10-years-ago

If you could go back in time and have a 5 minute conversation with yourself ten years ago, what would you say?

East River + Queensboro Bridge / heli-flight

Originally uploaded by Frizztext

What would you tell yourself 10 years ago?

Scott Berkun | February 13, 2011 at 9:08 am | Tags: postaday2011, postaweek2011 | Categories: Topic Ideas | URL: http://wp.me/p23sd-98

Topic #45 – Here’s today’s topic, brought to you by Plinky.com:

If you could go back in time and have a 5 minute conversation with yourself ten years ago, what would you say?

that’s what I would say to me (frizztext):

have hope, at least in ten years you will start with a new blog at wordpress, which will help, that you can awake happily every morning. happy, because you have so much to write. and it even works in that foreign language: English. though your English is bad, they will understand your daily posts nevertheless. no problem, that you grew up in Germany …

Maybe I should add: In September eleven, this year 2001, some Arabian youths from your Hamburg, Germany, will fly an airplane against the twin towers. They will break down. 3.000 death toll. They will make debates about a “clash of the civilizations.” A Samuel Huntington quotation will be there in the talk shows, that a conflict of this level only will be at the very end, if one of the fighters will be extinguished completely. Nonsense. The Arabian dictatorships will implode 2011. They will organize democracies there… I think, it would not be possible, to explain all that in 5 minutes. I would remain speakless…
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me, writing about Samuel Huntington AFTER 9/11:
frizztext about Samuel Huntington (amazon.com)

The analysis, published 1993 by Huntington, written long before any Danish Mohammed-Cartoon, has refocused attention after the 9/11 Islamic terrorist attacks – and there seems to be no end: Madrid (3/11/04), bombings in Istanbul (11/20/03) and in London (7/7/05) or the ritual assassination of Dutch filmmaker and writer Theo van Gogh in Amsterdam (11/2/04). Protests against Danish Mohammed-Cartoons (2006), Hamas in Gaza, war against IRAQ, trouble with IRAN.

And therefore there is no end of TV-discussions how to react. Huntington, former foreign policy aide to the US State Department
speaks of so-called “fault-line-wars”, which exist between the cultures (religions) and will give endlessly smouldering. As examples the hunter Huntington specifies among other things the Gulf War and Afghanistan.

Hotspots seemed to be on the fault lines between the religions in Chechnya, the Middle East, Tibet, Sri Lanka, and Bosnia. In Yugoslavia the Serbs were supported by Russian diplomatist while Saudi Arabia, Turkey, Iran and Libya provided arms to the Bosnians. Yugoslavia is an example of what happens to a country where religious factors become the means for identifying oneself.

And it could develop worse: Koran-Sura 9, verse 5: “Fight and slay the pagans wherever you find them. And seize them, beleaguered them and lie in wait for them, in every stratagem [of war].” Islam teaches that Muslims must not befriend Jews and Christians. Surat Al-Maidah 5:51 says, “O ye, who believe, take not the Jews or the Christians for your friends and protectors. They are but friends and protectors to each other.”

In the chapter about how to stop those “break-line-wars” Huntington writes: “The force along cultural break lines may stop for a while completely, but it rarely ends really.” “These problems become still more complicated, if the cultures involved do not have a core state.” Hierarchy-creditor finishing sentence of this important chapter: “A break line war cooks from down highly, a break line peace seeps from above down”. We hope, Huntington will know, which at the end is “above”. Another unsentimental, very tough-minded Huntington analysis: “The conflict can disappear fast and brutally, as a group extinguishes the other one.”

The fact that cultural difference could brought to coexistence, into an equilibrium, supported by a progressive deliberated secularization of all denominations (accompanied by a sober transformation of all too denomination-linked educating systems) – such roots of thought we unfortunately miss in this provoking sermon, mainly dominated by a military perspective…

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• frizztext about Samuel Huntington (amazon.com)
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• Why PostAWeek2011 Makes me a Better Writer (aisjournal.com)
• Scott Berkun Covers the Many Myths of Innovation (fastforwardblog.com)
• The War on Terror: A Myth of Conflict Between Islam And The West (disquietreservations.blogspot.com)
• Militant atheists, Christianists, and the idolatry of the West (khanya.wordpress.com)

About Didi van Frits

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