Jeff Dickey
Aug 26, 2017 · 1 min read

No “may be” about it.

When a society loses, or never truly gains, the ability to call out attempts at manipulation through lies, then it places its survival in the hands of whichever belligerent chooses to build a network of traitors to advance its attack. The US and its allies fought a Cold War for two generations against the Soviet bloc, which both sides preferred to the very feasible nuclear “World War Three” that all knew that nobody would truly “win”. It’s very easy to argue that what we’re seeing now is a similar tactic, made worse by the ease of the attackers’ exploitation of a deeply fractured civil society in the US (and the West more generally) to achieve policy aims that otherwise would require problematic, less deniable use of traditional military force.

Military and civilian historians in future will quite rightly be asking “what were they thinking?!?” Even allowing for the fact that 20/20 hindsight is far easier than useful foresight, the fact that politics is so dominated by those resolved not to pay attention under any circumstances, and people’s willingness to tolerate, if not celebrate that, will make almost as much sense to people in two generations’ time as the Salem witchcraft trials do to us today. In one case, action was taken when none was warranted; in the other…

)

    Jeff Dickey

    Written by

    Writer. Gentleman Historian. Chief Engineer at a wantrapreneurial Web “startup”.