A Real and Present Danger?

Recently, the writing group I belong to challenged members to write on the topic: What if it was the beginning of the end?

The end of what? I wondered.

After some thought, I decided that I would go for the big one. The world. Not the world as Earth: This body is here to stay, going round and round in its heavenly orbit, and nothing is likely to shake it loose for a while yet. Not for another 4b or 5b years, perhaps? Yes, b as in billion. When, and if, that happens, none of us would be around to mind.

What I think should be engaging us is the loss of a collective common sense, which seems imminent. Just  three months ago, the Brits lost theirs when they voted to leave the EU. It was not, as we know, a massive vote, but enough to show that democracy works, tipping the balance in favour of Brexit. This, I fear, may just be a beginning. A possible next step in this march of folly could occur soon when, in another important democracy, the United States, people will vote for who they want to be their president for the next four years. By the way things are going, it looks as if the vote might very well go in favour of Donald Trump, a choice that, by most estimates, will be worse than bad, not only for America, but for the rest of the world too. If this were to occur, the best that can be hoped for for avoiding world anarchy is that a Trump presidency will be a brief one of just one term. Not enough to inflict terminal injury to the world order, one hopes.

I use the word “anarchy” deliberately.

In the February 1994 issue of the Atlantic Monthly magazine, someone wrote an article titled The Coming Anarchy. That article, now famous, or notorious, depending on perspective, opened by describing conditions in West Africa, and Sierra Leone in particular, as the starting point for what the author thought would happen in the new millennium that was, then, just round the corner. In that opening paragraph, the author, Robert D Kaplan, deplored the wretchedness of the country which, he said, stemmed from lawlessness and ignorance, quoting an unnamed government minister whose sad, yellowed eyes, Kaplan said, were like egg yolks, an after-effect, he explained, of some of the many illnesses, malaria especially, that the man had suffered from. Kaplan did not reveal the basis on which he made this medical assessment. Not surprising. Medicine is not Mr Kaplan’s field. Neither, it would seem, is prophesy. But he went on to prophesy as well.

When he observed that yellow-eyed minister, Kaplan, journalist and essayist was on an information-gathering tour of the world. His premise, it appeared, was that really bad things were bound to happen, come the 21^st century. He saw climate change and resource scarcity as part of a toxic mix that was likely to drive countries sharing borders to greater bellicosity toward their neighbour. The main witness for the prosecution, as it were, was the late Ali Mazrui, who Kaplan quoted as saying that re-formatting of borders was a near certainty in Africa. However, the only border readjustment that has come about on that continent so far this century is the carving out of South Sudan from the old Sudan. It is true that South Sudan has turned out to be a basket case, but that has nothing to do with border changes. And, looking at the continent in the round, no country has tried to swallow up its neighbours. Even Nigeria, with all that trouble with Boko Haram in the north-east, has avoided cross-border raids in the efforts to rid itself of its troublesome mullahs. And, for that matter, neither has its federation splintered, in spite of what policy wonks in the US State Department had predicted. 

He reminds us that one hundred years earlier, the Balkans was the trigger point for the Great War that engulfed the world from 1914-18: The Africa of 1994, Kaplan says, was similarly primed for sparking off twenty-first century worldwide chaos. “Primitive, elemental, unchecked, foreign embassies closing everywhere, contact with the outside world taking place only through dangerous, disease-ridden coastal trading posts”, he portends... Well, the last time I looked, the United States, Kaplan’s own country, still had 51 embassies on the continent of 55 countries.

Nevertheless, Kaplan insists, plenty of opportunities exist for bad things to happen. Keeping his attention trained on Africa’s health matters, Kaplan recruited that old Victorian trouble-maker, Richard Burton, for whom Africa was “deadly, a Golgotha, a Jahannam”… that, according to Kaplan, sets the stage for consigning the continent to a future more deadly than the Victorian’s worst nightmares: True, a number of previously dormant or new diseases have emerged to scare the world since The Coming Anarchy was published: SARS, MERS, Ebola and, most recently Zika, have all surfaced, but no wide pandemics have occurred, averted by well-formulated science-based responses. Kaplan didn’t factor those in.

The Kaplan metaphor for the dissonant world of the future consists of riding in an air-conditioned stretch limo - read the rich industrialized nations- on the potholed streets of an urban landscape of slums peopled by menacing residents- read the rest of us- benighted by disease, poverty, ignorance and a disposition to do evil. This scenario could well play out. But what Kaplan omitted to include in his screenplay is the ghetto within the blighted landscape wherein Africa-America dwells and where police officers feel empowered to shoot and kill at will. Not surprisingly, the neighbourhoods simmer and, occasionally, erupt into fiery confrontations.

Meanwhile, election cycles come and go and, as I said at the beginning, there is real danger, in this one, that Donald Trump might become the President of the United States. "Our convention occurs at a moment of crisis for our nation," Mr. Trump declared when addressing his supporters at the convention that affirmed his candidacy. "The attacks on our police, and the terrorism in our cities, threaten our very way of life." And, right through his nomination campaign, and now the campaign for the presidency itself, candidate Trump promises to make America great again, by means that he does not clearly articulate but which seem no more creative than the use of invective, the building of walls or the threat of punitive bombings.

Hold on to your hats, peeps.

Tell Fren Tru