How to win the World's War

  The  earth is a conquered territory. Man through the power of science has ensured that. The conquest has since shifted to the outer world where man’s fertile mind found newer challenges. There have been human forays into space and the planetary bodies. Flags have even been hoisted in Mars. But all of these feats peter into inanity as the contorting contradictions of life on earth threaten the shared thread of humanity. Forget the fiendish fictions of alien invasions flashed on 3-D screens by spell-binding scripts of Hollywood. There will be no such thing as a freaky flying saucer crash-landing into the sun and throwing the earth into an endless pall of darkness. None of those surreal contraptions will make the world come to an end. But something else will. Worse still, it is here with us.


I speak of the world’s war- that ultimate clash of civilizations- for which the most potent armament has been what I choose to call the Ostrich Complex put up by world leaders. Francis Fukuyama and Samuel Huntington in their astounding theses, ‘The End of History and the Last Man’ and ‘The Clash of Civilizations and the Remaking of World Order’ respectively, have already highlighted the foundations of what confronts mother earth today. My contribution here is that the current existence of mankind presents an anti-thesis that opens leads for a search for fresh explanations of the hysteria of today’s world.

Regrettably, political leaders in world capitals have chosen to look away while the world convulses in utter contrition. The pretensions, wrong diagnosis, choices and grandstanding by world leaders over the ages have led to the grim reality of fear, insecurity, and brutish attacks stalking the face of the earth. We now live in a world where no one feels safe. The high and mighty; low and lowliest; and the haves and haves-not all now live in barricades of panic and paranoia. Little else paints this picture of a world defined by fear and terror than the worldwide travel alert issued by the United States Department of States this week to all US citizens. As posted on its website (http://travel.state.gov/content/passports/en/alertswarnings/worldwide-travel-alert.html) accessed Wednesday November 25, the warning states:  “The State Department alerts U.S. citizens to possible risks of travel due to increased terrorist threats. Current information suggests that ISIL (aka Da’esh), al-Qa’ida, Boko Haram, and other terrorist groups continue to plan terrorist attacks in multiple regions.  These attacks may employ a wide variety of tactics, using conventional and non-conventional weapons and targeting both official and private interests.  This Travel Alert expires on February 24, 2016.” If the world’s renowned super power can issue this kind of anxious alert then the default deduction is that the world is at war.

The media has rightly or wrongly framed this war as one between the few bad guys and the rest of ‘us’ good folks. We have been fed with the feeds of friction between the inhuman minds of terrorists holed up in the hills of Afghanistan and the humane hearts of innocent citizens straddling the cities of global capitals. The world has been made to accept the questionable dichotomy of contrived profiling along the lines of race, region, and religion. But underneath all of these facades the hard truth is that the world is reaping the fruits of seeds sown centuries ago. This is the stark reality that the world (read political leaders) has refused to reconcile itself with. And until it does and makes recompense and appropriate restitutions, the fear that the world is in for an inelastic circle of concentric crisis shaped by terror will continue to control our lives. And the clash of civilizations will increasingly take more terrifying dimensions if this is not done. Or at least seen to being done.