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[Note: this is a little fiction piece that I wrote on 30 October, 2015.]
Future History: How Armageddon Started
A little background will help put this future history in perspective. It doesn’t really have a beginning, but we’ll choose an arbitrary beginning in Syria, during the time when Bashar al-Assad was President. Now, Bashar al-Assad was a very cruel man. His Loyalists were loyal because of the benefits of being loyal. His enemies were his enemies because he was incredibly, insanely cruel. These enemies of Bashar al-Assad, we’ll call them the Syrian Rebels, or just the Rebels. The Rebels weren’t given much support by the international community, but there were so many of them that they had some degree of success. It helped that a large fraction of the Army was more loyal to their relatives than they were to the State. These defections are probably the main reason the Rebels were successful in claiming some territory and wresting control from Bashar al-Assad’s Loyalists.
What the Rebels could not do, though, was form a cohesive government in their occupied territories. They removed the Loyalists, and they removed the Army, but that left a power vacuum, and they were unable to fill it. Well, as you know, there are always power-hungry people waiting for such an opportunity. These are the people who see power vacuums even when they are forming, and…