Are you a terrorist ?

The answer remains a bit unclear, as you may have guessed already. According to a great modern leader, terrorists are everywhere, and can strike any time they want. Because somewhere is a region located in  "everywhere" and you are certainly somewhere, you are a terrorist.... Logical, isn´t it ?

Terrorism in its various forms can be defined as a standard means of governmental action in times of eternal and total war, giant military dictatorships with a democratic surface ( or call it democratic elements in it ) and post-orwellian control schemes to contain dissent.

The terror spiral starts at the top, and moves downwards until it reaches a tortured rat that suffers from the frustrations and neurotic behaviour of its owner. After a century of  almost continuous war that almost no one could escape we became used to the apocalypse presented to us as a potential reality that could occur / could have occurred the very next day – just because of some malfunctioning security system – a disoriented fly caught in the wrong place at the wrong time, say a computerized warning system, could have triggered a total disaster, or maybe a character like Ripper, a freaked out general, that firmly believed the Commies were after his precious bodily fluids, locked himself up in an army base and started an unauthorized assault against the ( former ) Soviet Union. Fiction or not ? Various times, it is confirmed, the world was at the very brink of such an event, due to security system alerts that were not quite correct, or real trouble, for example the shooting down of a US civil airplane by Soviet jets in September 1983.

Needless to say, after a century of war the political behaviour in general did not become so much more civilized. In WW I  roughly 90 % of the casualties were soldiers, or military personnel, the rest civilians. In WW II  the ratio was approx. 50 / 50, to be modified later, so that in Vietnam 90 % of the dead were civilians, and there is no verifiable evidence that this has changed. This ratio resembles the dark ages ( around 1400 – 1700 ).

Not only the methods of conducting wars and the modern inquisition look medieval, also the legal framework around it. We also got used to a seemingly endless fight conducted in the name of rivalring ideologies or belief systems that defined themselves as the perfect way to reach a perfect society ( if only these adversaries that were guilty for everything could be wiped out ). The Cold War still lingers on in a way, because quite a number of security bureaucrats failed to adapt to the political post – 1990 framework. It takes some time to enforce new laws, and sometimes they get ignored completely while the bureaucracy continues to malfunction as it always did.

Sometimes the question could be raised whether this war was to be taken seriously. While e.g. people were not allowed to work as a postman because of  their ideological diversion or because of having participated in a number of demonstrations, some of the global " capitalists"  praised the advantages of the chinese communist model that produced a variety of benefits for the the chinese people and was called "a great social experiment". The largest supplier of grain / crops that the Soviet Union could rely upon was – the USA. Communist China swallowed a huge amount of US capital and is now its largest creditor as well as Japan, not to mention all the others that invested heavily. Anyway, the Cold War produced the perfect justification for a variety of unprecedented repression schemes that went as far as the introduction of Orwell-style scenarios a few decades ago. The democratic propaganda therefore sounded quite exaggerated, was repeated over and over again, and again, and became in a way omnipresent and very difficult to escape from.

The (mutual) threat of complete annihilation is in a way a typical terrorist strategy. The FBI definition of "terrorism" sort of matches. Expressed in musical forms:  The age of anxiety.

The BOMB was and is the first authority to relate to when it comes to handling political matters. Politics has to follow the bomb, not vice versa. Imagine the consequences if the bomb got ignored in political decisionmaking processes.....It could even be argued that democracy facing the dictatorship of the bomb is a risky venture - too risky to be tolerated. Could we tolerate a maniac demagogue elected by an entity named we the people that tends to be irrational, easy to manipulate, uneducated  and not reliable ?

The largest military builtup in history was partially stopped when the results became so absurd that they simply were not payable anymore. The primary reason of the fall of the Soviet Union was a form of hyper-militarism that simply was too expensive – corresponding with a military-builtup policy of NATO that was designed to drive the SU into banktruptcy
– by provoking unpayable military spending. And a few other factors, like an inefficient bureaucracy trying to act in an economically efficient fashion. Or the growing tecnological deficits.

