The Middle East War, known as 'na Akpe Kalla na Sela' in Common, or 'the Great War of the South', has been called the greatest tragedy in human history. What it lacked in the systematic extermination of whole peoples of the 20th century's great wars, it easily made up for in sheer devastation. Arguably, much more than the Global Collapse, the world of today has been shaped by this conflict. It took place over the space of a week in 2047.

The elderly today were children and young adults during the war, so there is still a living memory of the conflict, yet in some ways, Britons know more about the Second World War than they do about the Middle East War. In the New World Order, the elites are well-educated about this particular piece of history, but in a way that is rather slanted to cast the nascent New World Order in a flattering light. The pain of this conflict is very much alive even today, and the consequences are still with us.

As the Middle East War is so key to understanding the development of the New World Order, I will spend a little time summarising these events in this article. Volumes and volumes have been written about the War, and I would encourage the curious reader to go to these source materials for more information - Sheila Ellis's multi-volume chronicle, The All-Consuming Fire, is particularly recommended. I will focus on the basic details which will help establish context around what I want to say about the New World Order.

Pre-War Situation

The New World Order was founded in 2044 by a coterie of countries led by Globalist governments. The founding members were Cascadia (na Kaskétija), the Northern European Union (na Atenysyn na Hare Jurop), South China (na Huanan), Turkey (na Turkije) and Russia (na Rus). Common was declared the official language of the New World Order in 2045, but at that time, English was still very influential and it was not clear that the adoption of Common was going to 'stick'. As well, the anti-capitalist wing of the Globalist movement had not yet been purged across the New World Order, and many in this faction were interested in Esperanto as an alternative to Common.

The early Globalist elites were not the self-promoting, pleasure-seeking worldly sophisticates of today. They were True Believers fresh off of the brutal violence, economic catastrophe and severe political instability of the Global Collapse. They were highly idealistic and far from secure in their power. This sense of belief in Globalism as a higher cause does much to explain why the early NWO elites were willing to make sacrifices to create a truly global society that are hard for us to imagine their descendents enduring today.

The early Globalists truly thought they were saving the world. Watching the world dissolve into chaos as global warming accelerated, food and water supplies were devastated and communities ill-equipped to cope with more and more extreme weather were repeatedly hammered with natural disasters, it is easy to imagine why they thought the world needed saving. They were convinced that their ideology was the key to the world's salvation - by eliminating national sovereignties and uniting the world under their rule, they would suppress the chaos, tame the markets, solve the Tragedy of the Commons that was tearing apart the global environment, and in general usher back in the Globalist golden age that they thought existed before crazed nationalists killed the golden goose and plunged the planet into the abyss.They were at once nostalgic for the old post-Second World War global order and contemptuous of democracy and the rights of the individual and those of nations and peoples to self-determination.

At that time, however, it was far from certain that the Order would hold together, or if it did, that it would be ascendant over the forces arrayed against it.

Out of these countries, one, Turkey, was regarded to be in the region affected by the war, and another, Russia, was directly adjacent.

Close to the War, the world was arguably just beginning to recover from the Global Collapse. The global economy actually experienced modest growth in the few years before the War, although not much, obviously, weighed against the severe contraction prior. Lawless or 'fallen' areas started to be connected to the world again and brought under the control of sophisticated new states. Things seemed to be looking up in some ways, despite the accelerating crisis of global warming, but at least global economic contraction and limited availability of cheap and convenient fossil fuels had reduced greenhouse gas emissions significantly.

Just prior to the formation of the New World Order, Cascadia had defeated the Christian Republic ofTexas in what was known after as the Texas War. That war had involved a limited nuclear exchange that destroyed Sacramento, Austin and Dallas-Fort Worth. The heart of Cascadia in Vancouver-Seattle and the then-important city of San Francisco were only spared the same fate by a missile defence system that performed unexpectedly well, so Cascadia had just had a brush with death. Texas was triggered to attack Cascadia by Cascadia's recent annexation of New Mexico and by a general determination to stop Globalism. With Texas's defeat, Cascadia had a highly mobilised military and was engaged in a vicious occupation of a deeply hostile Texas. The last committed and organised opposition to the spread of Globalism in North America, other than Quebec, lay in ruins.

