Slowar (pronounced sloh-War’) is a new word that didn’t exist until this morning. Yet a review of the news, especially events in Europe and along the former US Border with Mexico, demand a new word so that we can maintain some last vestiges of mental acuity.
I’m not sure why, but my sleep cycle always seems to react poorly to changes in time. It’s something we have been chewing since last week. And now it looks as though the battle over “making up time” has broken out in the UK. Yes, the once-civilized country is looking at multiple time zones as an economic and social measure. But as we’ve warned, it is also a deeply controlling time. The “ownership of time” is a dangerous disease, and those with enough presumptuousness to lay claim to it are committing the worst of fallacies.
Not that Britain has gone completely mad; just partly. You see in headlines this morning how the German’s are ticked-off at David Cameron (UK PM) because he has the audacity to consider limiting immigration from EU block countries.
In case you have missed the memo, the deal is Islamic moderates to not-so-milds have been pouring into the (slow-witted) EU, and then flipping over to the UK which is one way to get a population in place to begin tearing the UK apart from the inside. Which is how this stuff works. As expected, lots of coverage on this ranging from Al Jazeera to Deutsche Welle.
There is not a word for this; only descriptions that sound warm, fuzzy, academic, and not terribly threatening.
Immigration is one of these, at least it used to be. However, since immigration has been turned into a moderate hot button, the overly supportive Libs are in-process of repackaging the world into simply “migration.”
Historians, as much as I read them, are good at capture of facts, but not connoisseurs of context.
You’ll often read how (short of a hot war) slow warfare…wars that take place over longer periods of time… are not seen as “wars” per se. These are packaged for the uncritical masses as merely migrations, expansions, immigrations, opening of trade roots, and all the rest of it.
To be sure, some slowars are hot: Take the Cold War, for example. This was the poster-child of Slow Wars (slowar). Yet we managed to accept “cold” as a better description than “slow” despite the evidence of the calendar which ran from the earliest misgivings of Churchill about Stalin until the Berlin Wall came down.
Along the war, that slowar flared a few times, such as in Hungary in 1956. But the problem is far from confined to historical academic traditions such as slow warfare of the Cold War type.
The Chinese are fine practitioners of the art of Slowar. It explains, in large part, why Russia never really was the opponent in Vietnam but China was. That’s because China has been expanding south, into the Vietnam region, slowly for centuries. The conquer by use of the Chinese merchant class.
Yet guns are the lest-often used tool of slowars., It’s often political power. We have seen this in the wresting of power for local control of school curriculums; Common Core, and all that. The process has all been part of a revolutionary slowar in American education, designed on the notion that a “standard” education is a good thing. Yet is there empirical proof of this?
The European Union has been waging a slowar with non-member states, one of which is Ukraine. And whether the AIDSA/HIV and Ebola outbreaks in Africa are entirely natural – not part of a larger slowar for Africa’s riches, may be missed by future historians, who don’t use words like slowar. They haven’t been conditioned to think importance of new words to describe innovative points of view.
Come to think of it, I can’t remember the last time I read a “new” word in a history book.
It’s not in military doctrine, yet, although we can see a logical progression to all wars once the central concept of slowar in understood. The conceptual framework of war ranges from the shortest of wars, such as Blitzkrieg, to the ultra-long slowar. There are side tracks along the way including guerilla war, low-intensity conflicts (LICs) and morel;. But the largest zoom-out is where slowar comes into focus.
An example of another slowar? The war to stamp out poverty in America. Slow? In 50-years there has been no statistical progress even after trillions of dollars.
As slow as the American public is to recognize long-term patterns, name them, and place them in widespread use, it’s interesting to see how close the concept came to taking hold in a 2010 theater production in Russia:
SEPTEMBER, 2-3, 2010. MOSCOW. THE SECOND SESSION OF THE INTERNATIONAL PROJECT “SLOWAR: DICTIONARY OF WAR”. THE PROJECT IS ORGANIZED THROUGH THE PARTNERSHIP OF THE “LETTERRA.ORG” PROJECT1 AND “SCHOOL OF DRAMATIC ART”2 THEATER, WITH THE PARTICIPATION OF THE NATIONAL CENTER FOR CONTEMPORARY ARTS (NCCA) AND AT THE INITIATIVE OF THE “LOGOS PUBLISHERS” (MOSCOW) AND “MERVE VERLAG” (BERLIN)3 THE ACTION IS SUPPORTED BY THE DELEGATION OF THE EUROPEAN UNION TO RUSSIA, GOETHE-INSTITUT (MOSCAU), INFORMATIONAL AGENCY “ROSBALT”, POLISH CULTURAL CENTER (MOSCOW). THIS TIME THE PROJECT FOCUSES ON EXITS – WAYS OUT OF WAR (SLOWAR-X).
The press release (yes, from four-years ago) notes in part
SLOWAR: THE DICTIONARY OF WAR” 2010 is organized by “Lettera.org” project in partnership with theater “School of Dramatic Art”. This Second Session of the project coincides with the 65th anniversary of the end of the Second World War.