Extracts from Constant Conflict /RALPH PETERS(4)

Constant Conflict
RALPH PETERS

the future will be the conflict between information masters and information victims.
They no longer understand the world, and their fear is volatile.
They ache to return to a golden age & create a paradise of their own restrictive design.


today, the challenge lies in managing information.
Those of us who can sort, digest, synthesize, and apply relevant knowledge soar--professionally, financially, politically, militarily, and socially.

Army War College:
"All of you pathetic slaves need to be killed!!!"
« on: May 09, 2010, 11:19:34 AM »



When we speak of a global information revolution, the effect of video images is more immediate and intense than that of computers.
Image trumps text in the mass psyche, and computers remain a textual outgrowth, demanding high-order skills: computers demarcate the domain of the privileged. We use technology to expand our wealth, power, and opportunities. The rest get high on pop culture.
If religion is the opium of the people, video is their crack cocaine.
When we and they collide, they shock us with violence, but, statistically, we win.

As more and more human beings are overwhelmed by information, or dispossessed by the effects of information-based technologies, there will be more violence. Information victims will often see no other resort.
As work becomes more cerebral, those who fail to find a place will respond by rejecting reason.
We will see countries and continents divide between rich and poor in a reversal of 20th-century economic trends.
Developing countries will not be able to depend on physical production industries, because there will always be another country willing to work cheaper. The have-nots will hate and strive to attack the haves.

And we in the United States will continue to be perceived as the ultimate haves. States will struggle for advantage or revenge as their societies boil.
Beyond traditional crime, terrorism will be the most common form of violence, but transnational criminality, civil strife, secessions, border conflicts, and conventional wars will continue to plague the world, albeit with the "lesser" conflicts statistically dominant.
In defense of its interests, its citizens, its allies, or its clients, the United States will be required to intervene in some of these contests.
We will win militarily whenever we have the guts for it.

to be CONTD.(10 JULY 2011 SUNDAY.)gut5