Götterdämmerung

David P. Goldman, posting on his PJ Media: Spengler blog about the impact of perhaps as many as 14 million refugees in the Middle East:

Half of Syrians are displaced. Many of them will have nothing to go back to. When people have nothing to lose, they fight to the death and inflict horrors on others. That is what civilizational decline looks like in real time.

The Arab states are failed states, except for the few with enough hydrocarbons to subsidize every facet of economic life.

Syria is a ruin, along with large parts of Iraq. The lives of tens of millions of people were fragile before the fighting broke out (30% of Syrians lived on less than $1.60 a day), and now they are utterly ruined.

The hordes of combatants displace more people, and these join the hordes, in a snowball effect. That’s what drove the Thirty Years’ War of 1618-1648, and that’s what’s driving the war in the Levant.

War will end when the pool of prospective fighters has been exhausted.

Goldman is hyper-negative, but quite often correct in his gloomy predictions. Arab civilization covering North Africa and Asia Minor, after a long period of senescence, appears to be experiencing death throes. Very Spenglerian.