Hark to God:
Nice backdrop;
Pity about
The species

Coming sooner or later: The mother of all civil wars
Harold Hark
27 September 2002

Who said there is nothing new under the sun? The coming global civil war will indeed be a first.

For millennia the Left and Right have been fighting it out on local turf. (Ok, so everyone hates these terms. How about humanitarians and merchandisers, then. No? Spontaneous, progressive, democrats v inhibited, conservative authoritarians? There is always Cuban poet Jose Marti's definition: Those who love and create and those who hate and destroy. Aargghh. Left and Right it is.)

Some centuries the Left wins and the human race advances. Some centuries it's the Right in the ascendant and humanity sinks into the abyss.

Thanks to Globalisation (of commerce, not people), the heretofore local wars will, for the first time, cover the entire planet. All the isms and isn'tms will be present for this one. Quite possibly, and for the first time, members of one side will not be joining in a coalition of expediency with members of the other.

But wait. That has never really happened. Take the present coalition between the US and Russia over the War on Terrorism. Some have labelled this a scurrilous union, claiming the US has turned a blind eye to Russia's terrorist war on Chechens, for example. But this assumption is erroneous, since the US has routinely backed terrorists and terrorist states just like the Russkis. They have always been on the same side.

The thing is, the polarisation of good v evil is that stark these days, that even the dummies can see through the lying rhetoric of the Right. Well, maybe not all the dummies. After all, the Right has got to have someone doing their zombie work for them.

Sad to say, the Right will win the coming battle for humanity's soul, at least in the short term. They've got all the guns, you see. But in the long term, they will be returned to their dusty shops where the abacus sits in pride of place on the little recessed shrine (shaped like a throbbing anus) above the frequently used toilet.

One of the grandest of all cliches applies here: You can lead a horse to water, but you cannot make him (or her) drink. The authoritarian Right, made up of little folk populating the planet in their first go at human life, have never learned that freedom of movement and expression are what make for prosperous times. How could they? They're all greenhorns.

So they will impose and lie and restrict until the rest of us get mad enough to make them kill us or incarcerate us or force us to sit on what's left in our wallets until they bleed to death from their haemorrhoidal worldview. Because, unless there are enough of us willing and able to buy their products or their bullshit, they'll simply go down the gurgler.

And when they are put in their place yet again, the artists and scientists and thinkers will, yet again, resume their evolutionary tasks.

Jeesh. If you could look upon it all from a very high place (death, perhaps), the verdict on the futile machinations of this planet's history would have to be: bor-ing.

Too bad their isn't a God to whom we could all say: The buck stops with You, chump. Get it right, next time.

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