In the fifth of a five part special report, Ahmed Shibli, managing director of ETD Consulting sets out his own unique take on the twenty-first century to date and how several disparate events that have shaped our lives over the past twenty years may well be connected.
Part Five
Maybe the single ‘string theory of politics’ is that if we are going to promote violence abroad through proxy or direct wars, through encouraging violent uprisings against the regimes unfriendly to us, sell arms-for-profit to the brutal regimes that we may call ‘our sons of the bitches’ in the famous words of Henry Kissinger, sell arms to Saudis to bomb helpless Yemenis and so on, and as the digital media is playing and replaying these stories and images all the time to our own dispossessed and to our minorities (Muslims or otherwise) then the kick back may be ugly. Can this possibly explain the Capitol invasion in Washington DC?
Our own population mix in the UK, Europe and North America has now significantly changed with multi-culture and multi-religious dimensions widespread. Our own indigenous new generation has been brought up and went to school with these boys and girls and do not regard the world and the society as ‘them’ and ‘us’, unlike the older generations still ruling our countries.
The big questions is then, can we meet the challenge of the new era? Can we depart from the old ways of thinking? No doubt it is a difficult task to reorient our policies and work out an entirely new road-map and re-evaluate our attitudes and above all our alliances and economies.
The newer well-travelled generation is tired of the cold war mindset where anyone who is different from us is our enemy unless they agree with us. Perhaps we do not just need career politicians we also need great statesmen to start re-orienting our future. Maybe we need our very own glasnost and our very own Gorbachevs.
For example, can we physically connect Asia, Europe and Africa and bring people together? Connectivity at this scale can help bring people together and promote democracy, not the brutal removal and occupation of the other countries under whatever pretext. If China has started the Road and Belt project in Asia then instead of opposing it can we in the UK and Europe start, for example, a poverty alleviation project in Asia and Africa at a similar scale. We can be great by coming up with greater ideas than others, not by opposing their ideas and starting another cold war.
After all we have all the technology to help poorer countries with water, sanitation and food production, for example. Our universities are great seats of learning and can play a vital role in this. This way we can win hearts and minds and create a great and prosperous future for our coming generations.
And yes, just as at home we cannot dish out selective justice and expect people to remain loyal and peaceful, we cannot support selective justice abroad and expect the extremism and terrorism to disappear by, for example, merely launching ‘de-radicalisation’ programmes. We need to treat the root causes and not the symptoms of both the domestic and foreign extremism. What is happening in the USA today, where Washington DC resembles the ‘Green Zone’ of Baghdad, can easily happen in the UK tomorrow. Let us not believe in exceptionalism and sleep over these problems. USA believed in their exceptionalism and see what happened there. Let us wake up and change our ways and make the world a better place for our future generations.
End.