The Middle East War involved every country from Israel in the west to India in the east. Neighbouring countries such as Turkey, Egypt, the Central Asian countries, Bangladesh and Burma, experienced very severe effects as well.

Southern and southwest Asia were very severely impacted by global warming, which explains much about why the region was such a powder keg ready to blow. Massive droughts had become routine, and malnutrition was endemic across the region. Heightened average temperatures were reducing yields for those crops that did manage to grow. More stable areas such as Israel, Iran and India, were employing technology, especially biotechnology such as genetically modified crops, to stave off food insecurity, but water was an ever-present concern. In the east, the substantial disappearance of the Himalayan glaciers was severely reducing water flows in the Indus river system on which northwestern India and Pakistan vitally depended, and tensions daily threatened to escalate into war.

At this point, populations and governments throughout the region were severely distressed, with enormous refugee populations from conflicts, terrorism and sheer unworkability of the land causing refugees to flee across borders and into cities where support structures were already stressed past the breaking point. The Global Collapse had been devastating everywhere, but almost nowhere more so than western and southern Asia.

Here is a short description of the status of each major player in the area immediately prior to the war, going roughly west to east.

1. Israel

On the eve of the war, democracy in Israel had been 'temporarily' suspended for over a decade, and the country was ruled by a coalition of religious and conservative parties. Life in the West Bank and Gaza Strip, areas conquered by Israel in the 20th century and inhabited by an Arab majority but never formally annexed, had become nearly impossible, with starvation and disease rampant. Parts of the ruling faction wanted to finally evict these populations and formally annex the territory as part of an ideology of religious and ethnic entitlement to the land, but more moderate forces still prevailed and the final step was not yet taken.

At this point Israel was still relatively wealthy for the region, although its economy had shrunk during the Collapse. It was technologically extremely proficient, enjoyed stockpiles of strategic resources, and at this point was a declared nuclear weapons power.

Immediately prior to the Middle East War, the religious extremists got the decisive upper hand and put in place a plan to resolve the occupation for once and for all.

2. Turkey

Turkey had been a backsliding democracy with a moderate Islamic government before the Collapse. During the disorder of the Collapse, a military coup occurred, leading to the permanent suspension of democracy, and within the military, eventually a Globalist faction came to dominate. By the War, Turkey was a founding member of the New World Order, but comparatively reluctant in terms of social integration across the Order, and probably the most nationalistic of the States.

3. Jordan, Syria and Iraq

These countries nominally had central governments, but had fallen back into perpetual civil war, rampant criminality, and extremist terrorism. These were failed states unable to provide the necessities of life for their people. They were a source of chaos in the region but mostly unable to act with any agency.

4. Caliphate of Arabia

During the Global Collapse, under the al Saud family (Arabia was formerly known as Saudi Arabia, after their ruling family), with the oil reserves undeniably depleting and the disintegration of the United States removing their security guarantee and simultaneously any limits on their actions, the regime used its considerable remaining wealth and access to technology and resources to quickly build up both the beginnings of a civilian nuclear program and nuclear weapons.

By the time the al Saud regime was overthrown by Wahhabi radicals in the late 2030s, Saudi Arabia was a nuclear weapons state. Its oil reserves were also substantially depleted, as was the fossil aquifer that the country depended on for most of its water. The inability of the al Saud regime to maintain any semblance of the accustomed standard of living of its people under these conditions is what brought the radicals to power in the first place.

In order to cover for their own inability to address these pressing problems, the radicals went to greater and greater extremes, saying that Arabia's suffering was due to the people's straying from the true path of Islam, and enacting more and more extreme and cruel controls on the population in the theory that it would bring back God's grace on Arabia. This extremist government was in full control of Arabia's nuclear arsenal.

