When this is what they should be examining:
Posted on 12/01/2015 5:54:42 AM PST by wtd
An exceptional essay, discussing the primary forces at work against society
Matthew Bracken is the author of Enemies Foreign and Domestic, and a well-known advocate for Second Amendment rights. The following guest-essay by Mr. Bracken is also being published at Western Rifle Shooters Association.
As we roll into the New Year, we are witnessing the prelude to the culmination of a titanic struggle between three great actors. Three great social forces are now set in motion for a 2016 showdown and collision that will, in historical terms, be on par with the First and Second World Wars.
Two of these great social forces are currently allied in a de facto coalition against the third. They have forged an unwritten agreement to jointly murder the weakest of the three forces while it is in their combined power to do so. One of these two social forces would be content to share totalitarian control over large swaths of the globe with the other remaining social force. One of these social forces will never be satisfied until it achieves complete domination of the entire planet. So what are these three great social forces? They are Islam, international socialism, and nationalism.
Mr. Bracken explain[s] the salient aspects of each, and how they relate to the coming 2016 cataclysm...in his 9k word essay [pasted in the first comment below].
Some comments added by Matt Bracken to readers at Gates of Vienna offer some teasers:
"Now is crunch time. And let me say this while it’s on my mind: Obama wants to accelerate the schedule so that WW3 will initiate on his watch, so that he can sabotage the West most effectively. I have no doubt the shoot down of the Russian jet was roughly coordinated between Obama and Erdogan. They want this to happen while Obama can scuttle our military, etc.
"I think Islam just swallows Socialism in the end. Socialists say the Shahada, after they are promised some sop like calling the new regime “Islamic Socialism†or some such twaddle. Socialist leaders, (paid off or blackmailed by threats), will advise all their little socialist minions to submit to Islam, and they will."
"Mr. Bracken is absolutely correct about the matter of intentionality.
If European leaders wanted to close the land and sea routes to Europe, they could but do not. Navies are humiliated by being ordered to serve as taxi services.
If they wanted to search each invader they could but don’t.
If they wanted to stop generating refugees, they could stop attacking Assad but don’t.
If they wanted to stop generating refugees, they could starve ISIS financially by insisting SA and Qatar stop funding them, by insisting Turkey stop supplying them and buying oil from them, and by destroying refineries and oil transport trucks, but they don’t.
If they were interested in helping refugees, they could help 25 in place for what it costs to help one inside Europe but the only alternative announced is importation.
If they wanted to preserve Europe, refugees could be told they will be returned to their homes after the wars are ended but they aren’t.
If they wanted to protect their citizens, they could allow them to speak out against their Muslim enemy and arm themselves, but they do not. Dissent and plainly true words are ruthlessly punished.
European leaders promulgate contemptible lies about Islam that no honest person can embrace. The treason of these lying, vicious swine is complete and total.' - Col. Bunny
To which Matt Bracken responds:
"You and I see eye to eye."
Islam is similar to a self-replicating supercomputer virus. It is a hydra-headed monster, designed by its creators to be an unstoppable formula for global conquest. It’s almost impossible to eradicate, because it has no central brain or control center. Islam is like a starfish: when you cut off a limb, another grows to replace it. The names of the Muslim leaders, and the names of their Islamic groups, are transitory and ultimately unimportant. Osama Bin Laden and Al Qaeda are succeeded by Al-Baghdadi and the Islamic State, but they will all pass from the scene and be replaced by others. While Muslim leaders and regimes have come and gone, Islam itself has remained steadfastly at war with the non-Muslim world for 1,400 years.
Islam does not recognize secular national boundaries. To devout Muslims, there are only two significant realms of the world. First is the Dar al-Islam — the House of Islam, which is the land of the believers. The other is the Dar al-Harb — the House of War, which must be made Islamic by any means, including violent jihad. The expansion of Islam is sometimes held in check for long periods, but more often Islam is on the march, acquiring new territory. Once conquered by Islam, territory is rarely taken back, Spain being a notable exception.
The Muslim world produces almost no books or new inventions. Short of finding oil under their feet, most Islamic nations are backward and impoverished. So wherein lies the power source for Islam’s nearly constant expansion over the past fourteen centuries? The motor and the battery of Islam are the Koran and the Hadith, or sayings of Mohammed. A messianic Mahdi, Caliph or Ayatollah with sufficient charisma can accelerate Islam’s pace of conquest, but individual men are not the driving force.
Secular “Muslim in name only†strongmen from Saddam Hussein to Muamar Qadafi can hold Islamism in check for a period with brutal methods, but strongmen are often assassinated or otherwise removed from power, and in any event, they cannot live forever. Once the secular strongmen are gone, fanatical mullahs are able to stir their zealous Muslim followers into sufficient ardor to reinstall a radical Islamist regime under Sharia Law, according to the Koran.
This pattern of secular strongmen being followed by fanatical Islamist leaders has recurred many times over the past millennium and longer. Do not be fooled by modernists like King Abdullah of Jordan. To the true believer of Islam, any king or strongman is never more than a rifle shot or grenade toss away from being kinetically deposed, and replaced by another Islamist fanatic.
The persistent virulence of Mohammed’s 7th Century plan for global domination means that it is always ready to erupt in a fresh outbreak. Islam is like a brushfire or ringworm infection: it is dead and barren within the ring, but flares up where it parasitically feeds off the healthy non-Islamic societies around it. What produces this uniquely fanatical motivation, from within nations and peoples that otherwise seem devoid of energy and new ideas?
The motivation lies within the words of the Koran and Hadith. Most simply distilled, in the earthly realm, these Islamic texts offer immoral men sanction for thrill-killing, looting, raping, and capturing infidel slaves, and when these jihadists are killed, they are promised a perpetual orgy with seventy-two nubile virgin slave girls in Mohammed’s sick, evil and perverted Muslim paradise. Unlike the Jewish and Christian Bibles, the Koran and Hadith appeal not to man’s better angels, but to the darkest aspects of human nature. (Tellingly, Moses and Jesus are said to have climbed to mountaintops to communicate with their God, while Mohammed received his messages from Allah deep inside a bat cave.)
A meaningful or permanent reformation of Islam is impossible, because a new generation of fanatics, wielding the unexpurgated Koran and Hadith as their weapons, will always declare the reformists to be apostates and murder them. In Islam, the fanatics who are holding the unalterable Koran in one hand and a sword in the other always stand ready to seize complete power and exterminate their enemies.
