A month ago, on 6/12/2014, “The Economist” wrote guessed what might be coming and wrote: ““The industry’s weak balance sheet is also a vulnerability, says Michael Cohen of Barclays, a bank. Most firms invest more cash than they earn, making up the difference by issuing bonds. Total debt for listed American exploration and production firms has almost doubled since 2009 to $260 billion (see chart), according to Bloomberg; it now makes up 17% of all America’s high-yield (junk) bonds. If debt markets dry up and profits fall owing to cheaper oil, the funding gap could be up to $70 billion a year. Were firms to plug this by cutting their investment budgets, investment would drop by 50%. In 2013 more than a quarter of all shale investment was done by firms with dodgy balance sheets (defined as debt of more than three times gross operating profits). Quite a few may go bust. Bonds in some smaller firms trade at less than 70 cents on the dollar.”
While money is cheap, interest rates low, taking up debt is a possible basis for a business model. When interest rates rise, it won’t be. And the massive investments required to run shale oil fields will suddenly become more expensive. Since Saudi costs are far lower, they can keep priming the pumps at the Arabian oil well heads, until the mass of shale oil producers belly up when the phone-call is indeed a bank with a cash call. The Saudis won’t be attacked by the US Administration for what they are doing, because the low price of oil has, after all, helped the global (and that includes the US) economy bounce back forcefully in recent months. In fact, had the Fed raised interest rates the shale boys would have been sweating a lot over Christmas when checking their balance sheets prior to the New Year.

This is only one side to the Saudi policymaking coin, however. The flip side is not about economics, but about extending political influence beyond the country’s immediate region. In an op-ed back on 22/8/2014 in the “New York Times”, Ed Husain wrote: “Let’s be clear: Al Qaeda, the Islamic State in Iraq and Syria, Boko Haram, the Shabab and others are all violent Sunni Salafi groupings. For five decades, Saudi Arabia has been the official sponsor of Sunni Salafism across the globe….Textbooks in Saudi Arabia’s schools and universities teach this brand of Islam. The University of Medina recruits students from around the world, trains them in the bigotry of Salafism and sends them to Muslim communities in places like the Balkans, Africa, Indonesia, Bangladesh and Egypt, where these Saudi-trained hard-liners work to eradicate the local, harmonious forms of Islam.”
Clearly, Saudi Arabia’s Western ‘business partners’ have not succeeded over time in persuading the country to desist from this course. But then, before the real plummet in the price of oil, the country decided to donate 100 million dollars to the UN to fund a counter-terrorism agency. Ed Husain termed this a “welcome contribution”. Perhaps, however, it was a smokescreen, because Saudi Arabia had come up with a two-pronged strategy that would enable it to achieve the goal of spreading Salafism emphatically without this being noticed.
The drop in the price of oil will potentially hurt the shale oil producers. It already has hurt one country in particular, and I am not thinking of Russia or Iran, both of which commentators have suggested, Saudi Arabia has set out to punish for the policies they have pursued in the country’s backyard – in Syria. I am thinking of Nigeria. Where the country’s level-headed super Minister of Finance and Economics Mrs. Ngozi Okonjo-Iweala had sensibly pegged the budget to an oil price of USD 77.40, a figure she revised downward in December to USD 65.
While the country has some policies in place to diversify away from oil, and the current administration has prioritized promoting agriculture as such a path, it has an awfully long way still to go. A good three quarters of government revenue is generated by oil exports – meaning one half of the figure that looked to be beckoning in January 2014 when the price hovered around 100 bucks a barrel. The Goodluck Jonathan government is quite literally caught over a barrel. Cash-strapped would be kind by comparison.
And this is where the Saudi oil policy becomes foreign policy. If there is a government in the world that at present needs to muster all its resources to repel Salafist-driven Islamic violence it is Nigeria. It needs to invest in materiel and men to counter the insurgency of Boko Haram. It needs to invest heavily in infrastructure to drive socio-economic development in Northeast Nigeria (which is one of the regions with the lowest position in the Human Development Index on the continent). Without money, the largest economy in Africa is staring down the barrel of complete political instability, with Northern Muslims potentially radicalizing and Christian southerners potentially wanting to sever the covenant of the union on which the national federation rests. This is the second, covert goal of Saudi Arabia’s current oil policy. If they can crush the regional and continental ambitions of Nigeria, nip its burgeoning presence in Africa in the bud, the chances of radical Islam taking long-term root in the Sahel and sub-Sahel zones are good – and with these prospects the creation of a region that would be the natural objective for Saudi investment. And it is this that Western, Chinese and Indian foreign policy makers and businessmen should sit up and take notice of – not the few now doubly toxic shale-oil assets…
In fact, it’s a treble play by the Saudi gorilla. As the further it lets the price of oil drop, the more it in the interim trashes the massive investments the moderate Muslims in the Gulf states have made in solar power and in manufacturing. Over the last few years, in particular Abu Dhabi, Dubai and Qatar have consistently been pursuing this course as a means of diversifying their economies in an effort to ramp up life in the post-oil or post-gas world. The investments have been committed to both R&D, panel production, and in a variety of pilot and non-pilot plants. The countries’ various projects cover generating capacity of XXXX specifically commissioned by SolarGCC or the Qatar Foundation. Saudi Arabia, by contrast, boasts a total of only 5 MW in solar power generating capacity, commissioned by Saudi Aramco. The further the price of oil drops below $60 a barrel and the longer it remains lodged there, the less the value of the investments in solar, as diesel gensets deliver power at the same generating cost and are cheaper to buy. The Gulf moderates could find themselves simply having to write off their upfront investments, and their diversification strategy, so proudly touted as showing the emirs’ far-sighted efforts on behalf of their not-so-democratically ruled populace, would be left in tatters. Whether popular support for them then prevails is anyone’s guess.
And then there’s manufacturing, driven in Saudi Arabia by cheap energy prices and the presence of ores, such as bauxite. Alcoa has already entered the market. Or the presence of oil, like petrochemicals. Saudi Aramco and Dow Chemicals have just signed away $20 billion in a joint venture.