5. Republic of Iran

Prior to the Global Collapse, Iran operated under a hybrid Shia Islamic theocratic and democratic system of government.  Iran had been labouring under embargo for decades, a situation to which modern Britons can definitely relate. The embargo was due to Iran's extreme provocation and defiance of the United States, stemming from the Islamic Revolution that replaced a US client regime with the hybrid theocratic state, and ongoing misbehaviours and opposition to US and Western interests, There was a lot of fatigue with corrupt clerics amongst the general population, but the regime had a very firm grip on power.

In 2020, the first President Trump attacked Iran to stop what the US said were provocations and threats against shipping in the Straits of Hormuz, as well as to stop Iran from acquiring nuclear weapons (that the Trump regime had brought Iran closer to obtaining in the first place). They also had the stated desire to bring about regime change. The impact was to unite Iranians around their little-loved government to repel the invaders. Iran's victory in the Iran War was a major contributor to triggering the Global Collapse, although it is not completely clear if the incipient Global Collapse didn't also trigger Iran's victory in the Iran War.

Iran lived through the Global Collapse like everyone else, although perhaps coped better due to decades of experience with isolation and privation already, and had the usual problems with food and water insecurity and extreme weather due to global warming that everyone else did. Without the unifying force of the American invasion or the threat of the continued existence of a unified United States, the Iranian regime fell to democratic forces, a considerable irony. The influence of religion in Iran rapidly diminished.

Iran was a technologically proficient country, and with the hope sparked by the new democratic government and the return of many of the educated Iranian diaspora, they pulled together and managed to successfully implement some technological, particularly biotechnological, solutions to help offset some of the impacts of global warming on their food and water supplies. They still had oil reserves and used them prodigiously, contributing to the very problem they were fighting to mitigate.

In the latter part of the period leading up to the War, Iranians started to lose patience with what was seen as a lack of results on the part of the often fractious democratic government and they elected a Globalist-aligned government with a solid majority. This Globalist regime started to erode democracy and align with other Globalist-ruled countries like Russia, Turkey and Cascadia. Iran was not a member of the New World Order, but widely expected/feared to join it in short order, and was an open NWO ally.

As a supreme irony, without the pressure of American power, but despite being surrounded by nuclear powers, Iran never developed nuclear weapons. They had an active nuclear program, but it never came to fruition in time. Iran was helpless to deter or respond to a nuclear attack.

6. Caliphate of Pakistan

In 2025, Pakistan's democracy fell for the last time, and Pakistan became a military dictatorship without the pretence of an eventual return to democracy. The country was in desperate straits, with its growing population and dwindling flow in the Indus river system coming off the Himalayas. The country was riven with insurgency and barely under the control of its military government. Finally, an Islamist faction infiltrated the military sufficiently to overthrow the generals and declare an Islamic Caliphate of Pakistan.

Pakistan remained a nuclear weapons power. Not only were their traditionally tense relations with India inflamed to a white heat by this time due to a widening ideological gap and especially due to bitter disputes over land and dwindling water supplies, but also Pakistan, under the Sunni islamist regime of the Caliphate, developed poisonous relations with its Shia neighbour to the west, Iran. The ascendency of godless Globalists in Iran aligned with Globalists in North India inflamed Pakistan's paranoia and hostility towards Iran.

7. North and South India

India was severely distressed by the Global Collapse and climate change like everyone else, but was one of the better-off countries in the region, with severe water shortages only over regions rather than the whole country, and strong technological prowess to help mitigate some of the impacts.

Democracy did survive up to this point, but India split into North India, centred in New Delhi, and South India, centred in Chennai, during the Global Collapse. India was recovering from the Global Collapse at this point, and animosity over the split and/or desire to reconcile was an important force on both sides of the border. North India maintained much more of the animosity towards Pakistan than South India, who tried to stay out of the conflict. North India was sympathetic to the Globalists and aligned with Iran, and South India was more Hindu nationalist.