This latent danger breeds fear and causes nearly all non-Muslims to be carefully circumspect in their dealings with Muslims, lest they lose their heads at a later date. This intentionally fostered fear of Islam is used as a cudgel against those who would otherwise resist its domination. The immutable Koran is the constant fountainhead of bloody Islamic conquest. Radical Islam is the pure Islam, the Koranic Islam, the real Islam.
Anyone who does not understand this bitter reality is dangerously ignorant of the past 1,400 years of human history.
The second great actor or social force is international socialism. It can also be aptly described under the rubrics of leftism, statism, cultural Marxism and communism. These all inhabit the international socialist spectrum. I trace these cultural Marxists at least back to the Jacobins of the 18th Century, a clique of secular humanists who were early globalists aligned with Freemasonry.
The Jacobins moved from Germany to France with a coherent and fully developed plan to engineer a social explosion as a means to take power. The Jacobin destabilization plan became the template for many more bloody “people’s revolutions†to come. Following the French Revolution, we are familiar with Marx, Engels, Lenin, Stalin and Mao. We are less familiar with the early 20th Century British Fabian socialists, or the Italian Marxist theoretician Antonio Gramsci, or the German "Frankfurt School" of international socialists, who transplanted their vision to the United States via Columbia University.
Unlike Vladimir Lenin and the Communists, they understood that international socialism’s goals could not be fully accomplished until the strong edifice of Western Civilization was hollowed out and sabotaged from within. In the end, the clandestine international socialist forces which burrowed deep within the Western womb achieved results which were far more permanent than the militarily-imposed revolutionary “war Communism†of Lenin and Mao.
Over the course of the past century, while Communism collapsed in the Soviet Union, the Fabian socialists have been increasingly successful at poisoning the roots of national, cultural and ethnic identity, leaving the inheritors of Western Civilization disorganized and demoralized, with no central belief system to rally behind. Why has this deliberate demoralization and dumbing-down process occurred? The international socialists have believed at least since the French Revolution that it was their duty to impose a top-down feudal order upon the ordinary “dumb masses,†a new world order managed by self-proclaimed experts chosen from among the correctly-educated elites, both for the benefit of the ignoramuses, and as a way to line their own pockets and continue to live an elite lifestyle of wealth and power.
It may seem paradoxical that major corporate and banking interests are deeply invested in the international socialist new world order, but when you untangle the threads it actually makes perfect sense. Today’s international banks and mega-corporations are powerful global actors in their own right, and they are now written into each new international trade agreement. In fact, corporate lawyers author most of the pages of the multi-thousand-page trade pacts, which are now coming down like rain. Trade pacts which were never voted on by American or European citizens, pacts which are taking on the force of international treaty law, superseding even the United States Constitution.
From the Rothschilds of Europe to the Warburgs of both continents, to the Morgans and Rockefellers of America and back to the Hungarian immigrant George Soros, for several centuries, millionaire (and more lately billionaire) bankers have written their own laws and cut their own political deals. Today, they literally create billions of new dollars and Euros per day out of thin air, and pass it over to their cronies. In the United States, the creation a century ago of the Federal Reserve — a privately run central bank of, by and for the interests of a cabal of private banking interests — is a glaring case in point.
In the USA, the heads of global mega-corporations and investment firms donate massively to both the Democrats and the Republicans alike, ensuring favorable treatment in an era of corporately directed crony capitalism. The picture is much the same in other countries. These post-nationalist crony-capitalists recognize no sovereign borders and believe that patriotism is a laughable anachronism.
For example, in America, open-border traitors bribe politicians to pass laws to allow them to import unlimited numbers of H-1 visa foreign workers to directly replace Americans at their very desks and work places, and these traitors do not lose one wink of sleep over it. The traitor class of the international business set calls this “agility,†moving fungible proles, peasants and paupers worldwide to where they can be set to work most cheaply and profitably. Ordinary American middle-class workers and their families are just collateral damage in this process. The reality is not much different in Europe.
These super wealthy open-border corporate and banking elites, who paradoxically steer the forces driving international socialism, are able to bribe their way to success after success in myriad ways. Their wealth and political connections ensure that cooperative young players with future star quality are steered to the right universities, foundations, councils, government agencies and media positions. For example, when you see a talking head on television, and his listed expert credential is that he is a member of the entirely private Council on Foreign Relations who has written articles for their house publication Foreign Affairs, you will know that he is destined for high positions, and doors will magically open in front of him.
Over on the Fourth Estate, the global mass media have been almost entirely subverted, scripted and stage-managed for decades by these über-wealthy elites through a thousand channels greased with kickbacks, no-show jobs, and secret payoffs that are disguised as special stock offerings and private land deals. Media figures morph seamlessly into senior political advisors and corporate board members, adding millions to their portfolios with each well-timed transition. Even many retired generals and admirals eagerly wallow in this swamp of sell-out and sleaze. It should not be a surprise to anyone that so many politicians leave Washington or Brussels as millionaires. Just as it should not be a surprise that long-time CBS News anchor Walter Cronkite, "the most trusted man in America," was for his entire adult life secretly a leading member of the World Federalist Association, a fact he proudly revealed only after his retirement from in front of the camera.
Nationalists probably comprise most of the population of the non-Islamic world, but there is no way to know their number with any certainty. Opinion polls are so easily rigged that most of them are useless at best, and they primarily constitute false propaganda and dezinformatsiya on behalf of their sponsors.
Nationalists consider themselves to be first and foremost loyal citizens of a sovereign nation. However, it must be borne in mind that the very concept of nationhood is fairly recent in origin. The division of the globe into distinct nation-states only began in the 17th Century, usually marked by the Treaty of Westphalia in 1648 at the end of the Thirty Years’ War. Since then, the world has been divided by national borders, which often (but not always) coincided with a national ethnic group, language and culture.
This national division was particularly successful on the European continent. Shared Judeo-Christian morality, ethics and values promoted notions of fairness and equal rights, leading over time to the abolition of slavery, women’s rights, and racial civil rights. During this period of unleashed human potential, Europeans and Americans enjoyed the greatest increase in overall standards of living ever seen in the history of mankind. Great cities, universities and museums were constructed in Europe and in America. Rising European empires — wealthy, cohesive, confident and highly organized — then conquered or otherwise came to control colonies around the world. America picked up much of the business when the colonial era ended after World War Two.