These sectors are note exactly known as big local job creators, nor will they suffice to drive a post-oil economy. Moreover, Saudia Arabia with its religious conservatism is not finding it easy to attract the foreign talent required to operate the industries, either. In both respects it is strategically at a disadvantage to its tiny moderate neighbors. Firstly, there the numbers of persons requiring employment in the future will be far lower (population growth rates in Saudi Arabia are far higher as is the absolute size of the population, while the per capita wealth available to create the jobs is higher). Moreover, the more open-minded autocratic societies of the Gulf do not face the same problems of not attracting foreigners. Indeed, they have not been busy building industries based only on cheap energy, but have been looking to an energy future, to tourism, etc., while diversifying into industries far afield. Their success has been prodigious. And perhaps this has spurred the economic big boys of the region on in their willingness to dump the oil price in an effort to shore up an economy originally founded on oil if it enables them to sink the economic and ideological competition for many years to come. Saudi wellheads produce cheaply –so the policymakers evidently do not need to worry about forgoing profits, they are simply forgoing windfall profits.

The third shade of black followed after a brief interlude, from 1949-89, and brandished red flags. The one authoritarian regime (critical theorists, remember Adorno’s “Authoritarian Personality” scale!) gave way, once the Red Army left, to an equally authoritarian regime. This third shade of black was highly confusing for the population, not only because it initially painted the towns red, but also openly declared: “You are all anti-fascists”. In other words, officially those to the West in Europe enjoying liberal democratic freedoms were now labeled as fascists. Things had not been helped during the region’s time as the Soviet Zone, as that brief interlude also did not do anything to render the local culture more permeable. Rather, East or East Germany ‘missed out’ on the influx of refugees from the East that flooded into West Germany. The wagons were filled by admittedly ethnic Germans, but these were Germans with a very different culture and in part a distinctly Slavic acculturation. Likewise, the East Germans also missed out on the influx of ‘guest laborers’, be they Italians, Turks, or Spaniards (a fact that set east German cuisine back decades), and later Yugoslavs. Instead, the East Germans anti-fascists were all busy declaring their solidarity with the non-aligned countries – not that they had never visited such countries, let alone been exposed to persons from there, bar the odd West African, Angolan, Ethiopian or Vietnamese.
European bell jar
In fact, what gets forgotten in the official histories is not just the shades of black that characterized political life in the region, but also that it was not Great Britain but East Germany (the Germany Democratic Republic) which was the only country ever to exist in splendid isolation inside Europe. It was cut off from its cultural roots (and language) to the West and had little or nothing in common with its Warsaw Pact neighbors to the East. To make things worse, unlike them it had to tolerate a far larger number of Soviet troops on its soil, and a far larger proportion of quislings among its own folk, as exemplified by the film “The Life of Others”. Small wonder that it was East Germany which was last to come out – against the paymasters or whip-wielders in Moscow as the undertow of Glasnost swept the Eastern Bloc away. (Officially, the country only beat Bulgaria to ‘freedom’ by a day.) The popular discontent with the government did not actually bubble up until May 1989 (in the context of the local elections), long after Solidarnosc, the Hungarians and the Czechs were busy freeing themselves from the Muscovite yoke. In East Germany, the popular civil discontent became more manifest after the 1989 summer (hey, holidays come first), in the form of the September Monday demonstrations in Leipzig and later in Dresden. The East Germans were the me-too’s of their Eastern brothers and sisters, a country under-exposed to things foreign, foreigners, and the open-mindedness that is said to come through an encounter with ‘difference’.
Check-book unification
Into this bleak and black scenario steps Helmut Kohl, with a big fat check-book to pay Gorbachev’s bill for East Germany and to welcome it back into the fold swiftly. It was a great achievement, with Kohl putting his money (well, it was the West German taxpayers’ cash actually) where his mouth was and dishing up a 1-for-1 exchange rate – whereas the east German mark fell short of the deutschmark by a factor of at least four. In this regard, and henceforth, unification was about economics. And it was always part of the neo-liberal flavor of the day, was a purely market-driven, economic project. Unification saw capital shift into east (lower case now) Germany, wooed by subsidies and other incentives, turning brownfield industrial combines into wastelands and setting up new factories that stayed as long as the subsidies. Countless kilometers of new black top were laid, and the population was soon enjoying the blessings of cable TV, porn shops, second-hand cars, modernized city centers, and all the other things that go to make Western-style consumer capitalism such a laugh. Unemployment was a bit of a problem, as was migration from rural areas (where the farming collectives had collapsed into piles of porcine manure), but all change has a price tag, does it not.

