A post-history strip tease (xpost from GD)
A post-history strip tease
By Pepe Escobar
OpEdNews Op Eds 4/27/2013 at 21:33:45
How cozy it would be to summon the retro-spirit of Burt Bacharach to define our geopolitical future and start singing, "What the world needs now/is love, sweet love".
~snip~
The disintegration and balkanization of Iraq, detonated by the Pentagon's Shock and Awe 10 years ago, was a sort of prelude for this Brave New Disorder. The neo-con worldview, from 2001 to 2008, advanced the project with its ideology of Let's Finish Off The State, everywhere; once again Iraq was the best example. But from bombing a sovereign nation back to the Stone Age, the project moved to civil war engineering -- as in Libya and, hopefully for the engineers, Syria.
When we have armchair analysts, influential or otherwise, paid by flush foundations -- usually in the US but also in Western Europe -- pontificating about "chaos and anarchy," they are just reinforcing a self-fulfilling prophecy. If "chaos and anarchy" turns them on, it's because they are just reflecting the predominant libidinal economy, from reality TV to all sorts of what De Cauter describes as "psychotic games" -- inside a room, inside an octagon, inside an island or virtually inside a digital box.
So welcome to the geopolitics of the young 21st century: an age of non-stop war (virtualized or not), sharp polarization and a pile-up of catastrophies.