Happy national outcomes were far from universal. During the 20th Century, Communism rose to take complete power in some countries, notably Russia (as the Soviet Union) and China, but their successes did not lead to an unstoppable avalanche of global revolution, as had been foreseen by Lenin, Stalin and Mao. On the other hand, the slow, grinding “Long March through the institutions†of the traitor-class Fabian socialists (including Gramsci, the Frankfurt School and others) proved far more effective and durable.
By the 21st Century, these cultural Marxist traitor-moles had subverted nearly all of academia, inculcating generation after generation of students with a contempt bordering on hatred for their own national and ethnic identities. Most of the media were also subverted, ensuring that mass communications would always reinforce the politically correct international socialist world view that had already been injected and incubated in the schools and universities.
In this era of mass-brainwashing by the cultural Marxists, Christianity was recast as a retrograde social force, obsolete at best in the modern secular world, and at worst an outright danger to humanity. In the new politically-correct secular religion of humanism, European ethnic and cultural identity became the original sin and the mark of Cain. White European skin meant white privilege, and was transformed into a cause for shame.
Meanwhile, emancipated European and American women aimed toward new goals, which increasingly did not include producing a new generation, and demographic collapse began. Both men and women alike were anesthetized into apathy with 24-hour entertainment transmitted by high-def screens and stereo ear buds planted nearly into their brains. This unceasing fountain of entertainment proved an ideal conduit for mass-brainwashing with politically-correct values and ideas. Thus distracted and demoralized, most Americans and Europeans today seem unable and unwilling to stand up and fight in defense of their diminishing cultural and national identities. Brainwashed “social justice warriors,†the latest iteration of Lenin’s “useful idiots,†hasten the demise of Western Civilization, blissfully unaware of what will follow.
Thus rendered supine, the remaining American and European nationalists constitute the weakest and the most threatened of the three major global social forces. In a few European nations, patriots such as Geert Wilders of the Netherlands, Björn Höcke of Germany, Viktor Orbán of Hungary, Nigel Farage of the UK, and Marine Le Pen of France lead a rear-guard defense of their national, ethnic and cultural identities, while constantly being disparaged in the socialist-controlled “liar press†as racists, Nazis and xenophobes.
4. World War Three
Going into 2016, I believe that Europe is primed to become the central theater of a third world war. Like an overstrained zipper suddenly failing and bursting open from end to end, the European conflagration could well reignite simmering conflicts from the Ukraine to the Persian Gulf, due to interlocking alliances (NATO, including Turkey, vs. Russia), and the Sunni-Shia divide (Iran vs. Saudi Arabia, which has been imported into Europe).
Yes, World War Three. But why now?
A recurring strategic doctrine of the open-border international socialists, going back at least to the Jacobins, has been, “Out of chaos, order.†Lenin put it this way, when told that there were bread riots in Russian cities: “The worse, the better.†No “people’s revolution†(instigated and directed by traitor-class elites) has ever occurred on full bellies in happy countries that were at peace.
The international bankers and corporate elites are just as happy to underwrite revolutions as they are to underwrite other types of war. They have regularly provided loans and armaments simultaneously to all sides of European conflicts, always profiting handsomely no matter which side won or lost, or how many people died. They have also funded revolutions, in order to stir the pot for their future profits by getting in on the ground floor with new regimes.
For example, American bankers funded the efforts of Lenin and Trotsky both before and during their returns to Russia. Once you understand the grand machinations at work behind the forces directing international socialism, this seeming paradox actually makes sense. It’s about control, and brainwashing the idiot proles into the unthinking herd behavior required to manage them under socialism directed from above. But at the very pinnacle of the proletarian worker-bee hive, the controlling nomenklatura elites live like Communist dictators, or Rockefellers, or both at the same time, as they meet at Davos, Aspen, Jackson Hole and elsewhere over champagne and caviar to arrange their next self-dealing international trade agreements.
Now, the elite shot-callers have lit the fuse for the vast social explosion that is imminent in Europe, just as they did in Russia in 1917. How? By throwing Europe’s borders wide open. The Islamist corner of my triad represents a constant threat or push, and Muslims are always eager to fill any demographic vacuum. Their avarice for fresh Islamic conquest is a given or a constant. We see a 1.5-per birth rate among European women, and they see millions of European women with no or worthless husbands, who will soon meet real Muslim men. The current open-border policies of the European international socialists were intentionally designed to allow hundreds of thousands of culturally and religiously aggressive Islamist fighters and colonists to flood into Europe. The European traitor elites understand exactly what they are doing. They know what will happen. But why do it now?
The twentieth-century Austrian School economist Ludwig Von Mises wrote, “There is no means of avoiding the final collapse of a boom brought about by credit expansion. The alternative is only whether the crisis should come sooner as the result of voluntary abandonment of further credit expansion, or later as a final and total catastrophe of the currency system involved.†In contrast, when the socialist economist John Maynard Keynes was asked if his self-styled Keynesian credit expansion could continue in the long run, he replied, “In the long run, we are all dead.†Tra-la-la, who cares? It won’t be my problem.
In 2015, the childless homosexual John Maynard Keynes is indeed long dead, but we are still alive, and his “long run†is finally upon us. Now, just before the bank failures begin, seems to be an opportune time for the traitor elites to throw over the table, scattering the cards, chips and cash, while the lights go dark and shots ring out. The evil actors lurking in the background who sometimes engineer major catastrophes always have a plan to escape their worst consequences, including taking any blame, and they even have a plan to profit from the very disasters they created. The first Baron Rothschild, around the time of the Battle of Waterloo, is credited with saying “The time to buy is when there is blood running in the streets.â€
Is there any evidence of a concerted effort to deliberately throw Europe into bloody chaos and civil war? I think that there is. Thousand-passenger ferry ships cost tens of thousands of Euros a day to operate. Muslim hijra (jihad by immigration) invaders are receiving free or subsidized passage from Greek isles that are located only a few miles from Turkey, all the way across the Aegean Sea to mainland Greece. From there, chartered buses and special trains speed the migrants from border to border and onward into Germany, France and Sweden, at little or no cost to the muhajirun, or hijra migrants.
Who is paying for the operation of the ferry ships, trains and bus convoys? Who is paying for the smart phones and prepaid debit cards? Who is passing out the hundred-Euro notes seen in nearly every migrant hand, if they are truly arriving destitute after escaping war-torn Syria? Somebody is underwriting the Muslim hijra invasion of Europe. George Soros is spending billions to fund a hundred groups advocating open borders through his Open Society Foundation, so that might be a good place for intrepid researchers to explore.