Satellite Surveillance and GPS

A key fact to understand is that there had been no space launches since 2028, and many, many satellites were out of service. The US military had shut off the Global Positioning System to civilian access during the Collapse, and the means to access it even for military purposes was lost to the successor states - and it would not have worked even if it could be accessed due to the age of its satellites. The other, competing navigation satellite arrays were out of service or severely degraded as well.

So during the War, none of the sides had access to satellite reconnaissance to detect things like missile launches and had to make snap decisions with much less reliable information. None of the sides had access to simple, high-precision location services and had to fall back on older technologies.

The War

The actual conflict of the Middle East War was surprisingly short. It has been the effort to control the aftermath that has arguably dragged on even to the present day. The War basically consisted of a series of nuclear exchanges that took place over less than a week, killed hundreds of millions of people initially and in the first few weeks, months and years, and arguably led to billions of deaths in excess mortality over subsequent years, although this is hard to separate out from the background noise of the other significant sources of excess mortality already at play. It is easily the worst catastrophe ever experienced by humanity.

In retrospect, the war started on Sunday, 18 Aug 2047 when Israel, under the final ascendancy of Jewish religious extremists, bulldozed the Dome of the Rock, ostensibly to make way for the Third Temple. This move ignited a furious response from the local Arab population, as the Israeli government seems to have anticipated and desired, and the Israeli response was to begin a concerted program to clear Arabs out of the West Bank by any means necessary. Israel responded to missile attacks from Gaza with more powerful missile attacks in return, but maintained its focus on the West Bank.

In response, the Caliph of Arabia, possibly believing that God would protect Arabia from any Israeli counterstrike, or believing he could knock out Israel with a first strike, fired about half of Arabia's nuclear arsenal at every major Israeli population centre other than Jerusalem. Israel had that same surprisingly effective missile defence system as Cascadia and avoided being reduced entirely to ash, but Tel Aviv and Haifa were hit by kiloton-level nuclear missiles that managed to get through.

Israel was grievously wounded, but its ability to strike back was very much intact. Riyadh, Medina and Mecca were reduced to radioactive ash, as was virtually every major city and military asset, But the counterstrike did not manage to eliminate the Arabian high command or the last of their nuclear arsenal.

Recognising that Arabia was destroyed, but maintaining the delusion that there might be something to rebuild, the Arabians decided to use some of the last of their nuclear arsenal to try another attack on Israel,  but most of it to strike at Globalist Shia rival Iran. Iran was helpless against a nuclear strike, and a number of major Iranian cities including Tehran were hit with kiloton-level warheads. Israel's remaining missile defences were effective at blocking the last Arabian strike.

It took a day or two for the full realisation of what had happened to disseminate to the outside world, given the poor state of information and surveillance at the time. In that time, the religious Pakistani government made a fateful decision: they would pile on and fire a barrage of tactical nuclear missiles at their Iranian rival, particularly striking military sites, in order to knock them out completely and not have to worry about Indian-allied Iran at their backs while they faced India.

North India detected the missile launches from suspected and known nuclear sites in Pakistan through areal surveillance and had to make a snap decision. They interpreted the launch as likely being directed at India, so they gave the order for a full scale nuclear strike and invasion of Pakistan.This strike wiped out Pakistan as a country in a matter of minutes and hours, but also failed to destroy the Pakistani missile command or all the missile sites and nuclear-armed aircraft. The Pakistanis launched their remaining weapons at North India, wiping out major cities and military installations across the country. They spared South India, perhaps because they were more concerned about completely eliminating the more dangerous rival.

The Aftermath

That was basically it. In the space of a week, some experts put the death toll from the initial strikes in the low hundreds of millions, and millions more started rapidly dying from injuries, radiation, disease caused by the total lack of sanitation, lack of even basic medical care, starvation and thirst. It is a myth that communal violence and crime were a major causes of mortality in the early aftermath - according to Ellis, communities often pulled together and there were many heroic and selfless acts, but it is undeniable that the complete civic collapse did create openings for numerous bad actors, whose actions did cause a lot of deaths directly and indirectly as time went on.

