In less than a year, we’ve gone from the London bombings to the French riots to the Cartoon Jihad and, now, to the possible execution of Abdul Rahman for apostacy. The first two of these events have a contemporary ring to them: we’ve grown accustomed to terrorist bombings and there’s nothing new about minority groups rioting. There’s nothing contemporary about the two most recent events, however. When the new millenium was rung in a little more than five years ago, who could have imagined that lives would be lost and property destroyed over the publication of cartoons depicting Mohammed? And who could have conceived of a Moslem’s conversion to Christianity as creating what increasingly looks like a major international incident? It seems to me that history is running in reverse.
Then, again, the case can be made that history has been rewinding ever since the fall of the Berlin Wall on November 9, 1989. As I watched—in stunned disbelief—West Berliners and East Berliners climb to the top of the Wall and start to destroy it little by little with their pick axes, hammers and whatever else they had, my reaction (you’ll have to take my word for it) was to say to my wife that history was about to be unfrozen.
How right I was! I’m not claiming that I had any idea as to exactly how, where, or when the geopolitical landscape that had been put into the deep freeze by the Cold War would thaw. And if I had any awareness of the rising tide of Islamic fundamentalism, I don’t recall it.
In any event, it didn’t take long for the first crack in the post-Cold War ice to appear. It happened in the Balkans; specifically, in Bosnia-Herzegovina. So I again found myself in a state of stunned disbelief. There, on my TV screen, were pictures from Sarajevo, the home of the spark that set off the First World War. More eerily, the people looked like, and were dressed like, the people whose photographs appear in histories of pre-World War I Europe. Strange, indeed.
We now know that the spread of terrorism to our shores and to the countries of Western Europe is connected to the Balkan wars of the 1990s. Having booted the Soviets out of Afghanistan, the unemployed mujahadeen migrated to the Balkans to assist their Muslim brethren in their fight against the Serbs. So, long before 9/11 (and before the 1998 African embassy bombings), Al-Qaeda was in Europe, albeit in southeast Europe. That’s where the Clash of Civilizations began. At the time, we didn’t see it that way: it was in the Balkans (so who really cares), and the aggressors were the Serbs (not exactly the banner-carriers of Western civilization).
What, then, are we witnessing? Nothing less than the unraveling of the world created by the Treaty of Versailles. That world was only partially destroyed by Hitler. World War II brought the Soviet Union further into Europe, but it didn’t alter the territorial settlements in the Balkans and the Middle East resulting from the breakup of the Ottoman Empire. And it was that event that terminated the Caliphate after a centuries-long run. Hitler wanted to overturn the Versailles Treaty; so do the Islamists. Hitler was successful, if only for a while. As to the Islamists, it remains to be seen.
I recall watching the Fall of the Berlin Wall with a friend, Joe turned to me and said,
“Now we can forge our swords into plowshares.”
I told him I thought that might be premature.
I had NO idea how prescient I was that night.
The 20th Century was uniquely horrific in terms of bloodshed because warring abstract, secular ideologies captured the machinery of heavily centralized, mass-production, mass-society, nation-states.
Today we have de-massification, centrifugal disintegration of states into ever smaller ” nations” and other ” premodern” identities ( religious, tribal, ethnocultural) entering into competition with modern (citizenship) and postmodern (social group)identities for the primary loyalty of the people.
Marc: I was working in a certain very large 5 sided building just across the Potomac from Washington, D.C. when the Berlin Wall came down (There is a piece of it on display in that building now, as well as a section of the fence that was between Austria and Czecholvokia). It was an interesing place to be at that time – and, to paraphrase a an old Chinese saying, the worst curse if “May you work in an interesting place at an interesting time.”
It was a momentous time, one which the author Tom Clancy has described as the best evidence of the direct intervention of the hand of God in the affairs of Man.
But, oddly enough, few people then or now seemed to see those incredible events as an achievment. They saw it as the passing of a period of time, one that came to change in a manner analogous to the length of hemlines and the length of hair. We just decided that we were bored with that Cold War stuff and stopped doing it. For some years thereafter in Air Force advanced planning meetings people would say “That is an example of Cold War thinking.” To which I would reply “Cold War thinking won the Cold War.”
So what kind of thinking will win the current war? I would submit it will be won by achievements and that which is required for those; it is not just going to happen because we think that it is “time.”.
Within five years of the fall of the Berlin Wall, 8,000 new mosques were constructed in the five ‘stans, countries where the Soviets had repressed the number of total mosques to a mere hundred.
In England today, far more Muslims attend mosque than Britons attend church, even though the Muslims are a small minority of the total population.
Norway is about to legalize heresy, since legalizing apostacy was, even for Norwegians, too much too soon. When Oslo is Muslim, then…
Where is the evidence of radical islamists in the Balkans during the initial stages of the conflict?
[...] [...]
I was only 11 at the time of fall of the Berlin Wall, so I obviously didn’t have much understanding of the Cold War at the time but I did understand the elation on people’s faces as they chipped away at the wall and I felt it too. I still remember seeing the film about the family that built their own hot air balloon to cross the wall and even knowing the ending felt the suspense throughout from their first attempt which failed, all the way to their triumphant at the end. I knew from what I was taught that the Soviets were cruel and suppressed freedom of choice on everything from the smallest to the largest things, even the choice of one’s career. That was all I needed to know that it was evil and must be destroyed. I didn’t know what to make of what came after, but that the world felt a lot safer without the Soviets around. I think in the future historians will look back on the 1990’s like they do on the 1920s or the 1950s. They were like coming out parties after facing the trials by fire of war. I did not think we would face an enemy like the Soviets again, yet if we look as Marc did at the post Cold War era as an unfolding of the dynamics that began in the aftermath of WWI it is quite plain. As that superb columnist Spengler at Asia Times Online remarked, the theologian Franz Rosenzweig understood that the fall of the Ottoman Empire represented the beginning of the clash of Islam with the West not the end. For Islam is now endangered culture unable to come to terms with modernity, and declining cultures strike back quite fiercely if they are militant in nature, which Islam definitely is under such circumstances. By going into Iraq, itself a product of the dismembering of the Ottoman Empire, we stepped directly into this minefield, which the Europeans laid, something that we should constantly remind them of when they speak of “American Imperialism.â€
>in the aftermath of WWI Franz Rosenzweig understood that the fall of the Ottoman Empire represented the beginning of the clash of Islam with the West not the end.
Hmm, I think going back a few thousand years to when christians slaughtered a quarter million muslims is more on point , Bush originally announced a “Crusade” to liberate Iraq and rid the world of Al Qaeda. Muslims and their scholars were outraged because 1000 years has not erased their memory of the Christian Crusades against Middle Eastern Islam.
Historically, millions have been killed in the name of God. Once again, the priests and rabbis bless the cannon and the Imams bless the Kalashnikovs.
If there are angels, they are weeping.