As we roll into 2016, I am reminded of the Vietnam War’s Tet Offensive. In January of 1968, before the Tet Lunar New Year celebrations, thousands of Viet Cong fighters were infiltrated into Saigon and other South Vietnamese cities. Their coordinated mass attacks on January 30 came nearly by complete surprise, constituting America’s worst intelligence-gathering failure between 1950 in Korea and 2001 in New York. The experts had all agreed that the VC were too weakened and divided to accomplish mass attacks on a national scale, yet more than 80,000 irregular Communist infiltrators simultaneously struck in more than one hundred towns and cities. The Communists used a declared truce period to launch their attacks, while the American and South Vietnamese forces were on holiday leave. Bitter urban fighting in Hue, Vietnam’s third largest city, lasted for a month. Before they were defeated in Hue, the Communists executed thousands of civilian prisoners, dumping them into mass graves with their hands wired behind their backs.
The Communist bosses in North Vietnam miscalculated that the Viet Cong attacks in the cities would trigger a spontaneous national uprising against the American imperialists and their Republic of Vietnam puppets. This general uprising did not take place, and the VC was largely wiped out by hard-fighting American and South Vietnamese troops. City life went back to what constituted normal in South Vietnam. After Tet, the Viet Cong were largely a spent force, and never regained their former power. (The final takeover of South Vietnam in 1975 was accomplished by conventional NVA troops arriving from the North in tanks and on trucks, after Democrats in the American Congress cut off the resupply of ordnance and fuel to our South Vietnamese allies, leaving them unable to defend their republic.)
Yet back in America, in order to deceive and demoralize America in time of war, “Uncle Walter†Cronkite twisted the story of the Tet Offensive into a tale of rising Communist power and reach, of American military failure, and of the hopelessness of the cause to keep the Republic of Vietnam free from Communist conquest. Why did Cronkite do this? “The most trusted man in America†was secretly a leading propagandist for international socialism, which sees a strong and independent United States as the greatest barrier to their goal of eventual global governance. The case of Walter Cronkite and the Tet Offensive false narrative is just one glaring example of the pervasiveness of the international socialist grip on our mainstream media.
To an American nationalist, Walter Cronkite is a classic traitor, but to a dedicated international socialist, national borders and national sovereignty are no more important than they are to a devout Muslim. To both supranational groups, borders and nations are anachronistic constructs to be ignored, trampled, and discarded over time. Cronkite was a traitor to America, but he is a hero to the cultural Marxists. Typical of his dishonorable breed, Cronkite kept his true allegiance a secret until after he had retired from broadcasting lies and propaganda. I am convinced that the global mainstream media is infested with hundreds of Walter Cronkites today, both in front of and behind the cameras.
Which brings me to the main thrust of this essay. I believe that Europe is being prepared for a Muslim-jihad version of the 1968 Tet Offensive in Vietnam. A vast and concerted act of treason has been taking place across Europe since the creation of the European Union. Under the Schengen Agreement, Brussels promised to guard the outer frontiers of the EU, while abolishing internal border controls. The Eurocrat elites broke the first promise but kept the second, thus opening a wide path for the onrushing Muslim hijra immigration invasion.
Right now, approximately a million new Muslim migrants are engaged in a struggle to find a warm place to sleep in a continent with nothing approaching the capacity to adequately house them. At least 75% of the migrant invaders are Muslim men of fighting age. Native-born ethnic Germans, Swedes and others are being thrown onto the street to provide emergency housing for Muslim “refugees.†Tens of thousands of migrants are currently living in tents, and in temporary shelters like school gymnasiums and underused warehouses.
There will be no means of finding or creating permanent quarters for them before the Central European blizzards come. When the snow is deep in Germany and across Europe, these men are going to enter local houses, demanding to be taken in as boarders — or else. Where it is useful, small migrant children will be held up in front as human shields for their emotional blackmail value, elsewise they will be discarded. One way or the other, Muslim migrants will be attempting to move inside of German homes and apartments seeking heat and food, and the young Muslim men will be seeking undefended infidel or kafir women to slake their lust, (which is their right, under Islamic Sharia law).
In disarmed Europe, any group of a dozen or more cold, hungry and angry Muslim men armed with clubs and knives will be able to enter any German house or business that they like. Worse, there are now reports of vast quantities of firearms being smuggled into Europe by the muhajirun, with cowed European authorities afraid to search the migrants or their baggage, lest they provoke riots. And weapons are not only smuggled in “refugee†baggage: eight hundred assault-style shotguns were just seized in a single truck in northern Italy, bound from Turkey to Belgium. How many truckloads of weapons and explosives have not been stopped?
In Germany, even before the winter snows, the migrants are flash-mobbing and looting shops and stores. Seeking to forestall a social eruption, police do not respond until the mobs have safely departed. For now, the German government is paying these store owners for their lost merchandise, but this cannot continue forever. Businesses are closing and Germans are retreating in fear, as the muhajirun learn that they can invade private property and rob Germans without repercussions, convincing them even further of the docile passivity of their hosts, and the inevitability of their ultimate hijra invasion success.
As attacks mount, the German police will nearly always fall out on the side of the traitor-elite politicians who pay their salaries, and they will not come to the rescue of besieged ethnic Germans. At least, not under official orders, or in uniform. This calculated disregard by the international socialist elites for the safety and welfare of ordinary German citizens will in time lead to vigilantism and death squad actions by “off-duty†German military and police personnel. They will be acting against their “hands off the Muslims†orders, which are ultimately emanating from Brussels. And in time, enough firearms will find their way from the military, police and black markets into the hands of ordinary European nationalists for them to mount an armed resistance.
The accelerated pace of the 2015 Muslim hijra invasion was conceived, planned and executed by Quisling traitors comprising the elite leadership of the European branch of the international socialist movement, headquartered in Brussels. To paraphrase British nationalist patriot Paul Weston, if a farmer deliberately inserts a fox into the henhouse, who is guilty of killing the hens? Now, today, across Europe the stage is being set for the genocide of the weak, confused and defenseless European hens. The former East German Communist functionary Angela Merkel achieves high marks at both Muslim fox insertion and German hen repression. (Meanwhile, the former Soviet Communist KGB Colonel Vladimir Putin evolves to become a Russian nationalist who always advances Russian interests, at least as they are perceived by himself and his cronies.)
