Michel's
Commentary
by Michel Dresser
by Michel Dresser
The Battle Line
is Culture
March 5, 2002 Michel Dresser
The new source of conflict in the world, is not ideological or economic"the source of the conflict divides us"is culture.
Communism, as a militant ideology, crumbled when the Berlin Wall came down. Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn wrote, in his essay, Letter to the Soviet Leadership that Communism had died long before the wall came down. The men in the Kremlin didn't really believe in Karl Marx or dialectical materialism any more; they just believed in power.
The old men, now hanging on behind the walls of the Forbidden City in Beijing, may govern over a billion people; but their Communism is no longer a fighting faith. They no longer aggressively seek to spread Communism. They want Taiwan back, not to make it Red, but to make it truly Chinese, as a part of the mainland. The goal is more cultural than ideological.
In Europe, politics is no longer about Socialism vs. Capitalism, as it was in the last century. It is about the survival of particular national cultures vs. The European Community. Two summers ago, the Danes overwhelmingly voted down accepting the new currency of the European Community. Exit polls indicated that the typical Danish voter cared little and knew less of the economic issues involved. The Danes simply wanted to keep the traditional currency of their nation. The issue was cultural rather than economic.
Our present clash with Osama bin Laden, is a profound culture war. The "Arab Fundamentalists" who made up the Taliban Party, see themselves defending the culture and religion of Islam against the decadent West. The same is true from the Sudan to the Molucca,s in Indonesia"determined militant Muslims want to push back the beachheads established in their domains by the Christian West.
The fault lines of world conflict now run, not, through the old grounds of politics and economics but, increasingly, through culture. Despite the optimistic prediction by Marshall McLunhan, a generation ago, that modern technology would make us a "global village," technology seems to have brought us together only to make culture our battleground.
And those are my thoughts
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