We may not like each other but we are steadily fusing into a global community

By Barrack Muluka

The temptation to go to Afghanistan can be real. You remember Afghanistan? That place of unending warfare. You remember how the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics (USSR) invaded Afghanistan in December 1979? It was the high noon of the proxy wars between the USSR and the United States in the Cold War era.

After World War II ended in 1945, the Western capitalist world and the USSR returned to unfinished business. The Russian Bolshevik Revolution of October 1917 had come with threatening sounds. The Bolsheviks would export workers’ revolutions to all parts of the world. They jolted the world of capital, then at war with itself since 1914. The capitalists put their war on hold in November 1918. But then Adolf Hitler happened. And he was not alone. There were other dictators, threatening to overrun the world with a dangerous Fascist agenda. There was Benito Mussolini in Italy and Gen Franco in Spain. They drafted in Japan, because of her imperialist concerns in Asia. The capitalist world went back to war against itself, for six years. The allies said they were fighting something more dangerous than socialism, in the Hitler-Mussolini-Franco Axis. What’s more, it dragged in the socialist Russia to fight on its side.

Russia lost millions of youth in the war. But it rewarded itself by bringing together all the Eastern countries it had “liberated” from the Fascists and Nazis into a new union of socialist soviet republics. They became one country – almost one nation, even. Others not in the union were their allies, anyway. The socialist revolutions agenda, placed on hold in 1939 at the break of World War II, was back. Tension. Arms race. Military pacts. Proxy wars. Ugly propaganda. This became the New World Order between 1945 and 1989. The American journalist Walter Lippmann called it the Cold War. It came to an end of sorts in November 1989, or so Ronald Reagan and Margaret Thatcher announced in Lisbon, Portugal. But that is a story for some other day.

In its heyday, the Cold War, in all its permutations, was a welcome diversion. Whenever journalists found their home environments too hot to handle, they rushed to Vietnam, Korea, Angola, Mozambique, Iran-Iraq and Afghanistan – the hotbeds of the proxy engagement in the Cold War era. You buried your head in those sands. You came back home after things had cooled down. Today Afghanistan remains as attractive as it ever was. And we also have new diversions – Crimea and Ukraine, Syria, Egypt, Libya, South Sudan and a whole whale of other global trouble spots. When we don’t have these, we have planes vanishing in the thin air and ships sinking in the sea. More than adequate agenda to keep you going, if ever you wanted to bury your head in the sand.

Unlike in that fading era, the world has contracted, perhaps more than what Marshall McLuhan, that Canadian genius of public communications, had in mind in 1962. For, it was McLuhan who coined the expression “the global village.” Overwhelmed by the pace of technological advancement 52 years ago, today, McLuhan said society was being telescoped into a global village. We would soon be a seamless global community – a world without borders, so to speak. But McLuhan passed on in 1980, aged 69. The international network of computer interconnectivity that we call the Internet was in the birth pangs. McLuhan did not live to witness the realisation of his prediction.

But we are one village, today, regardless. In the words of Martin Luther King Junior, this civilisation has contracted space and placed time in chains. Hence you can leave Tokyo Japan on Saturday morning and get to Washington DC on Friday afternoon, the same week. Should they ask you in Washington when you left Tokyo, you could very well say, “I left tomorrow.”

Such are the marvels that modern science has done to time and space. It does not matter that we may not like each other very much; we are steadily fusing into one global community. Samuel Huntington has noted correctly that this fusion brings with it a clash of civilisations as the biggest liability. Yet it was Barack Obama who said during his visit to Egypt in 2008 that ultimately, our fate will depend on how we elect to define each other. We can choose to define ourselves by the things that make us similar or, alternatively, by the things that make us different. If we choose our similarities, we are likely to be more tolerant and accommodating. If, on the other hand, we choose to emphasize the things that make us different, then we must prepare for unending violent conflicts, bloodletting and waste of life and opportunities.

Today, in the age teeming with so much knowledge at your fingertips, the world is awash with needless wars of intolerance. Human beings have travelled through history fighting over resources. But, today, populations fight because one culture craves to impose itself upon others and to dominate them. It cannot work. This is regardless of who is trying to impose their worldview upon the rest. The West is, for example, trying to impose its gay and lesbian culture upon everybody. They twist your arms with economic sanctions and other intimidations to make you accept their sexual adjustment programmes (SAPs). A resurgent China is here, with its “neo-capitalist” thrust under a mask. Islamic fundamentalists are everywhere, spreading the gospel of hate and terror.

Yet none of these worlds and cultures can insulate itself from the rest of the world, let alone dominate it. There is no more Afghanistan to run to for hiding today. If you run away from the Americans, you will find them in Kabul prosecuting their new imperial agenda. But you will also find there assorted profane merchants of terror, masked under the guise of religion. These ones kill, in God’s name, people who have no quarrel with them.

This July, it will be a hundred years since the outbreak of World War I. How has the world changed? We are a global village whose pace of geo physical and technological seamlessness has outstripped our appetite and capacity for mutual understanding, cross-cultural respect and tolerance. In the event that the global community does not begin conscious conversations on cultural co-existence in this new village – the most technologically advanced age of all times – is likely to go down in history as the most intolerant and bloody “civilisation.” Is there a case for strengthening and revitalising the United Nations Educational, Cultural and Scientific Organisation (UNESCO)? UNESCO has its job cut out, and quite a big job too. It must take the lead in a global cultural conversations that could make us accept and respect global cultural diversity.

The writer is a publishing editor, special consultant and advisor on public relations and media relations