Without the past, the future holds little promise
WASHINGTON - In the late 1990s, I found myself on a journalists' trip up the great Volga River in Russia starting in the charming old city of Volgograd. Before we left northward on the river, I could not help but notice the beauty of a single Russian Orthodox Church spire etched against the sky as the sun went down.
"Before the revolution," our guide said, "Volgograd had 73 churches." In short, all had been destroyed by the communists, many made into museums of Marxism.
Then, as we started out on our little tourist ship up the river, we had the good luck to see remarkable Orthodox monasteries, like the Makaryev Convent and Monastery, built in 1435, that were so big they were truly small towns. They had been closed until the '90s, which marked a temporary opening of the former Soviet Union, and so no foreigners had seen them for years.
At least the monasteries had survived, but the thought of a Volgograd with 73 church steeples, now forever lost, troubled my soul for many sunsets.
Oh, it is not that there aren't some magnificent emanations of human love toward culture. The stories from Mali, in west central Africa, are something history will need bend its mind to find enough praise to celebrate.
It was there, in the great African trading route city of antiquity, Tombouctou, that scores of native Malians packed their precious Islamic manuscripts from centuries past and smuggled them to safety out of the city at night while Islamist extremists were attempting to destroy all the history of the city. What manner of courage and bravery - I do not even know how to define it.
I mention these moments because they make me think of the sheer wastefulness, in beauty, spirit and soul, of this last year, of 2015.
What was it that seemed to exemplify this rapidly passing year? Horrible violence, whether in the deserts of Syria and Iraq or in the cities of America. The dangerous upheaval of peoples, as in the millions attempting to take over the towns of Europe. Confusion and serious lack of cohesion in Europe and America. Fear of the breakdown of the nation-state, which mankind has suffered so hard to cement as the defining system of societies, clans and tribes. And, finally, just plain fear.
These attributes of life today would seem to have come out of nowhere, like ISIS when it first drove across the Iraqi desert as out of hell itself.
But these terrorists, militia groups and new-style "warriors" of al-Qaida, of ISIS, of Boko Haram and all the other murderous nutters have been stewing for many decades. First, in the colonial brutality of the 19th century; then in the sudden freedom from colonialism and empires (Hapsburg, Romanov, Ottoman) in the post-World War I and II periods; and, finally, in the outcome of it all, as those millions of testosterone-ridden young males in the Third World now believe they are DUE a First World life.
"For the first time in history, almost all of humanity is politically conscious and interactive," Washington's great scholar, Dr. Zbigniew Brzezinski, said, speaking at a year-end review on the 20th and 21st centuries at the Center for Strategic and International Studies. "They demand responsibility in a world scarred by colonialism.
"Another fundamental change," he went on, "is the end of 500 years of domination of the world by the Atlantic powers. The 19th-century awakening was among elites. Today, it is the young who are unhappy with the nation-state."
Dr. Brzezinski is not optimistic.
"I think we are going in a bad direction," he went on. He believes that we are going through a change in which the past is enlarged and the future uncertain. In which most Americans have no interest in the Middle East, but where they now feel obliged to establish some stability, partly out of guilt.
Yet, he sums up, "I don't think we're going to have a very stable world order - not on our own."
In my own experience covering war as a correspondent over the last 50 years, I have seen the changes Dr. Brzezinski was talking about. First, you could see the seemingly endless small "armies" of often fatherless boys being birthed in Africa, Asia and the Middle East, with little schooling and almost no hope; then their utter frustration turned to joining gangs in the cities of America and Europe and terrorist groups elsewhere; and finally, the organization of the hopeless into a vengeance-fueled group bent on getting even.
At the same time, belief in God and worship of God plays little part in this world of gangsters and psychopaths. And, without God's or religion's rules for living, these boys - resentful, vicious and unforgiving - set up their own "anti-morals," as in ISIS.
Meanwhile, perhaps the question we should really be asking ourselves is: What IS there in this saga that will tell us how such confused and ever more secular societies can learn to be virtuous humans?
© 2015 UNIVERSAL UCLICK