East German immigration
Unfortunately, the heavy-handed politicos forgot that these east Germans had still not been exposed to foreigners – at least not on the ‘home front’, for they all set about getting Canary, Balearic or Turkish sunburns as soon as the charter flights started taking off from Berlin or Leipzig. Those politicians then placed nothing worse than asylum-seekers among the east German populace – in line with the standard metric for dividing up the flow of incoming refugees among the German laender. They did so without having first putting in place an acculturation program teaching east Germans what democracy was, how it was not to be confused with consumerism, and spelled, among other things, tolerance. Hardly surprising, since tolerance cannot be quantified and therefore measured by some economic system. And this shortfall has knocked on into the political system, where equality of economic opportunity does not go hand in glove with an equality of representation – or certainly not at cabinet level, where to date the Conservatives have posted one east German minister (Thomas de Maizière), as have the Social Democrats in the form of Manuela Schwesig. A glance at former Merkel-led cabinets shows that the only other east Germans to ever make the grade has been Wolfgang Tiefensee, formerly Lord Mayor of Leipzig. Matthias Platzeck made Chairman of the German Social Democrats, but never achieved ministerial status.
The politicians have ‘integrated’ east Germany successfully if the yardstick is ensuring the quality of life there has been continuously raised such that it no longer lags so far behind that in the west of the country. But they have done so while neglecting to provide a real education in democracy and tolerance – after a couple of centuries of shades of black something that is desperately needed. Unless you count exercising democratic rights a majority of a town deciding to burn down a home for refugees. Or the majority deciding not to bother going to vote. This is pure anti-anti-fascism, as back under Honecker everyone went to vote and the Socialist Unity Party of course pulled well over 95% of the vote. Today, under 50% of the Saxon electorate goes to vote, no doubt out of a wish to demonstrate that they have learned democracy is about choice and that they have chosen a Sunday in front of the TV. This is a sane strategy, as they need to be nicely rested to go and protest against being flooded by immigrants and refugees at the Monday PEGIDA protest marches in Dresden. There, they declare that “we are the people” (sounds like Democracy Lesson One) and that they are fed up with politicians not listening to them and instead gently inserting the one or other foreigner under the bell jar that was once East Germany and has now been robbed of its capital.
Politicians, listen, these people have not been socialized to like foreigners, neither have their fathers nor were their grandfathers and great-grandfathers. These people, who at least realize they are the people, have spent decades, if not centuries, under authoritarian regimes, have never experienced much other than black. They certainly have not experienced blacks. Their sense of colors is limited to red necks. Their palette does not include yellow or brown, or Turko-black moustaches, or Italian red-white-and-green. They do not understand color. They cannot understand color. They have not been taught to. All they know is that they have gained much over the last quarter of a century in terms of spending power – and that they will defend at any cost. Because, like 25 years ago, they are still the people. And in this regard Germany is certainly not unified, united or otherwise welded together.
The center is right
The only conservative to have understood the lessons pre-War German history might teach us would seem to have been physicist Angela Merkel. She, at least, seems not to have suffered from the same loss of collective memory as everyone else in her party. The only way of keeping the country impervious to right-wing extremism is to maintain a strong center, she insists, something very much missing in Weimar. And neatly this also means keeping herself in power by occupying the middle ground. Perhaps she also realizes that she need not worry about a majority in Germany left of the center, as the one or other leftist has claimed was possible or hoped for in recent decades. (For the Greens, and that is now the dilemma they face, found out in Baden Württemberg that they mainly bag new votes from the right, among conservatives driven by an opposition to progress and a wish to uphold old values, such as nature as opposed to railway stations.) By admonishing her fellow citizens in her New Year’s address to not become xenophobic she sought to maintain that strong center. The subtext was a different one: It was Merkel the successful leader seeking to warding off her very own legacy of failure in unification.

