Language may be the cultural tool that we invent to invent and sustain ourselves in coherent isolated societies. Very few societies — language cultures, all — remain purely themselves given encounters with conflict, including invasion, and with expanding trade relationships. For western onlookers involved with the Islamic Small Wars, the Sunni-Shiite schism and much else have been only latent to western popular knowledge and not latent at all in the minds of the owners of each respective legacy who are now the captives of their own archaic thought as contained by old language and, indeed, related “habits of mind”.

The Islamic Small Wars will end with poetry, not bullets, with freedom from archaic language, not subjugation, with mere human equality — and with “compassion, humility, inclusion, and integrity — and not the delusions of grandeur associated with supremacist hegemony.

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All of the above . . . because I say so.

😉

The full brief would be lengthier and more complicated, but suffice it to say that what has happened in Iraq and Syria and elsewhere along the links of the Islamic Small Wars owns no place other than the past among the world’s nations.  The enthused fighting in Syria, however vigorous, becomes also more socially incoherent and subject to individual and small group interests by the day, and similarly motivated fighting and “struggle” elsewhere seem not to prove any better as regards gaining traction in their districts.

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