With so much in the world to write about, comment upon, illuminate, satirise and analyse, I can no longer remain oblivious to the elephant that has rudely bashed down my door and lumbered into my room.
He’s been loitering outside for a good while now, occasionally catching my eye with a baleful and accusatory glance. Thus far, I have succeeded in shutting him out but I still catch a glimpse of him through the crack in my curtains; I lie in bed at night and hear his tail swishing to-and-fro and feel the bump as his ample haunches scrape against my walls.
My efforts at exclusion have availed me nought for he has abandoned his patient vigil and simply barged his way in. He is standing next to me now, snorting and bellowing and commanding my every regard.
I write this not because I want to but because I feel I have to.
We have all watched while events in the Middle East have rapidly escalated to the point where Israel has, now, formally declared itself to be at war. It is a conflict that we all regard with a deep sense of foreboding because we all instinctively realise the implications not just for the parties concerned but beyond. Having read the posting from Perry de Havilland, it is with a heavy heart that I concur with both his analysis and his prognosis.
But it does not end there and it would be bad enough even if it did. As evidence mounts that both Syria and Iraq are preparing to enjoin a wider war and given the intention of both the USA and the UK to go after Saddam and America’s broader war against Al-Qaeda, the mind begins to boggle at just how bad all this could get. Will Islamic radicals take this war to the USA mainland again? And what happens if they do?
In a way that if the most frightening element of this mess; the fact that Arab radicals really seem to think they can push the Israelis into the sea and bring the West to its knees. Not wishing to be pejorative, but they are, quite simply, deranged. That’s what makes this so different from the Cold War. The Russians had chained themselves to a warped and bankrupt philosophy but they could always be relied upon to act in their own best interests.
Not so here, sadly. Too many Arabic radicals believe their own rhetoric and are suicidal enough to act upon it. They simply do not seem to appreciate that whatever force the Israelis can unleash it is not but a gnat’s bite compared to that which can be visited upon them by Uncle Sam.
I can see the confluence of forces beginning to take shape and time-honoured dark clouds brooding on the horizon. Maybe this is my sordid and pessimistic imagination at work but there are too many red lights flashing to dismiss them all as herrings.
Did it feel like this in 1913? Could anyone see then where that Great Power rivalry was going to lead? Did anyone imagine the scale of carnage that lay ahead? If they did, would history have been any different? Or is there something deep within the epistemology of our species that impels us inexorably towards these periodic bloodlettings, regardless of the steps we take to avoid them? Is that really what all our searching and truth-seeking is all about? A desire to know the truth about ourselves when the real truth hides in plain sight all around us. Libertarianism, Conservatism, Socialism, Marxism and all other ‘isms’ seem nothing more than ephemeral and foppish casuistry in times like these; parlour games for the effete, the safe and the well-fed.
The kind of parlour games they probably played with each other in that last, dappled Edwardian summer before Europe became a charnel-house.
I don’t know if Europe, or anywhere else, will become a charnel-house again. I certainly hope not. But if things go as badly as they could go, then a lot of consequences will follow and expect none of them to be very agreeable. Synagogues are already ablaze in France.
None of us may be touched, but all of us will be tested.
The elephant is still here. I suppose I will have to learn to live round him somehow. He tells me that he once appeared in the background in Out of Africa and he keeps quoting a line from the film; a resignation used by the African farm workers when they were facing a catastrophe or force majeure that they could neither avoid nor prevent.
“Mem’sahib” they would say ”God is coming”