The prodigious amount of smoke from burning cities thrown into the atmosphere cooled the planet for several years, creating world-wide famines, especially given that most areas of the planet were growing crops specifically bred and engineered for heat tolerance in response to global warming. The radioactive fallout travelled far and wide, causing a severe health emergency for untold millions and billions of people inside and outside the directly affected areas. The New World Order State of Turkey was flooded with refugees and severely impacted by these effects. Turkey was lucky they did not receive a direct nuclear attack, as some scholars allege that the Arabians were considering it as part of their final strike.

South India faced a similar situation, with refugees and radioactive fallout stretching it to the breaking point, but was lucky that Pakistan had not nuked it, too.

Every government in this area except Turkey and South India completely collapsed and there was no civic order. The three Globalist governments in the area, or their remnants, begged the New World Order for help.

The New World Order Intervention

The New World Order decided to send a massive commitment of troops to the region to establish order, deliver humanitarian aid, and help their Globalist friends Iran and North India and NWO State Turkey.

This was an incredibly controversial decision. Those troops were placed absolutely in harm's way, and most developed the same kinds of health problems as later bedevilled the people native to the region who had avoided the initial nuclear annihilation. The input of resources was considerable. But the rulers of the Order felt that in order to demonstrate the sole global legitimacy of the Order, they had no choice but to respond to the humanitarian crisis and establish control over the area.

In order to make it worth their while, the Order wound up helping themselves to the area's resources, carving it up into Protectorates, and ruling it arbitrarily.

This intervention is essentially still going on today. It led to the formation of the New World Army, originally just a common command structure to coordinate State armies, to Turkey moving away from residual nationalism and towards greater integration within the Order, to greater integration within the Order in general, and to Russia falling out of the Order and then being drawn back in through a particularly underhanded and bloody covert operation in cooperation with Russian globalists that led to much of the former Russian elite being exiled to the blasted lands of South Asia.

As this was happening, more and more states fell under the sway of the New World Order, including the desperate South India, and Canada, New York and Chicago, who fell like dominoes out of fear of each other and of Cascadia.

The Order's signature commitment to free movement of populations, as well as the potential for military and economic aid, was a major draw for poorer states, and the Order started moving into more areas of the world with no effective state control and establishing Protectorates. They also engaged in covert tactics to bring Globalist governments to power, and even in direct conquest.

One notable response to the War was moving distressed populations en masse to areas under Order control where the Order was trying to actually take advantage of opportunities created by climate change, like Siberia and northern North America, and at the same time forcibly moving rebellious populations into harm's way in some of the most hostile areas of the planet. Over the space of about a decade, millions of Texans were forcibly moved to Iran and replaced with Iranians, for example. Transportation of entire communities considered to have provided shelter to insurgents became a routine punishment for insurrections by bands of trols.

The War also noticeably accelerated the adoption of Common. The New World Army troops were forced to learn Common, and the many of the military leaders from disparate countries were old Globalist revolutionaries who spoke the language and found it convenient as a lingua franca. English could have served just as well at that time, but these were ideologues, and other than the Cascadians, they had a visceral aversion to English as a reminder of the hated American hegemony and its criminal cowardice and weakness that precipitated the Global Collapse. The dialect that developed in the military was taken around the world by returning troops, who then tended to support the conversion of education systems back home over to teaching in Common.

The Middle East War made the New World Order what it is today. Who knows how the Order would have developed or whether it even would have held together without the War. It accelerated the NWO policy of population movement and mixing - whole populations undoubtedly would have continued to move and mix without the Order, but with it, the process was accelerated and was actively abetted, and at the same time, the nativist reaction to create 'pure' nation states was forcibly suppressed. Even in far-away Britain, the War definitively shaped the world we know today.

Projection of Power

One impact of the War was to illustrate that the New World Order had become the only entity on earth with the will or the means to project power on a global level.