Internalizing oppression

There are other place where the oppressors are not apparent, where the oppression is so ubiquitous, so internalized as to be invisible, where people have, or so one might imagine, identified so strongly with the aggressors that everyone is an aggressor. A state of affairs that is surely inconceivably unhealthy for the population. In one of these other places, killing fear walked the land, the killers extinguishing life with a bullet to the skull, piling up the corpses like so many mementoes. Only to fail in their genocidal intentions. Indeed, genocide itself is always a fantasy of the oppressor, as there is (thankfully) no instance in human history where such has been successful, where an ethnic group has been completely wiped off the face of this earth.

In one such place, plastic bags are banned, a seemingly sensible move to protect a fledgling environment otherwise rent by the blood that soaked into the earth. At the same time, such a prohibition is symbolic of an accepted internalized yearning for complete order, for obedience to moral code that prevents any iteration of past barbarism. In this place, all the cars seem to be cleaned regularly, to have good tires and to stop at traffic lights. In such a perfect world, the ex-pats who are all working on projects to do good can cycle to work, despite the oppressive heat.

Perfection is not godly

In this country, namely Ruanda, Arica’s most densely populated country, all the gardens, and there are many of them, in fact almost every institution has them, look perfectly tended, well-kept, like those strange men who are constantly combing and jelling their coiffeurs to make certain not a single hair is out of place. The blades of tropical grass all seem to have been cut to some normed height, a sign that there is some standards organization that rules almost all aspects of life. Not surprisingly, the cassava and maize fields within the city limits of the capital Kigali (now home to a tenth of the population) and there are many of them, are all set out in perfectly straight lines, as if the poor smallholders who still own their particular little patch, used a string, two sticks and a right angle to get things in rows.

Out on the street, not is a motorcyclist in sight, let alone a paying passenger on the back of a motorcycle, who does not wear a helmet. Despite the incredible spread of the bikes as a simple mode of transport – some Indian businessman bagged the monopoly on importing them. Perhaps he imports the helmets and drinks with the lawmakers who impose ruinous fines on those caught without one, but such an assumption would be cynical. All the steep streets the bikes, motorbikes, cars and small trucks toil up and down are not only precipitous in part in this the country of a thousand hills, but perfectly swept each morning, any unsightly existence, any dust-and-dirt particles brush-panned away. And the picture is no less elegantly surreal off the streets. Even in the carpentry yards, chippings and sawdust are gathered up and whisked away. As if people get a guilty conscience if there are any blemishes anywhere. The roads are mostly well paved, the signboards announcing the donor-agency-sponsored projects that line them all, like the fields, at almost perfect right angles.