A few days after the Paris attacks, French police commandos fired some 5,000 rounds down an urban street into an apartment set into a crowded block. A year from now, I predict that when police arrive on that street, they could be met with sniper fire, improvised barricades, IEDs and possibly RPGs. In short, Paris, Brussels and many other European cities will in time resemble Beirut during the 1980s.
To understand Europe’s future, simply ask the Lebanese what follows when a nation takes in tens of thousands of angry Muslim “refugees.†Civil war is what happens, even if it begins among the various competing refugee factions. It is a threadbare hope that a wished-for peaceful silent majority of Muslims will be able to influence the radical Islamists away from violence, and thus forestall the coming European Civil War, any more than imagined peaceful silent majorities could have prevented the civil wars in Lebanon, Bosnia, Syria or a dozen other places. Actual peace-loving Muslims will be as insignificant to the outcome of the coming conflict as were any Quaker pacifists hiding in 1944 Berlin. The only significance of the alleged silent majority of peaceful Muslims is that they will serve as living camouflage for the jihadists to hide among.
It is critical to note that none of the examples I just mentioned (Lebanon, Bosnia, Syria) constituted neat bipolar wars between two national state actors. All were three-sided wars — at least. These formulations are inherently unstable and constantly veer toward violence, as temporary alliances of convenience shift and today’s friend becomes tomorrow’s enemy. In this environment of deception, subterfuge and betrayal, the false-flag terror operation becomes a standard operating procedure. It is a simple matter for Group A to conduct a massacre of Group B while wearing the outward uniforms or other insignia of Group C. And it is no trouble at all for Group C to fire a few mortar rounds into the market square of Group A from the territory of Group B. Ethnic cleansing, reprisal operations and mass executions proliferate like mushrooms in this free-booting environment, which is devoid of the behavioral controls normally inherent in a war fought at the national level between two uniformed militaries.
When any non-Islamic country, such as France (through dangerously naive immigration policies) attains approximately a ten-percent Muslim population, violence and civil war become a constant threat. Ten percent of a total national population translates into more than fifty percent of fighting-age men in key urban districts, due to the concentration of Muslims in Sharia-zone ghettos, combined with aging European demographics. Later, these Muslim ghettos will serve as sanctuaries and bastions for the jihadists, until and unless they are finally pulverized with artillery shell fire or aerial bombs. France and Germany will not be exempt from the lessons of history that were hard-taught in Beirut, Sarajevo, and Damascus.
Thousands of the recent Muslim muhajirun currently arriving in Europe were schooled in prolonged and savage religious and ethnic civil wars. Today’s Europeans, deliberately brainwashed with politically correct fairytales about the benefits of multi-culturalism, have utterly no idea what horrors await them. Increasing European discomfort will not change the outcome one iota. Just because the Europeans may tire of the irritating presence of Muslims, (both new immigrants and native born), the Muslims will never willingly leave Europe. Nor will the Muslim immigrant invaders knuckle under and turn quiet and docile again.
The hard core of the battle-hardened jihadists now fanning out across Europe understands the tried-and-true process of igniting a civil war through terror. They will calculate that the European military and police cannot and will not sustain the battle against an unceasing campaign of terrorism. Brussels cannot remain on virtual lockdown forever without its economy being wrecked. What will happen when a Paris-type attack, or worse, is a daily event in a dozen European cities?
As I mentioned above, just the other day in northern Italy eight hundred combat-style pistol-grip shotguns were discovered in a truck on their way from Turkey to Belgium. Do the math. The Paris attacks were carried out by approximately eight jihadists armed with Kalashnikovs, shotguns and TATP suicide vests (which can be manufactured anywhere there is a kitchen). Now imagine a “Super Tet Offensive,†with every type of target on the hit list from airports to zoological parks, each being assaulted by an eight-man squad of such killers. Some attacks smaller, some larger, from pairs to platoons in strength.
Today, perhaps only a few short months prior to Tet 2016, there is no Islamic high command located in Europe or elsewhere in charge of planning specific terror operations. There is no OKW (Oberkommando der Wehrmacht, the supreme command of the German Nazi armed forces) planning an Islamic Operation Barbarossa, hence, there is no command and control structure for Western intelligence to penetrate and disrupt.
Instead of a central brain directing many hands, think of a vast swarm of stinging jellyfish, all moving in loose formation, with the same generalized attack plan in their collective hive-mind. At the end of 2015, individual muhajirun may have only a basic awareness that they are heading to Europe to conduct a great jihad. As D-Day draws nearer, coded messages will proliferate with cryptic references to portentous events from Islamic history. “Get ready, and prepare to conduct major operations†will be the thrust of the online chatter and encrypted wireless messages. In each European city, targets will be individually scouted by local muhajirun in anticipation of a general outbreak of jihad terror attacks.
How many mosques have already received a truckload of shotguns or Kalashnikovs? Run the numbers again: eight jihadists per terror attack, eight hundred weapons per truck, 80,000 Viet Cong fighters in the original Tet Offensive, and an estimated 800,000 muhajirun flooding into Europe. Using radical mosques as clandestine armories is S.O.P in the Middle East, so why would the jihadists not use the same tactics in safe and docile Europe? Out of a sense of fairness and respect for European laws? Please. In the words of Turkish Prime Minister Erdogan, “The mosques are our barracks, the domes our helmets, the minarets our bayonets and the faithful our soldiers…†And bear in mind that anyplace an AK-47 can be smuggled, so too can a few kilos of Semtex.
Imagine a dozen or even a score of Beslan-type school sieges, all happening at the same time, across that number of European cities. Initially, the first string of major surprise attacks will be coordinated by the most well-organized terror networks using currently unbreakable wireless encryption. Many of the attacks will involve numerous captured hostages, often children, with impossible demands being made to guarantee their safety. Or no demands will be made; just rape and slaughter will ensue, as in the Russian Beslan example. This outbreak of major attacks will be the signal for the general jihad offensive to begin.
The Beslan Massacre happened in 2004 at the hands of yet another killer gang of aggrieved Islamists. Two squads of Chechen Muslim terrorists arrived on the first day of school in a Russian town, using false police vans as camouflage. They took a thousand young hostages and held them for three days. The Muslim terrorists murdered over four hundred innocents, often after rape and torture. Now, imagine twenty ongoing European Beslans, with simultaneous infrastructure and “soft-target†(people) attacks happening everywhere in between.