The Order mainly fought local forces resisting its control. Neighbouring countries were active in the region, both in providing humanitarian aid within their limited abilities, supporting their allies and working against their enemies in terms of the forces at work in the affected territories, and trying to take advantage of the situation themselves by annexing territory. The New World Order worked with and fought against these local players, with the ultimate aim of bringing all countries under its control.

There were many neutral or anti-Globalist states at the time, including Britain. Some countries tried to provide some humanitarian aid, or sway outcomes in the region, but mostly the Order's global rivals were unable to come together and too caught up in their own problems to get involved in the crisis in southern Asia. Some may have thought that the intervention would weaken the NWO and ultimately work out to their advantage. It appears this assumption was mistaken.

Addendum: Summary of Local Impacts

1. Arabia: Arabia was obliterated. Out of a pre-war population of nearly 50 million, the present population is believed to be well under 0.5 million, mostly nomadic. Millions of refugees fled to put-upon Egypt, chaotic Jordan and Iraq, and unwelcoming and distressed Arabian Peninsula neighbours, but the rates of survival even of those who managed to flee were poor. Most are believed to have died directly in the nuclear strikes and from a total absence of the necessities of life following. The New World Order was focused on helping its friends Iran and North India and on punishing its foe, Pakistan. Its only interest in Arabia was in ensuring weapons were secured. Their limited resources went elsewhere, and while some meagre aid came, mostly Arabia was left to die. Today na Arapwek is a loosely-governed NWO Protectorate.
2. Jordan, Syria and Iraq: These areas that were previously generating refugees were suddenly flooded with refugees from Arabia and Iran. The NWO provided limited and insufficient humanitarian aid, mainly with the intention of limiting the burden on Turkey. This area has recovered, but not to the extent that it can function as a State. Collectively, they form the Protectorate of na Pasra, named after the capital of Basra.
3. Iran: Iran was devastated, but also received a lot of help from the New World Order. Millions of surviving Iranians were resettled to safer and more productive areas of the world. Iran was also a popular destination for populations exiled as a punishment - there is to this day a large Texan minority in the modern State of na Iran.
4. Pakistan: Pakistan was destroyed, much more so than Iran and North India, but not to the extent of Arabia. Roughly 80% of the population of over 265 million died in the first year. The New World Order was much more focused on control than it was on humanitarian aid in this area, and Pakistan also took a much harder drubbing from nuclear strikes than its neighbours. Millions of Pakistanis were resettled to other parts of the world. The modern Protectorate of na Pakistan is a shadow of its former self.
5. North India: North India was a major focus of NWO aid, and like with Iran, the NWO settled millions of Indians in other, more hospitable parts of the world. Over half of the pre-war population still died in the first year after the War. North India became a Protectorate, and several decades later recovered to the point of becoming the State of na Hare Paryt.
6. South India: South India was spared nuclear strikes but still overwhelmed with the humanitarian crisis, with its resources already strained to breaking. It became close to the New World Order and the Order soon subverted it and brought local Globalists to power with the promise of aid and resettlement. Five years after the War, South India was the NWO State of na Sela Paryt.
7. Israel: Other than the fact that Israel was obviously grievously wounded, not too much is known about subsequent events in this highly secretive country. They were able to quickly rebuff a New World Order attempt to take control, and given their continued possession of nuclear weapons and the nuclear horror everyone was already witnessing, the Order had no appetite to press the issue. Egypt had moved in to Gaza, and was able to hold on to it, eventually becoming part of the New World Order state of na Masyr. Israel had prodigious stockpiles of strategic resources and seemed amply able to survive. They started building a wall around the country, which the Order responded to by matching it on the other side. Israel thus had the honour of being the first Free State to be embargoed by the NWO.

Another important impact is that Muslims are no longer able to undertake the Hajj, the required once-a-lifetime pilgrimage to Mecca, because it is still radioactive, and because the Order does not allow anyone anywhere near Mecca. To this day, restoration of the Kaaba is a rallying cry for Islamic opponents of the New World Order.