Perfect development

Nature here is ancient, many of the trees are monocotyledones, the elephant grass, the frangipanis, the acanthus, the palms, etc. But that old world is swiftly giving way to a population intensity unprecedented even in Africa, and to a firmly controlled environment of build, build, build, be it health programmes to counter Type 1 diabetes, or blanket and highly praised primary-school coverage for all (it manages to turn out illiterates all the same. One tiny pockmark on this perfect face: Parliament still bears a few bullet-chipped marks on its walls from 20 years ago, retained to remind those within of what price parliamentary assembly can have. The lip-service gloss over everything else seems to be working. At the end of the main avenue stands Fortress America, the embassy, architecturally lording over the ministries that run either side of the road that leads away from it. They are interspersed by embassies and hotels where the exchange rates are completely unlike those set by the central bank: not that anyone evidently complains, as in a system where all aspire to be correct and atone for the past, who would wish to complain. Everything has its place here, no one dare step out of place and raise his voice – or hers, for that matter. Next to the exit from the Gents in one such hotel, the prostitutes with their super-high-heels and ultra-tight-skirts stand or sit, but without stating their case at any volume. They have their place, go about their profession without upsetting any balances.

The hotel band plays happy music, foreigners come and go with the flow of donor money assuaging donor guilt and not having intervened when murderous madness ruled the streets. The only thing that gives anything away that the order is precarious and had to be kept by inner and outer force is a heavily armed paratrooper standing at a key crossroads. And an equally heavily armed private security guard, female, lurking on a balcony of one of the main memorials to make certain no doubt that no one treats a memorial wrongly.

Here, after what happened 20 years ago, life did not return to normal. There is nothing normal about normality here. There is a frighteningly omnipresent wish to always invoke that past’s horrors while at the same time being over-perfect in the present. It is a form of denial that makes one shudder, so oppressive is the official policy of being ‘correct’ about everything, about maintaining order. Beneath the surface of this model nation, the divide between rich and poor widens faster than in any other African country. The country imports wares it could itself produce, so that the import/export traders make more; even palm oil is brought in, though there are plenty of palms, even coffee is purchased from outside, though there could be plenty of coffee, the conditions are ideal. Perhaps the palm trees or the coffee trees refuse to grow in perfect straight lines, since the climate so encourages rampant, verdant growth.

Nightmare of efficiency

Ruanda today is a lived waking nightmare. Do-gooders mingling with doing-gooders. The past commemorated everywhere with memorials, society held together now by an oppressive inner wish for perfection. There is a ubiquitous and compulsive lack of creativity, a compulsive orderliness that is inhuman and stifling. The current population live as ghosts of what they themselves could be. Genocide didn’t kill all the bodies, but it killed all the hearts.

Surviving

The guitarist is well past the national average, as here life expectancy just edges past 40. He must have been 30 or so back then, when the world suddenly came to a stop and turned upside down. And he survived. To his right, up the hill, is the National Stadium where this summer there were the international celebrations with all the international politicians celebrating themselves and reconciliation 20 years after, after the genocide. Which also partly took place just down the road here. An event when the world watched on TV or listened to music, while the Hutu hunted, and 75 percent of the guitar player’s tribe were murdered.

Back then, this place was the Novotel, and only it and Hotel Ruanda, then called the Hotel Mille Collines existed. Today, there are many international hotels in the city; the boom can possibly be explained by the large number of foreign consultants who come here to administer the average of US $ 200 million in foreign development aid that are injected into the national economy each year. I wonder which government officials own the hotels.

The old guy plays a mean guitar. It’s a white Fender, metal strings strangely. Maybe they last longer. He’s poor, his neatly pressed trousers are shiny on the thighs and when he turns to adjust his amp, I see they are stained. Just as his cap saw better days a while back. But he survived. And now he’s gazing out into space while his hands enjoy a life of their own. Teee-a-moh, the far younger Hutu singer cajoles, more ramazotti than eros. Sounds a bit like tea and ammo, the way he pronounces it. He’s got a cowboy belt buckle, boots and Foster Grant style shade. His coolness. Maybe he stands out all the more because his guitarist is so the opposite.

The old guy’s mind is elsewhere, he’s drifting, just letting his hands earn the money. When it’s time for his lick, he plays his riffs, never moving, not altering his gaze, head looking slightly sideways, eyes invisible. He survived. And he can (still) play music. Maybe it banishes the demons. Maybe it is exactly what is needed. Playing guitar after Nyamata is not barbaric at all. Perhaps it’s the best way to live on with the memories. Tozzi had a hit with the song as long ago as 1977. That was 17 years before the genocide.