In this context there is a phenomenon called terrorism. While officially often defined as the work of non-governmental anarchists and political desperados working independently, it can correctly be defined as a standard governmental instrument to achieve a variety of political goals. For some decades the superpower conflicts were covered behind proxies. Proxy warfare became a common way of hiding oneself behind third-world-culprits, and to pretend to comply with UN standards. Proxy freedom fighters were run against red governments, proxy red terror gangs against western-style governments. Or: Fighters for the sovereignty of we the people tried to destabilize western imperialist regimes, and brown terror gangs and imperialist saboteurs were used against the forces of justice. Their methods were as similar as the nuclear arsenal. The soviet bomb may have looked quite different compared with the US devices, but still the basic principles of functioning remain the same. Behind almost every terror gang there was and is some puppet master and secret banker that financed them – a state, or a government. The control density became so high that it was and is almost impossible to organize a terrorist plot without the support of a larger power with the necessary financial resources, infrastructure and safe havens.

Anarchists and bombers have always existed, but the golden age of terrorism began in the late sixties of the 20th century. Behind PLO / Black September ( just to quote one example ) there was, not astonishingly, a clique of Saudi financiers, among others. Gaddafi himself sponsored various terrorist acts. Behind the Red Army Fraction lagged an octopus called Stasi or MfS, the east german secret agency. The CIA launched quite a few attempts to kill Fidel Castro and did so in several other cases ( Lumumba, right ? Or a handful of Latin American presidents, e.g. Allende that got lost in an operation called Track 2, or was it 3 ? ). There are numerous complaints about a somewhat naughty behaviour like this, but it simply has to be remembered that agencies like that – huge bureaucracies with typical weaknesses – are run with the full consent of governments, therefore states, and  we the people always loved tough action ( the inspiring and socializing effects of public executions enriched the entertainment resources for thousands of years – to be replaced by TV-transmitted surrogates, as in many other cases elements of life itself are replaced by – surrogates.....).

Interesting to read was Casey´s autobiography ( CIA-chief from 1982 – 1987 ). It contains a lot of useful information about clandestine techniques. There you find an interesting example of a covert CIA operation targeting a sheik called Fadlallah. He became too intolerable and it was decided to remove him. A british special forces agent got hired to coordinate the efforts. Saudi money, not surprisingly, was donated to finance the operation, laundered, and re-allocated to acquire the necessary personnel and means. The only one that knew about all the operational details was the british special forces agent, the participants that did their jobs had no idea what they were in for – except their personal duties and the minimum of knowledge required. They did not know who ran the coordinating activities. They did not know who the other participants were. They had no idea of the existence of an assassination plan. They did not communicate via telephone or other visible means ( today they would of course not even think about using the internet...). Certainly they did not use credit cards or official bank accounts. Of course they did not rent cars. Simply they avoided anything that could have resulted in usable evidence and a trace. They did not in any way uncover their real names. Then a bomb blast destroyed Fadlallah´s house and killed some 100 people or so – while Fadlallah was dining in a restaurant some kilometers away. This typical example of a secret service operation is, of course, just one example. Pakistan is known to have supported various terror gangs as well as Saudi Arabia, the USA, the Soviet Union, GDR, France got caught in the act while bombing a Greenpeace ship, and so on.

Then there is a variety of seemingly nongovernmental terrorist phenomena. Numerous acts committed in the eighties in Europe are associated with a club named P2 ( Propaganda due ), a secret society that consisted of 962 members in Italy, and was associated with sister and mother societies  here and there around the globe. P2 is quite interesting because several presidents were spotted in there as well as army leaders and TV moguls as well as Mafia dons. Another media mogul that revealed the existence of a network called Gladio drowned in the Atlantic in the early nineties under – of course – undefinable circumstances. NATO material was in several cases found a bit too close to terrorist scenarios.

So, you can define terrorism as a form of clandestine warfare, and the terrorist is the adversary in the game, while the own folks committing similar acts are the freedom fighters or the fighter for the souvereignty of we the people. It is a matter of perspective rather than objective facts who is labelled a terrorist or a hero. Also: The winner seems to survive as the hero, while the loser later is regarded as the criminal – but this is a phenomenon encountered in the area of criminal justice everywhere and everytime.  Justice is where the winner is, while it does not really matter  how the game was won. To put it a bit sardonically: It is a corrupted female that runs after the money. Justice is where the money is.

The system-typical paranoia can be observed in various legal products such as the Zersetzungsrichtlinie ( Directive 1/76 enacted by the former head of the GDR secret police Mielke who inspired quite a few security bureaucrast worldwide - it can be obtained at www.bstu.de ), a directive for the handling of political cases in GDR in the seventies and eighties. There you can read how operation plans have to to be set up to ruin and neutralize "hostile" elements. There is some similiarity with certain already published CIA manuals ( or, as the Washington Post dared to put it, murder manuals – a term that probably would not be used today, like the definition of the CIA as a rabies-infected elephant by Sen. Church ).