What Hitler’s Nazis accomplished with Stukas and Tigers and motorized divisions, the Islamonazis will attempt to accomplish by a massive “Tet Offensive on steroids,†overwhelming and stunning the European meta-system into immediate paralysis and first psychological, then material defeat. At least, that is the outcome that the Islamonazis will be striving to achieve. The 1968 Tet infiltration and mass-attack strategy didn’t succeed in Vietnam, and maybe it won’t work in Europe, either. It’s more likely that the hoped-for general uprising by all European Muslims against the kuffar will not be triggered, and it may simply stall and sputter out.
In strategic terms, if nothing else, the 2016 jihad offensive and subsequent civil war in Europe will open up a second major front in the war against the Islamic State, causing NATO and the West to turn their attention inward toward their own survival, and thereby take pressure off the other theaters of war in Iraq and Syria.
And for the Europeans to win the coming civil war, they will have to be at least half as brutally ugly as their Muslim invaders, and that means pretty damn brutally ugly. But while the jihadists will be operating at maximum brutality from day one, the placid and polite European authorities will be starting from far behind in that department. For example: a standard jihadist tactic is to flee from a terror attack straight back into the embrace of their co-religionists in the Sharia-zone ghettos, and hide behind their women and children. Then what will the authorities do? Go in and try to arrest them? (Just joking.) Wait for their next excursion with more terror bombs? Or gut the entire suspected block with shell fire? This is what I mean by damn ugly. The French reaction to the Paris attacks gives a hint of how this phase will run.
Best case scenario, and I don’t see this as likely: the 2016 Islamic Tet attackers will be wiped out the way the Viet Cong were in 1968. But if there are enough simultaneous attacks, in total numbers involving anywhere near the 80,000 or so fighters of the Vietnamese Tet, I can’t see how the present European forces can defeat the jihadists in less than a month, if at all. By very simple math, that number of jihadists means ten thousand Paris-level attacks. Think about that. Ten thousand Paris level attacks! All taking place in the same month, the same week, even on the same day, right across Europe. The politically-correct and overly polite European policemen (and even their militaries, at first) won’t be up to mounting successful counterattacks and rescue operations against a score of Beslans happening in schools, hospitals and concert halls. Not while at the same time, airports, train stations, power plants and other targets are being hit by Paris-sized terror squads right across Europe.
And count on this, for it is a standard tactic used by all Islamonazis in this extremely dirty style of warfare: just like in Beslan in 2004, where the killers arrived in false police vans, in 2016, ambulances, emergency vehicles and other official conveyances will either be hijacked or painted to simulate the real thing. Suicide bombers will arrive in official uniforms to sneak past security. This is a standard tactic, I repeat for emphasis. A jihadist dressed in a policeman’s uniform will drive a hundred-kilo bomb straight into the police headquarters in an official, marked police car. Goodbye, police HQ. (And incidentally, good luck at planning the rescue operation for your town’s local Beslan-in-progress, after your local police HQ is cratered, and much of their crisis leadership is wiped out.)
A few examples; I could go on for pages. The milk truck or bakery van will deliver terrorists to the middle school at mealtime. An ambulance will pull into the hospital’s underground parking garage and detonate. The cement truck won’t be delivering cement. Muslim jihadists are very proud of coming up with ever more clever ways to fool stupid infidels by abusing their naïve faith in official uniforms and corporate logos. The jihadists hurry to sign up for suicide driver school, just for the prospect of exploding a massive bomb inside of a crowd of filthy kuffar, and launching themselves straight into the arms of their seventy-two waiting virgins. This is how they will fight in Tet 2016. Forget this lesson at your extreme peril.
Another painful European history lesson has been largely forgotten since the days of the Troubles in Northern Ireland. In the 1990s, the IRA forced the British to the peace table when it became clear to all parties involved that the Brits could not prevent car bombs from exploding in the heart of the London financial district, costing billions in repair and lost-opportunity costs after each new blast. Essentially, a competent terrorist organization can hold a modern city hostage in this manner.
A few dozen to a hundred (at most) active IRA terrorist fighters managed to pull off this feat. And they were not even trying to kill people; rather, their goal was to wreck important office towers, with the British economy as their primary target. Usually, the IRA detonated their London car bombs during off-hours in these final terror actions of the Irish Troubles. The Muslim car bombers will not be as considerate in the coming European Civil War. They will strike for maximum civilian casualties, in an attempt to terrorize European leaders into surrender and submission to their Islamist demands.
I predict that the unfolding European Civil War (after the initial Tet 2016 phase) will comprise a steady escalation from Paris-style rifle attacks and suicide bombers, to snipers, to IEDs, to car and truck bombs. This is why I mentioned the possibility of eventually reducing the Sharia-zone ghettos to ruins by air and artillery bombardment. This will indeed happen, after the car bombs begin to explode in European cities. At that point, an urban civil war loses any vestige of civilized norms. Fortified ghetto bastions that provide sanctuary to Muslim jihad terrorists will be destroyed if the Islamic conquest is to be quelled.
This type of no-quarter urban warfare already has a name, “Hama Rules,†from the 1982 obliteration of that Syrian town. Hama was a Muslim Brotherhood stronghold used to launch attacks against the regime of Hafez al-Assad, the father of the current Syrian strongman. These guerrilla (or terrorist if you prefer) attacks occurred beginning in 1976, and didn’t stop until Hama was reduced to rubble, and at least ten thousand Sunni Muslim Syrians were killed among the ruins.
If the Europeans don’t have the stomach for that level and scale of total civil war, then over time they will be defeated, and either forced to convert to Islam, or forced into subjugated dhimmi status, or they will be executed, (if they can’t be put to useful work as slave laborers first). Those are Islam’s unchanging options for defeated male foes, at the pleasure of their Muslim vanquishers. The captured girls and women of the defeated kuffar will be taken as slaves, that is a given. So it will be war to the knife, and knife to the hilt, with no holds barred, and no quarter asked or given.
Going into 2016, a peaceful de-escalation is improbable, not with up to a million fresh muhajirun of fighting age currently cast all about Europe without housing or prospects as winter comes on. This rapid mass influx of hundreds of thousands of unattached Muslim men into Europe is the equivalent of pouring a jug of nitroglycerin down the barrel of a cannon, then loading a double gunpowder charge, ramrodding three or four cannon balls on top, and lighting the fuse. It is the perfect recipe for a disastrous explosion.