Can you ever forget?

A great poet once wrote that “Death is a Master from Germany”. He was right in the sense that no two acts of genocide are comparable, and that the Third Reich mastered its killing method. But he was wrong in that Prussian military discipline and efficiency were brought to bear elsewhere, exist in other militaries. There is a clear line linking the church in Oradour and that in Nyamata, in the former women and children were killed, in the latter the death toll was some 10,000. The methodology was no different in either case to that applied in the Kravica warehouses outside Sbrenica. Lock people in a church (where they think they are safe out of a superstitious faith in everyone’s respect for religion) or in another edifice, and then throw in the grenades. This requires no mastery, just evil. It is systems of command efficiency that when coupled to the right ideology evidently allow the inchoate and primordial instincts kept in check within humans to rise up like some sort of anthropological horror constant, bubbling and seething on the surface, unleashed by some de-civilized bloodlust, be it in a battle for resources, land, or private property. And then such evil gets perpetrated. Here in Ruanda in a frenzied burst of post-anti-colonial revenging. There are ghosts of Pol Pot in the lineage.

Since 2002, Ruanda’s population has increased by almost 50%. It is now the most densely populated country in Africa. The $200 million the international donor community has thrown at it this will have to go a long way, as there are scant resources to be exploited here in this little landlocked nation, GDP is only US $ 7 billion, and the more foreign aid has poured in, the more the Gini coefficient marking wealth inequality has risen. At the table next to me a groups of indigenes are drinking beer, their golden Rolexes glinting in the sun. If one thing is for sure, I never liked the sing-a-long “Ti Amo”. I watch the guitarist’s face and still discern no emotion. If one thing is for sure, I certainly hate it now, for how bleak must life be if it is so bleak that you escape it through that saccharine song? I try and focus on the frangipani to keep my own balance. Maybe come night-time and the Southern Cross, it will bring some fragrance wafting my way.

Cairo is a city that is an architectural and urban design disaster. If the sentence is true that “all Egyptians want to be designers”, as one professor of the applied arts tells me, then it is a pity that this was not the case at least 30 years ago. Cairo is the city of the block, the slab, the monolith. It reflects the nimbus of construction in the country, whose first industrial champion was Arab Contractors, a state corporation that privatized and is now tantamount to a state itself. Having built the Assuan Dam it branched out. And was soon followed by the cement industry, which was in turn followed by the light breeze-brick industry. The slabs are often only two apartment boxes wide, with a single utility shaft for the elevator, stairs and piping. The sides of the building are left bare, no money shelled out for plasterwork – the desert dust will sandblast the red bricks beige soon enough.

Meaning that unless a tenant decides to paint the façade around the balcony, all buildings look alike in terms of dingy color tone, and their shapes differ only depending on whether they are cylindrical (next to the Nile) or a greater or lesser grid of boxes. And each sand-colored building is topped in the same inimitable way: by a crown of satellite dishes, all aligned in the same direction such that if you buzzed the city with a small plane the impression looking down would probably be similar to gazing across an extensive field of mussels all standing in rows reaching up into the water – from the sandy seabed below. Even at 25 storeys in height, it is a matter of 25 layers of identicalness. Difference is a matter of the interiors or the street life at ground level, or the proximity of gardens or parks, of which there are many – despite the excessive price of land that has prompted all these buildings to rush upwards, clamoring for space.

In the hallways and lobbies there is a constant fight going on to repel the dust, to wash down the tiles or marble floors and wall panels. It is an undertaking that recurs everyday with the regularity of the sun, but not as bright. As often these public sections of buildings are as under-illuminated as they are under-cooled, as landlords seek no doubt to keep operating costs low. This is particularly the case in ministries, where the cabling is often not concealed now doubt out of a wish to facilitate repair work without breaking walls open. The stairwells are often illuminated only by shafts left open to the sky that run parallel to them. In this respect the presence or absence of light is a defining rhythm to urban life here. For some that life is always dingy – in the elevators in the ministry buildings there is inevitably a lift boy. In the Ministry of Higher Education, he is possibly aged 60 and is diminutive in stature, probably chosen for the job for that reason. He has a small seat made of bent tubular aluminum and plastic belting, which he offers to an old lady. Next to it, balanced precariously beneath his telephone and the top of the faux-formica panel stands his coffee cup, the smell of cardamoms bringing the outside world into this little under-lit office of his, prison cell that moves up and down all day, albeit not smoothly. The fact that outside the building the traffic is sheer pandemonium, the decibels rising and falling by the meters gained seems as good as implausible, a rumor but not a reality.