The old GDR files are still valuable material  because they give good insights of the operational tactics of political police forces in general. Directive 1/76 is, for example, a good image of the handling of political cases in FRG. The methods listed are very hard to prove. This seems to be of utmost importance, because they do not really fit with various   ( international ) charters and treaties that prohibit dirty things like torture, or secret assasinations without trial. Trials for example have this particular disadvantage of being visible even when conducted out of the public. So, the clear and rational choice is the usage of undercover means.

This old material has some importance when analyzing the behaviour of former west german agencies. First, because operations of various types were conducted on west german soil, particularly in West Berlin, and also, there is an interesting data pile handling West Germans  ( ~ 2 million ), and there was, of course, the need to outbolshevik the bolsheviks in retaliation or whatever. While the shooting of refugees at the iron curtain had some legal consequences the slow executions of GDR and FRG nationals produced not even the glimpse of a ( penal law ) consequence, despite the fact that getting shot at the border is more pleasant than to be driven into suicide. One of the first things you learn as a law student in West Germany is that driving someone into suicide is legal....an interesting construction. Of course it is not legal, but very hard to prove. So, if you read the directive 1/76 you may get an explanation for mysterious professional failures, the notorious tendency of officials or others to define your personality as obscure, your character as problematic, your sex life as ridiculous and so on.

No need to mention that Amnesty International noticed the worlwide increase of psychological torture in the past decades. The UN anti-torture convention is a mysterious phenomenon: It is barely enforced. In a society that calls itself obliged to respect the rule of the law, of course, secrecy is THE priority. Also, the courts tend to be more objective than in a communist dictatorship – at least, they were. The press used to be dangerous too, but this also is rapidly declining. Information about conspirative and illegal maneuvers tends  to be rather outdated nowadays. Example: You can read that some politicos now demand a centralized database on terrorism. No need to mention that this existed for decades already. 

These old Stasi files are not historical material at all, that is. Today the technology used is far more sophisticated – one of the most important differences. Still, it is sort of coincidental who gets targeted. Lawyers tend to be defined as a risk to public security, as I could witness. Legal activities, too, like publishing material on, say, constitutional law. Critizing your great leader may be more dangerous than you think. Analyzing plots may be a particular risk because the plotters may watch you....

No need to mention that operation plans encountered in this context involve the systematic intimidation of the target, among other measures like the organized sabotage of professional activities, social networks, family ties and so on. Not surprisingly it resembles the mindsets of typical weirdos quite a bit. Paranoids love to scare others....A lot of cases in GDR got closed because the target committed suicide.

In the end the security system used was one of the major reasons why the state to be protected by it vanished. This is why I regard the notorious usage of bolshevik police state methods and their drastic expansion over the past decades as counterproductive for the preservation of the system that pays for this. People that drive others into suicide do have a self-destructive character, seemingly. They dis-organize themselves in the end.

The technique of organized sabotage is functioning even better in more or less darwinist environments like success- and competition oriented capitalist states, as I got told long ago. The slightly crampy fun-and-happiness-society under continous stress excludes and stigmatizes any malfunctioning element almost automatically. Also there is some tendency to create Jew-surrogates while the real ones are absent....

In this scenario psychological warfare against civilians is system-typical. Targets are getting continously scared, harassed, sabotaged and confused – until a psychiatrist can define them as paranoid. And introduce therapeutical measures that are not always intended to be healthy...

Because terrorism is system-typical and tolerated by elites, the typically a bit paranoid looking behavioural patterns get adopted by the masses – they copy them like the tie their idol just used or the mannerisms displayed.

Mobbing in public companies ( or private ) for example is quite similar to MfS obstruction techniques. Business practices typically involve death or annihilation threats – even in minor cases. Abuse is widely tolerated and regarded as a minor offense. Many times the trial sessions in rape cases are worse than the actual deed.

Slaughter is a typical part of the daily TV program, as well as the mobgang behaviour of schoolkids leading to a military builtup in schools. The slaughter on TV increased dramatically. The movies and related material produced in the seventies were spiced with small amounts of ketchup, in Hitchcock´s Psycho there is one drastic scene ( which makes it particularly horrible ), but in Heat there is some real heavy stuff going on, right ? Taxi Driver looks like a mild comedy in comparison. If you spend an evening in front of your TV set you may encounter some several hundreds of slaughtered individuals, if you zap a bit around.

