Murderous Logic

 

(…) We will see, time and time again, atrocities committed by these actors that recall the chillingly murderous logic of Stalin, Mao, and Pol Pot, as they too seek to remake their own corners of humanity overnight so as to keep them safe and thoroughly disconnected from the evil of the outside world. These perverse acts of violence will be designed to shock us as much as their own people, in the typical "bloody nose" strategy that outsiders have attempted against the "weak" and "amoral" Americans going decades back in our history — at times successfully (e.g., Pearl Harbor, Tet Offensive, 9/11). As such, their strategy of resistance will specifically target — in the manner of Fourth-Generation Warforer — our morale and perseverance rather than our material strength.

  This "silver bomb" strategy is not unlike the "silver bullet" think­ing that has long impaired much of America's own military logic. While we constantly search for the "killer application," or decisive technology that will bring us instant victory, our enemies search for the "killer strike", or the symbolic targets whose destruction brings us to our knees and convinces us of the futility of fighting on. In this way, our current main enemies, the Salafi jihadists, are, in the words of that hardened revolutionary strategist Vladimir Lenin, almost "childlike" in their assumption that the right bomb in the right place at the right time will bring about worldwide revolution.

But their destruction is preordained by history, in a form of natural selection by which those who cannot ground themselves in anything but totalitarian schemes of power and domination over others must inevitably be weeded out so that others far more talented and imagi­native can truly reap the benefits of a world without walls, without disconnectedness, and without war.

So yes, I do account for nonrational actors in my worldview. And when they threaten violence against global order, I say: Kill them.

 

Quelle: “THE PENTAGON’S NEW MAP. BLUEPRINT FOR ACTION” von Thomas P. M. Barnett, S. 281 f