Saturday, June 22, 2024
9:05 a.m. This is the day Hitler invaded Russia in 1941, a fatal mistake. I was thinking, a while ago, someone could look back at our history since at least 1914 and reinterpret everything as the gradual reemergence of the non-western world, partly through the west’s civil wars and partly through the natural effects of western ideas and technology on the other old civilizations. It would give people a different way to look at things.
So many contenders:
- The Latin Americans, closest to western culture, and their attraction to and resistance to the Colossus of the North.
- The Chinese, recovering from 300 years of decay and stagnation, first reawakened by Japan in the 1930s and then finding their way once they rid themselves of their fleeting dependence upon Moscow.
- The Japanese, first imitating, then defying, then conquering, then being conquered, then beginning again.
- South Asia, profiting from European institutions and then rejecting Europe’s role. India, Indonesia, Indochina, Thailand, etc.
- The Muslim world, taking advantage of the war against the Turks, then Hitler v. the West, then the U.S. v. Britain, then Russia v. the West. Oil its greatest asset and greatest problem. Its greatest internal problem, secular v. extreme religious beliefs.
- Russia and the other borderlands, half western, half anti-western, continually vacillating but always seeking a valid path into the future.
- Finally, Africa, the land of the future in the way people used to call Brazil the country of the future. Sub-Saharan Africa looks like its going to take a long, long time to emerge, but you never know.
And there is the West itself, in all its contradictions. It is no longer Christendom. At the moment it appears to be secular materialism, but there is a remorseless quiet backlash growing, from several directions. It will take an external defeat, perhaps many of them, before the ruling paradigm is overthrown, but it must come.
And from all these competing fragments, each previously sovereign in its own area, each driven to distraction by the newly intrusive presence of the others, something new will arise, a world civilization infinitely complex and both familiar and alien. We who are alive today will not live long enough to see it, though the youngest among us may see the beginnings.