Too bad that the TV set did not only replace cool old stuff like public executions but also dear old ma reading goodnight stories. Instead of some fairy tale kids now get – loneliness and the Texas Chainsaw Massacre. The socializing effect of this can be studied at schools, where they – slaughter each other in cases. Schools are now battlefields run using prison surveillance techniques.

In the end you reach the dog, which at times resembles the character of a malconditioned owner and acts like a TV-brainwashed fighting cell that gets too confused by this abnormal dictatorship -–and starts to attack pedestrians without a reason, leading to a legislation that prohibits the usage of certain races without protective measures that resemble a straightjacket.

Wie der Herr sos Gescherr ( The character of the landlord shapes the character of the servants...).

Emergency status and martial law are a perfect device to quell down dissent. Terrorism   – among other phenomena – has always been and still is a well – tuned device to stigmatize any form of opposition and therefore was discreetly supported continously. If the war on drugs was designed to keep the drug money flowing ( into oceans of launderes monies ) the war on terror could be defined as a means to keep the terror money flowing - not to mention its effect on afghan opium poppy production.

Quite logically a broad variety of former terrorists started to enter the governmental sphere. Arafat for example. One or the other israeli leader, to be a bit neutral, is said to have bombed the British out of Palestine. I do not remember who was it....who ? Here, right around the corner, there was a former RAF lawyer acting as police chief. The result was a pompous show-off, Kamikaze-style law enforcement actions....and so on. In Berlin, subway ticket controllers started to adopt the behaviour of GDR border guards. Police developed Kamikaze-threat techniques. You think this is an irony ? No, not at all. War on the law....

The golden age of terrorism corresponds with a continous decline of legal standards, as well as a continous increase of violence in general: The deterioration spiral.  For decades we faced a security policy that is a worthless waste of taxpayer´s money as well as destructive. A side effect is the step-by-step abolition of the rule of the law. And – this is not a phenomenon encountered in exceptional locations but almost everywhere.

In the sixties it was almost impossible to get a warrant to, for example, wiretap telephones. Because of these terrorists and a sharp increase of criminal offenses in general it was argued this measure had to be legalised and introduced into regular criminal procedures. Some years later it was found that this measure was inefficient. Demands for more efficient methods grew louder, and then, for example, it was suddenly legal to record conversations in public. Of course: This all was found too inefficient later. Then secret-service-surveillance techniques were introduced, it became legal to wiretap living rooms, business locations. That also was found inefficient, and now the torture lobby is very active to promote its interests. Torture itself is – top priority – a means to break resistance rather than anything and a means to intimidate dissenters in general. A terror device, that is. In the Fadlallah case, torture would have been quite useless to stop the plot. A typical device also for times of crisis, when a power structure becomes threatened – like the monopoly of the Catholic church in the late middle ages, when the Inquisition was on the run.  Still, the Inquisition granted the right to justify yourself, or at least the option of a declaration of withdrawal from false beliefs ( like the belief that the earth is not flat like a plate ) ....and today ?

Every step of legal deterioration was justified by the lack of efficency of the measure that was just introduced a few years earlier. The oceans of drug & terror money grew larger and larger....

A suspicious ping-pong game. Ping – the government-sponsored terrorist or other types of criminals and their vile acts, pong – the legal apparatus´ response to it.....while it can be assumed that terrorist acts on demand were committed exactly in the moment new security measures were to be introduced, and opponents to that to be labeled supporters of anarchy and terrorism. This has functioned quite well.

There is not much of the rule of the law left. Currently, the torture lobby is pressing hard to legalize its widespread activities – to cut the roots of the legal regime off, to be a bit unfriendly. Still, it has to be remembered, the Inquisition could always count on an applauding audience while witches were burnt. What a movie....And, oh, ah, these highly amusing sex acts in shady prison cells....these tasty confessions of having committed these dirty but delicious acts with the devil ( strangely resembling the subconscious fantasies of the torturers)....these naked screaming red-haired witches....mmmmmmh. We the people wants action. The harder these ........get it, the better.