The gridlock reality which prompts people to leave for meetings hours in advance has led to the foundation of new housing and office estates between downtown Cairo and the satellite cities the planners strung like so many pearls along the outer ring road. These new towns sometimes have names or simply borrow from the names of the adjacent district, such as all the sprawl round Gomnia on the road to the airport, where the line of apartment blocks is brought to an abrupt halt by the outer perimeter fence. They fill the gap left to the satellites, such as New Cairo, and in some cases have become more glitzy than these, boasting ultramodern office blocks or complexes thereof, already bursting at the seams with tenants eager to have escaped the gridlock. Albeit only for such a time as it takes for developers to fill in remaining gaps, bringing in more people, and thus more traffic.

This trend is de-urbanization in a sense and re-suburbanization, whereby the residential belts are often between the new commercial districts and the rapidly decaying or emptying downtown. Downtown is now often a matter of old buildings half empty – here, brownfield is not the word, which should be beigefield. And by old I do not mean 100 years back, with an ornately carved frontage on a three- or four-storey building. I mean the 1970s or 1980s blocks that are much higher, were the sentinels of Nasserian or Sadatian progress. Under Mubarak all that expanded were the barracks…

Bipolar uniforms

In the bipolar world of the Cold War, uniforms still counted for something, Red Army officers wore peaked caps so wide you could land a sputnik on them back then or a modern drone now; lines of medals and ribbons attested to military prowess and confirmed membership. The rows of soldiers in the Chinese Army parades were as endlessly uniform and uniformed as the country is vast. Even members of the NVA, the Viet Cong army, past masters at guerilla warfare, all wore ‘uniform’ jungle fatigues and wide-brimmed hats – and thus set themselves off from their compatriots in the South who opted for a sartorial look based on the French colonial army rather than any Asian traditions.

In an age increasingly characterized by a fundamental bipolar opposition between 1 and 0, presence or absence, strangely the structure of warfare has changed fundamentally and is anything but as straightforward. In the post-1989 world, the notion of sides itself starts to change. The unipolar world in which the United States is the clear hegemon and (however much the Russian or Chinese military hierarchy may wish it were not the case) will continue to be so for some time to come thanks to its technological edge logically does not have sides in the ‘us’ and ‘them’ sense, as between the black and the white there are now any number of shades of grey.

Difference, no difference

This is a truly novel state of affairs, as even back in the Middle Ages friend could be distinguished visually from foe, the Crusaders who arrived by boat from Saladin’s defending warriors. You could tell the difference not just by the physiological or physiognomic differences between a red-bearded Frank and a black-bearded Egyptian. For there was the red Cross of St. George on many a white robe donned over the armor to keep the knight’s temperature (not temper) below boiling point, while the other side dispensed with heavy armor and just wore cool robes over thin linked armor. You could also tell the two sides apart by the weapons, and the type of horse – those huge Crusader chargers, heavy and hard to stop once they got moving vs. the dexterous Arab ponies that have since become the preferred stock for racehorses on all continents. The double-handed broadswords that required a giant to swing them and a lot of room in which to do so vs. the subtly worked scimitars with their bone breaking properties.

If you fly into the same stretch of beaches and mountains today, or fly over them filming, you will find a complete absence of such clarity. In all the local conflicts it is now by no means apparent who is killing whom? All that is clear is that civilians are constantly the victim. In the days of the self-proclaimed ‘Islamic State’ (or in Subsaharan Africa of Boko Haram) the real question is: Do the sides joined in fatal battle know each other and if they do, how exactly do they keep each other apart? After all, the days of uniforms as defining features have vanished, leaving would-be warriors whose insignia are a Kalashnikov and possibly a turban or headscarf. These anonymous killers are the new-millennium equivalent for the anonymous structural deaths of the 20^th century, the gas attacks of World War I and the blanket bombing of World War II, both of which marked new heights to anonymity.

