Showing posts with label World War i. Show all posts
Showing posts with label World War i. Show all posts

Wednesday, February 24, 2016

A World on the Brink? Some Essential Questions for Serious People in Very Serious Times

by Nomad

Surreal

With the US elections months away, and problems around the world causing many to wonder and worry, it's time we asked a few crucial questions about where we are headed.


The other day, the UK Guardian had a not-so-cheerful op-ed piece that is worth noting. 
In the piece, entitled Is The World Drifting Towards Disaster? Maybe, writer Michael White expresses a gloomy fear that things seem to be headed towards something as dark as anything we have yet seen
A lot of bad things are coalescing all over the place and no one seems to be in charge. A combination of opportunist ambition, of myriad weaknesses, systemic and personal, and of profound global power shifts put us all in danger.
We have been here before.
You must have read with alarm, or watched flickering black and white newsreels, how imperial Europe, rich and complacent, drifted towards fatal civil war in 1914. Schoolchildren are taught how 25 years later it all happened again, this time after self-deluding efforts to duck unpleasant realities ended in Hitler’s war.
“How could they be so blind?” we wonder as we read the latest history book or watch those TV documentaries.
Yet look at us.
A perfunctory tour of our troubled world backs up White's observation.