While the deterioration spiral was spriralling itself downwards the criminal statistics grew worse, and worse, and worse. When incarceration rates reached a historical peak in the  mid-nineties the trend temporarily ended. But it can be argued that there is another trend that distorts the crime rate statistics – the trend to not call the police any more and bother it and rely on the donation of protection money and private security forces. Terror got worse, and worse.

As a CNN or BBC watcher you can consume a phenomenon called the daily suicide bomber, or the daily slaughter. In the seventies there were rather singular individuals that got targeted, small groups maybe, in the eighties mass bombings got introduced, then entire buildings got blown off, simultaneous mass bombings started, and this trend culminated in the demolition of WTC I, II, VII and so on. Maybe the boring image of a hole in the WTC buildings after the fires disappeared would have been too boring to achieve the desired mass-psychological effect. You can view this event from different perspectives. The evidence collected after 9-11 is of course much more objective and true as the evidence presented to justify the second Iraq war....mass destruction sells, as a political creator put it. Vaguely I now remember the media hype caused by the publication of Adolf Hitler´s diaries. The author, Kujau, would have been the perfect psywar and intelligence specialist. Not to forget: He was quite sophisticated. No one noticed that the diaries were completely fictitious. Hitler´s handwriting was almost perfectly copied. He sold them for almost 10 million Marks ( ~ approx. 5 million US                   Dollars ).

Also, law enforcement in this context became increasingly suspicious. It seemingly became convenient to let something happen, or arrange it, to afterwards cry out loudly that security laws are not efficient enough and have to be tightened. It was quite obvious in numerous cases that the antiterror-apparatus was not wanted to function. Also, there is an astonishing number of ( former ) government agents or former army soldiers spotted too close to the terror scenario. Bin Ladin is a former US government operative. Timothy McVeigh was an Iraq war veteran. The Anthrax attacks of 2001 got conducted with US military Anthrax. The sniper: An army asset. Not surprisingly, no one was found to play the role of the terrorist in the biowarfare case. Who produced the "Allah is great" papers in the Anthrax letters ? There is a large variety of case material of this type.

Then we even faced a former streetfighter and RAF affiliate that beat up police in the position of german secretary of state, and one of his RAF colleagues as police chief. The results ?

Guess. What can be expected ?

The ex-police chief ( among others ) tried to "calm down" the german public by stating that Germany is a safe haven for      Al - something. Safe havens for these are astonishingly located where the largest CIA outposts are, like Germany, or Pakistan, or Afghanistan. At that time  ( 2001-2002 ) we were confronted with a theory that the 9-11 master plan was created by an egyptian student ( ! ) in Hamburg functioning as a sleeper cell. Our top police Rambo posed on TV – with Ashcroft -  and declared he will stop any further attempt to start acts like this on german soil. This was a myth, anyway. Read the 9-11 official report. But the Atta mystery served to justify the desired load of massively unconstitional acts that followed. Personally I still find the behaviour of a broad variety of "security experts" after 9-11 quite mysterious. On air they showed a strange form of tranquility, some were a bit euphorized, and the emotional display was highly ambiguous. There was a sometimes incredibly bold behaviour of  law enforcement personnel, a, say, tendency to demonstrate that legal barriers had fallen and that they now, thanks to whoever, could act as they wanted ( bad, bad times for lawyers, journalists, demonstrators, activists, human rights groups, government critics in general, and so on... ). It would normally not be expected that in times of real crisis a behaviour like this is displayed. Her, her – we can do what we want now !  Sorry, folks: In a real, not a virtual war, a bold demonstration of " we can do what we want now, her, her " combined with reckless arrogance and pimp-style behaviour cannot be expected.

Also, it is very interesting that some security experts are particularly interested in those people that are interested in the 9-11 event ( bad for tourists that got to the locations that suddenly become ter – rourists or something ). The overall image our protectors displayed on TV is a bit too Strangelovian, to put it mildly. It starts to get difficult to support this all by paying taxes. Almost five years after the 9-11-plot we are waiting for properly investigated results. No one got convicted so far. There are numerous people that got imprisoned, but, if the question is allowed, who are they ? A large number got released already or extradited or fined for minor offenses like credit card fraud. The side effect: No one is really concerned about incarceration without a court order. Just to quote one example. To sum it up: Al-something is located in a safe haven, to quote a handful of security folks, they are granted constitutional rights ( opposed to a variety of other subversives that are not granted this privilege ), there are numerous statements of security folks related to a lack of personnel, or interest ( you can quote a great leader in this context ), and legal results are poor if existent at all. Terrorist acts have multiplied since 2001.
Watch the daily terror show and count them....

