Violence across the Middle east

4 March 2013

Norman Pagett writes:

We watch in horror as the violence erupts across the Middle East, ethnic groups wracked by violence towards one another, in lands where tolerance had been normal for centuries.
So why now?
Syria is the current murderous focus, but why?
Few care to point out that 800,000 herders, farmers and their dependent families have lost their livelihoods in the countryside during last decade through extreme drought, and as a result have been forced to migrate to already-overcrowded cities. Syria’s drought is set to worsen over the next 20 years as climate change takes effect, making increased conflict inevitable as food supplies get tighter, and civil war makes it harder to get hold of.
In microcosm, they are reflecting future world events, as desperate people attempt to find sustenance, but instead find only armed resistance to their basic needs.
Syria’s neighbours face the same catastrophe as the region begins to dry out. Humanity has no option but to fight for its basic survival needs, and in doing so will use the dogma of religious forces, while those actually clinging on to power recognise that their lives depend on the brutal subjection of those seeking to depose them.
So the violence escalates to extremes.
If climate were not altering their food supplies, bellies would be full and farmers would be too busy tending their crops to arm themselves and demand regime change.
Demands are for political change, a refusal to accept that political control of whatever color cannot alter the damage wrought by overpopulation and energy depletion.
As new leaders are found lacking in any ability to put thing right, so they too are deposed by a mob getting ever more desperate in the face of a catastrophe which is growing in lockstep with the voices heard in denial of it
This scenario is not confined to the drylands of the middle east. Already the cornlands of the USA are following the same pattern. So far the farmers of the USA are not packing up and migrating as they did in the 30s, but as the land dries out, there will be no living to be had there.
Back in the 30s, the USA had around 200 million people; another migration of people seeking sustenance will find themselves competing for space with an extra 130 million. There is simply nowhere to move to.
Just as in the middle East, conflict is inevitable. As the cornlands of the USA dry out, and the mountain fed irrigation of California ceases to function, there won’t be enough food to go round
Then you will see the conflict which is destroying the Muslim nations writ large on home territory