The 1968 Tet Offensive involved approximately 80,000 armed Viet Cong infiltrators sneaking into Vietnamese cities and towns, (unnoticed by the “experts†in intelligence, I will add.) How many of the almost a million muhajirun now loose in Europe will take up arms for the cause, after the first initiating wave of Tet 2016 terror attacks? Does anybody really have any idea? There is a point when stealthy hijra transitions into overt jihad, and I believe this will occur in the coming year. Historians will look back and marvel at what I think of as the coming European Jihad Tet Offensive of 2016. Or perhaps they will call it the European Trojan Horse Civil War. (I only hope that they don’t call it The Final Islamic Conquest of Europe.)
Historians will study how this mass hijra invasion, and the consequent Tet 2016 and European Civil War came to happen. The truth is it was an inside job by the traitor class, the cultural Marxist open-border international socialists. First, they numbed and dulled their own compatriots into apathy, before opening the gates to the Islamist barbarians. They injected the paralyzing curare of multi-cultural political correctness into their own societies, in order to render them unable to defend themselves from the planned attack.
In reality, the international socialists and the Islamist forces have agreed upon a murder pact, wherein their common enemy, the nationalists, will be removed as a threat to either of them forever. In 2016, European nations will deliberately be torched, in order to finish off their people’s last remaining notions of national pride and cultural identity. In effect, the coming conflict will constitute an agreement about the dinner menu made between a jackal, a hyena, and a supremely stupid bliss-ninny lamb, who was raised on Utopian multi-cultural fantasies. The lamb believes that by its own sweet example, the jackal and the hyena can be turned into vegetarians — but the choice for the dinner entree is already a foregone conclusion. European nationalists will be shot and stabbed in their fronts and their backs until they go down and are consumed by both of their rapacious destroyers.
And depend on this: standing before the crater, in front of the smoking building, after the tenth car bomb to explode that month, telegenic media traitors will mangle the truth into a false narrative that supports the inexorable spread of international socialism as the only possible solution to the “tragic cycle of violence.†The liar press will call patriots Nazis, and Nazis patriots; they will damn saints and praise mass-murderers. These media presstitutes are loyal only to their traitor-class paymasters, and to their common international socialist vision of global tyranny imposed from above by the all-knowing elites. “Out of chaos, order,†will be in their minds if not on their lips.
If the traitor elites can imagine sufficiently far into the future, then they must surely see international socialism lining up next for its climactic struggle against Islam, which shall be fought atop the still-warm corpse of European nationalism. Will these traitor-elite international socialists be able to hold the line against the ultimate victory of Islamic supremacism in Europe, or anywhere? Let us compare their assets and armaments.
The traitor elites control vast wealth and many levers of power. But will the ready offer of unlimited wealth and fast-track career promotion outweigh the fear of the Muslim assassin, kidnapper, and beheader? Which motivating force will prove stronger in the long run, the proffered bribe, or the kidnapped child and her threatened decapitation? International socialism and world Islamism are both evil totalitarian ideologies rooted in a quest for absolute power, but I believe that more socialists will convert to Islam than the other way around, tending to tip the final outcome in that direction. Why? Because you can live without accepting a suitcase full of Euros or a juicy job offer as a bribe. But you cannot live with your head removed from your shoulders.
Another enduring but rarely examined weapon in the Islamic conquest armory is the offer of amnesty to well-placed infidel leaders who agree to convert to Mohammedism. Can I see Angela Merkel wearing a hijab? Yes, certainly. Whether the badge she wears on her suit is red or black won’t matter to the former Communist, not if it is a matter of saving her neck while retaining her status. Study the history of Islamic conquest, and you will find numerous cases where Western leaders announced — after clandestinely opening the city gates to hijra invasion — that they had already converted to Islam.
As reward for this valuable service, well-placed defectors to Islam are often allowed to preserve their wealth and positions by taking fresh Muslim names and swearing fealty to the new Islamic regime. It’s intentionally made very easy to convert to Islam. The shahada conversion prayer is only a sentence, a handful of words. Sincere inner belief is not required, only publicly outward submission, which is the true (and nearly always obscured) meaning of the Arabic word Islam. Submission.
So when it comes to last-stand defenses, and head chopping time draws near, will the secular humanist international socialists fight to their last breath against Islamism? Not likely, not when simply repeating a silly and trite incantation about Allah and Mohammed can save their inherently dishonorable and traitorous lives. Simply stated, they will submit to Islam.
I think that in the end, Mohammed’s evil and satanic Koranic blueprint for world conquest will prove to be even more virulent and persistent than the evil and satanic blueprint of the international socialists, going back through the Jacobins, Marxists and Communists. The unchanging Koranic blueprint for global domination is still replicating and advancing after fourteen centuries, while the international socialist blueprint is only two and a half centuries old. Based on proven longevity alone, a betting man would have to favor the Islamic formulation for conquest and tyranny over the international socialist version.
And in the event that Islam either destroys or co-opts international socialism, I would expect the strife to continue until only Sunni or Shia Muslims are left alive. Then there would arise schisms and conflicts among new competing sects, because of the innately violent instructions central to the Koranic blueprint. But without an external host for the parasitic Islamic ringworm to feed upon, (having killed and consumed the golden goose of productive Western society), Islam itself will most likely fester and decay. What would succeed a failed global Caliphate, I can’t imagine. By that time, the last believing and practicing Christians in Europe will be lying cold and forgotten in their unmarked mass graves.
But perhaps the conflict between the three major forces will turn out differently. Perhaps, after the Islamic Tet Offensive of 2016 is turned back, European nationalism will experience a miraculous resurgence, following a rejection of the international socialism which dragged the EU nations toward disaster. Sometimes invading forces badly miscalculate their chances and underestimate the resolve of their enemies, and after sweeping to early success, they are rolled far back from their high-water marks. Napoleon and Hitler in Russia, and the Greek experience in Anatolian Turkey from 1919 to 1922 come readily to mind.
Or perhaps the Islamists will take their jihad a step too far, and a nuclear device or other WMD set off in a Western city might finally provoke a commensurate counter-strike against the nexus of Islam in Mecca and other Muslim holy sites, such as Karbala in Iran. Certainly Vladimir Putin can be expected to evince more steely-eyed resolve than the current crop of effete and dithering Western European leaders.