While all this happened, police developed Kamikaze threats as a measure to discipline unwanted individuals. And so on. And, torture is getting legalized....as a central feature in the demolition process.

No need to mention that the measures taken after 9-11 are in a way comparable with those after 1933 in Germany. A continous state of emergency and alert. Concentration camps with a total of up to 10 000 inmates, torture, mass surveillance, a huge increase of agents to spy out every corner, and a broad variety of legal standards that got partially legally abandoned or simply systematically ignored – a stalinist strategy ( imposing the normative power of facts and legalize the results later – a method that functioned quite well in order to disrupt and ruin the rule of the law, which is now reduced to a barely visible minimum ).

Take a look at the measures taken after 9-11: Do they serve to calm down a traumatized patient, the people that is, or do they cause even further panic ? Think. The alert system calms down nobody, of course, and especially in the case of frequent false alarms or exaggerated threat scenarios. The apparent inability to go and get a few thousand not too well organized folks hiding out in afghan caves, or the displayed lack of motivation to do so ( you can quote one or the other authority to prove  that ), or the apparent inefficiency  in the case of the Anthrax-investigations  could even cause mass regression – the result of a deadly, continous threat that is not being removed or credibly counteracted. Dictatorial measures can then be expected as the long-awaited relief, and love of the dictator – that, not surpringly, does not want to get criticized. What can be observed anyway is a sharp increase in the sales of sleeping pills, tranquilizers, and  the like.

Interestingly enough, 50 years of Cold War did not lead to a legal degeneration like the one encountered in the past, say, 10 years. Tens of thousands of nuclear bombs, millions of operatives worldwide....then came a bunch of alleged Arabs and – demolished an interesting amount.

Logically, we will be confronted with the long-known blabla that these and these security measures have failed and have to be replaced or optimized by further ( military ) means. Already the present security system resembles the logic of occupation regimes rather than anything else. This GDR style....define the GDR government as an occupational force to kill any dissent in a situation that is not stable at all....again, we will be confronted with further blabla that the security system has institutional deficiencies, the huge bureaucracies are not well – coordinated and managed– and that even larger and more repressive bureaucracies are the clue to solve the problems encountered – precisely what is happening right now. The fact that an abundance of spies are not really able to find anything leads to a further increase of the number of this type – presumably to end up in a virtual world where the investigator decides what he wants to see, but is not really able to perceive the most obvious. And so on...

The present threat secenario that is broadly discussed: Nuclear terrorism. Due to security experts ( government members ) it is going to happen – the only question that remains:    When ? Where ?

Then martial law is likely to be imposed officially. Unfortunately all these above mentioned security measures will be defined as useless. Probably the camp infrastructure is planned already, as well as there are lists of potential inmates.
 
Bye, bye, rule of the law.

An  optimistic outlook:  At present we still live in comparatively affluent times. But natural resources are not available forever....who will obtain the remaining rests of, say, oil ? Who will be able to have sufficient drinking water reserves ?  What will happen when the Gulf stream, that got reduced by 30 % over the past decades, disappears ? Scientists now compete. Who has the most plausible model available ? You may now choose whether this entire civilisation is put to an end by global warming or, alternatively, global cooling. A variety of scientists indicate that the disappearance of the Gulf stream will lead to an abrupt global cooling within up to 20 years, others find that sceanario unilikely to happen and predict that a rest of mankind will be able to survive in 2100 by settling down in Siberia. Or similar regions. A smaller number, mostly government or corporate - influenced, only predict drastic weather changes with far reaching consequences, like the impossibility of getting a house-insurance in certain regions - due to an increase in the number and intensity of hurricanes.

Anyway, most  scientists at least predict dramatic changes. Combined with other factors, like supply shortages or the
reduction of  agricultural lands it can be predicted that times will get a bit turbulent. It will be difficult to maintain the present economic structure as well as territorial integrity....

To give a glimpse of an overview: In, say, twenty years there could be some 10 billion people on earth, but comparatively less petrol, and much less drinking water. Much less forestry, much less agricultural space, and probably unpleasant weather in many regions. Also, it seems to be quite unlikely that the UN charter and all that will stop rigorous actions in times of war  that in this period could be fought to maintain the essential minimum of  energy and resource supplies.

So, one is forced to assume that at least an epoch is ending.