the land. Even if, by some oddity of case, the courts were to defend my right to speech, the federal legislature has both actively and tacitly given its permission to the President to do as he pleases in extra-judicial pursuit of "terrorism," however the government chooses to define it. Both pretenders to the throne of Empire have endorsed the wretched disposal of constitutional rights against unreasonable searches and seizures, yet their respective supporters refuse to see them as two faces of the same tin coin of authoritarianism ringing mightily while delivering nothing of value to the besieged Constitution and those it rightfully protects.

I am not afraid of this government, for I know it is the engine of empire dying before my mortal eyes. I need do no more than write and speak of its collapse, for it hastens its own death with each passing day, with each passing, more outlandish, more insistent lie.

I need only wait, write, and teach; and in that last modality of my death watch upon this wrongful and elderly monster whose name is Anathema, I shall prepare the young for the time that is to come that they may be not only prepared through revelation for a circumstance of awful tribulation, but knowing of why it has come, how it will proceed, and to what ends they must dedicate their learning and, indeed, their very spirits that they may continue on past the time when this government, of its own tragic destiny, has passed into sullen history, yet one more failed state of glorious ideals eviscerated by the consuming and all-destructive spiral of lies and their consequential burden of corrosive, suicidal distension.

And so I pause in the course of my own journey to the end of days to defy this government—nay, to challenge this government—to silence me. I dare this government to call me its enemy as I have, in this place for all to see, called it the enemy of my freedom.

Silence me lest I remain to my solemn task of shining a light down the darkling and now inexorable path that is the way to the cemetery of empire.

I wish only that the light I cast could illuminate for me that which lies beyond the graveyard, for I know that the better place—a bright place of learned hope and vigilance in freedom—exists, yet I know neither its form nor its time. That good place is there, but I cannot see it, so I must craft my hope of its good and great landscape within my soul, that place where lies cannot make permanent camp, that place my government long ago abandoned to the ill shadows of fleeting fortune and paltry powers that sovereigns so willingly substitute for a living spirit fed by the wellspring of a people unbridled in their freedom.

While hope is never enough, knowledge is abundance; and so, even as I sound the clarion call of the end of this history, I offer a horn of plenty to those who can steadfastly endure this government's crying shame of decadence in political oppression and economic misery in its last years and days. In caution, though, be forewarned: the wrath of generations to come will lay to waste the lives and deeds of us all for the disdain with which we dispensed with hope through action in the name of safety through surrender. Woe be our name as the truth we cannot see becomes the justice we shall suffer.

As both meek and magnificent promise, I give you this: the time of tribulation, bearing as it must the cruel twins of consequences and truths, will someday and inevitably pass; then all of us, both the living and the dead, shall once again be free.

Free we shall be until, of course, lies once again become empire and ignorant, self-serving people find life in the shadow of empire preferable to death in defiant rebellion.


The Dark Wraith has spoken.