Two of the Five Pillars of Islam literally revolve around the black moon rock set into the corner of the Kaaba in the center of Mecca. After 1,400 unchanging years, Islam cannot simply erase two of its five pillars and continue with business as usual. Allahu Akbar means our god is greater. If Mecca were turned into a vast, glowing crater, this would be visibly untrue. When the Aztec and Inca man-gods were visibly thrown down by the Spanish conquistadors, those religions and social systems collapsed. If Mecca were to be destroyed, eliminating two of the five pillars, it’s an open question as to what would happen in and to the worldwide Muslim community. “We used to think our god was greater†won’t be an effective rallying cry. But I don’t suppose I’ll be around to see how this all plays out. For 1,400 years, uncounted millions of Christians and other infidels have died not knowing if Islam would ultimately prevail or be vanquished.
I’m not sure if there is a future ahead for sovereign nation-states as they have been constituted for the past four centuries, especially nations with their own unique histories, cultures and languages. I don’t know if the wealth and influence of the traitor-elite international socialists can overcome the constant threat of terrorism contained within the deadly Koranic conquest plan. And when it comes to how the approaching European storm will affect China and Asia, my crystal ball is cloudy on the other side. It’s hard to imagine a world war extending from Scandinavia to the Persian Gulf not going nuclear at some point. Perhaps the patient and cautious Chinese will simply inherit the ruins of the West. Perhaps they will be drawn into the world war.
No matter what else happens over the coming decade, 2016 is shaping up to be an epic year in European and world history. I hope that whatever develops across the Atlantic might at least provide clear lessons that will be valuable for the defense of a free and sovereign United States of America. Including lessons about the extreme danger of importing millions of Islamic muhajirun.
And lastly, thank God — through our Founding Fathers — for the First and Second Amendments to the United States Constitution. Unlike the Europeans, we are at least still free to warn one another of impending dangers, without our being silenced by the traitor elites who operate the levers of state power. And because of the Second Amendment, we will never be pulled down to the ground like helpless lambs by the Islamist hyenas and socialist jackals. When one-too-many ravenous foxes are placed into the henhouse by socialist traitors, in due time both the foxes and the traitors might just get a face full of buckshot.
Just remember: never, ever give up your guns.
You’re going to need them.
"Matthew Bracken was born in Baltimore, Maryland in 1957, and attended the University of Virginia, where he received a BA in Russian Studies and was commissioned as a naval officer in 1979. Later in that year he graduated from Basic Underwater Demolition/SEAL training, and in 1983 he led a Naval Special Warfare detachment to Beirut, Lebanon. Since then he’s been a welder, boat builder, charter captain, ocean sailor, essayist and novelist. He lives in Florida. Links to his short stories and essays may be found at EnemiesForeignAndDomestic.com"
25 sheets of paper if you want to print it out
I’ll pass.
If I get my wish of ink carts for Christmas, it is worth (from the 5 or 6 pages I’ve read while sitting at the computer) a more relaxed reading environment
Don’t pass. Read this one. I know Matt personally. This is well-thought out, and well-researched.
If you want to speed read, do so until you get to “End Game.” Then read that.
Matt is our own Travis McGee, and author of the Enemies Foreign and Domestic trilogy.
One of the same dynamics that worked in 1914 to spark WW1 is at work now, and will ensure that WW3 begins in Europe in 2016.
I refer to the European nations in 1914 all mobilizing their vast Army reserves. Once that happens, total war is just a matter of time.
A million unattached (no wife of kids to consider) Muslim migrants now floating around Europe are the equal of the 1914 reserves all being mobilized. Those million Muslim migrants are not going to take up knitting or gardening while waiting for a job at the VW plant.
The most radical 1% will trigger the conflict with a series of car or truck bombs along with a few Beslan attacks. This will be the signal for the next most radical 10% to begin general attacks.
After that, nobody knows what will happen, exactly, but you can be sure it will be brutal.
Yeah, I’m aware.
Just not particularly interested in any piece that assumes I am ignorant about Islam.
When this is what they should be examining:
Wise words and sage advice.
I hope more than some in high positions of military intelligence and power are following your work.
You have a gift of making complex geo-politics risks and threats, understandable and actionable.
I’m very glad to be part of this community.
Thank you, Matt.
“Don’t pass. Read this one.”
The intended target audience for most of my work are the boys and girls down in the fusion centers.
I hope they pass my messages along to any remaining adults.
Fortunately, this is an essay that needs multiple exposure.
So glad I stumbled upon this thread. I had read one of Matt Bracken’s books about survival in the wilderness after the cities dissolve, but I had forgotten his name.
I am going to undertake to read every word Bracken has written so far. Being retired & sitting on my ammo stash, I have the time.
2016 is going to be an ugly year, folks.
Alas Brave New Babylon is what you read.
Get the Bracken Anthologies next.
Tet was the Wild West.
Comparisons, while understandable, are misguided; why not the Battle of the Bulge, Normandy, or Iwo Jima?
"Tet was the Wild West.Comparisons, while understandable, are misguided; why not the Battle of the Bulge, Normandy, or Iwo Jima?" - Jack Hammer
That is a question best redirected to the author, Matt Bracken at the source link...here
Thanks! And for some historical perspective on Matt’s book title, read Pat Frank’s “Alas Babylon” (1958) about a WWIII aftermath in rural Florida. BTW, the war in Frank’s book begins in the Middle East with the Russians in Syria & involves the port of Latakia. Maybe you’ve already read it.
Still relevant today, and not dated. Human nature doesn’t change.
Yessir - read it some time ago.
Matt’s title is an amalgam of “Brave New World” and “Alas Babylon” - the warning cry from the brother at the AF base.
That’s right, the warning from the AF base!
I was a kid in 1960, and talk of nuclear war, CONELRAD, & lovable Nikita going berserk at the U.N. was daily fare for us. Alas Babylon was produced for TV.
In the novel, the Air Force vet looks from his porch one morning & sees not one sunrise but several....Tampa, Orlando, Tallahassee, etc.
The selling price of a car is now based on how much fuel is in the tank. Then there is the guy who dies looting a jewelry store because the place is super radioactive.
One CD pamphlet warned housewives, “the first sign of a nuclear strike will be your kitchen lighting up like a gigantic flashbulb and your Mixmaster will stop running. You will then have only seconds to gather your kids & get to your fallout shelter.”
And now we get to worry about it all over again. Such fun.
;^)
I remember Sputnik ...
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