You have to wonder if the Rupture could be the end of European civilization. Europeans may not understand how to live without electricity, but I’m sure that many Middle Easterners wouldn’t be bothered. Europe crumbles, the muslims invade.
Short term, that's pretty obvious. (Though I would not want to be the tech-driven South Korean military if the leaders of North Korea, with 1950s-era technology or worse, decide to get their food from "down south.") There are a lot of places in the world where lower-tech military conflicts could still create tremendous problems.
But what about long term, and specifically this question:
144 posted on 8/26/2013 2:41:04 PM by WI_Rifleman: “You have to wonder if the Rupture could be the end of European civilization. Europeans may not understand how to live without electricity, but I’m sure that many Middle Easterners wouldn’t be bothered. Europe crumbles, the muslims invade.”
Just what we need... camel-riding desert warriors in search of more water and farmland crossing into the ruins of a devastated Europe because the Arab warriors don't need electricity, with no Charles Martel to stop them at a future Battle of Tours.
I spent some time today thinking this scenario through.
When the dominant economic order of a culture collapses, it doesn't result in everyone dying. Some people are left. In a survival-of-the-fittest scenario, not only individuals but also some groups and cultures are capable of surviving the collapse. Some of those groups are likely not only to be able to survive but also to be able to exploit and take advantage of the situation.
A good case can be made that is **EXACTLY** what happened when a band of religiously radicalized Bedouin desert warriors in search of food and water decided to attack the war-weakened frontiers of the Byzantine Empire and Sasanian Empire (the late Persian Empire), and then kept going when the far-off rulers in Constantinople and in modern Iran couldn't fight them off.
It's probably something we should have on our radar screens — not just for a total SHTF scenario like what Bracken contemplates, but also for less devastating forms of regional economic collapse, i.e., a worse version of what is already happening in Greece.
That, unfortunately, is a quite realistic scenario. It doesn't take too much to imagine an economic collapse back to a Great Depression such as the 1930s. That happened within living memory of some who are still alive today, and the consequences in a technological age could be much worse.
Fortunately for us, many of the leaders of the more powerful Muslim nations, and even more so their princeling children, are just as addicted to Western ways as any American or European.
At the other end of the economic spectrum, Islam is inherently anti-capitalist because of its objection to charging interest — an aspect of Islam which isn't always obvious to Westerners because Muslims don't have a problem with participating in an “infidel” banking and commercial system, but don't want to encourage capitalism among their own people. Islam breeds forms of welfare which, although they'd claim not to be socialist, have similar effects on their urban poor populations.
The key weakness of Islam is that is is an ethical system which is not based on personal self-sufficiency but rather on shared tribalism, and not uncommonly leads to family conflicts and tribal conflicts even between Muslims. That's different from Western poverty due to lack of an ethic of self-sufficiency, but in an urban environment apart from the rural family-based economic system, it produces gangs rather than stability.
Many Middle Eastern cities, even if (unlike Western poor urban residents) their residents are used to the power going out periodically, would quickly become horrible hellholes if the water supply got turned off, or if food paid for by oil money wasn't coming in regularly via shipping from countries with much better agricultural productivity. A major collapse of world commerce would harm Middle Eastern cities just as badly as those of Europe and North America, and perhaps more so because of the need for importing food and transporting water.
Of course, there are lots of places like Afghanistan or Yemen with radicalized rural minorities. Such people would survive when the major urban centers of the Middle East collapsed, blame “faithlessness to Allah” for their problems, and take over whatever was left of their part of the world. Perhaps after a while they would decide the time was come for jihad in search of more water and more food elsewhere.
Realistically, could Islam take over the West via a future economic collapse, much like the way it conquered the Persian Empire and devastated the Byzantine Empire?
My guess is that in a post-collapse scenario, an Appalachian hillbilly with a horse and rifle is quite capable of taking on a desert Arab with a camel and a rifle.
I'm not so sure I'd say the same about rural Europe where rural life was based on feudalism and protection by a local noble, not individuals with firearms like the American frontier. Even traditions of rural self-sufficiency which survived the rise of the Industrial Age were largely stamped out by socialism in rural Western Europe. In Eastern Europe, I suspect that Communism, together with forced urbanization, did even more damage.
But in any case, I think it's obvious that a lot of Third World Muslims are much more capable of surviving “hard times”, however we want to define them, than most Westerners.
That is something to consider as our economy continues to have major problems.
246 posted on 8/27/2013 4:27:06 PM by Travis McGee: "The America of the 1930s that got through the Great Depression without tearing itself apart no longer exists. Now kids murder for fun on full stomachs. Imagine when they are starving.
Bracken is right in more ways than one.
Major economic crises tend to bring out the core character not only of individuals but also of nations. For all the problems of FDR and the Great Depression, America didn't turn into a Prussian-style militarist state as Germany did or a military-driven imperial expansionist state as Japan did in the 1930s, and there are reasons for that.
I am much less certain those reasons which applied in 1933 continue to apply in 2013. A welfare state has consequences, and modern America is in a lot of ways much worse than 1930s America or 1930s Germany.
Muslim nations have not, at least not yet, gone through the same collapse of social and moral standards.
The core character of Islamic nations is very different from anything we've seen in Western history, and I don't think most Americans want to face a committed Muslim enemy without the technological and economic superiority we now have.