Fragemented confusion

Indeed, in the unipolar world, conflict has become so fragmented that it is nigh impossible to structure it in uniform terms, or, to put it differently, ensure a clear-cut, tailor-made antagonism. Who, after all, are the real Jihadists? Is it wrong to suspect the one or other is simply out to settle an old score? And who is simply creating a new one? If there are no uniforms then we must assume at least some of the one side knows some of the other, which would suggest that here we may have to do with erstwhile next-door neighbors warring over village spoils? If uniforms are not needed then we must be witnessing some latter-day tribal conflict. Take Northeast Nigeria’s Boko Haram: The members go riding round on armored cars looted from Libya and which can be recognized as such. But from a distance it is hard to guess that the Kalashnikovs they have were bought in a market in Darfur. After all, their faded desert camouflage fatigues are identical to those worn by the Nigerian Army regulars, who likewise love to brandish their Kalashnikovs, assuming that is they haven’t sold them in a market place in southwest Nigeria to boost their pathetic pay rates.

Take, for that matter, the TV images we see of Syria, men at random holding machine guns up above their heads and shooting over walls. Who are they and how do we know who they are (is the media misleading us) and how do their opponents know who they are? Now and again I have a sneaking suspicion when viewing such images that actually no one really knows who is what and that this is possibly the existential core to all the killing. The members of the “Islamic State” organization possess a flag, a new-age battle standard like the Jihad banner of yore. Yet when marauding they have any number of different sets of battle fatigues, and boast scarves wrapped round their heads to keep out the dust and, one must assume, keep in the heat. According to the list on Wikipedia in August 2014, they were fighting at least 20 different other groups and armies, which certainly brings a new meaning to waging war on more than one front. In fact, basic training for each member must surely first involve recognizing all the uniforms he (no she’s allowed) might encounter that belong to his opponents. There is a surreal level at work here somewhere, because I find myself imagining these guys having to have little picture flick-through books in their fatigue knee-side pockets: Manuals they can flick through quickly with one hand while holding binoculars to their eyes with the other in an effort to decide whether the man down the road in similar attire is a ‘friend’ or ‘foe’.

Or take the TV images we see of Ukraine, once again men at random holding machine guns up above their heads and shooting over walls. Since the separatists and the members of the regular army wear the same battle fatigues one assumes the only distinction is the black balaclava helmets that all the members of the one side presumably suffer desperately under in the summer heat. Running round proudly in a woolen face mask at the height of summer, when the thermometer peaks 35°C in the shade, brings a new meaning to the idea of separatists being hot-headed. But what happens if the infidelity of the government loyalists runs to them also donning black balaclavas…

Who’s who

In our unipolar world, the militarization of some societies has evidently run so deep that all of society is seized by the syndrome in one homogeneous mass of weapon-brandishing men. And what remains as a mark of distinction? The playing fields: The neatly structured world is, as we all recently saw on TV, now reserved for football, where the players don a national uniform before taking to the pitch at the World Cup. Sport is the residue of the past when you knew whom you were out to beat. And the losers, they all wear the same uniform: A trawl through TV stock footage of refugee crises soon sadly reveals that the clothing of the poor and displaced is invariably branded; be it the polo player or the crocodile head on shirts, or the Nike swoosh on a pullover. Nowadays it is not a sergeant who has three stripes, but a refugee in an Adidas sweatshirt.

Chronologically and as regards popularity, first came post-modernism. Which is apposite, for it heralded a whole splat of ‘post’-movements that saw or see themselves as representative of contemporary society, which is, after all, the affluent society. Ever since the 1970s, that society has been typified by the shift out of the traditional mode of production that revolved around heavy industry, into what many have called a “post-industrial” economy. That was the first ‘post’ and it marked a social transition, as henceforth the service sector started to play an ever larger role – and industrial production was something done elsewhere. The term ‘post-industrial’ society is a bit of a misnomer, as here the ‘post’ actually means that post has to be sent to other parts of the world with the data for the industrial production there, for example in China.

One of the next uses of the post-prefix was fittingly post-materialism, which tried to persuade us (not long after post-modernism arose) that we were switching from materialist values to a desire for new forms of autonomy and personal expression. One can assume ‘we’ could afford to do so. Then, in close third, post-humanism took the stage. According to it, in ethics, for example, it is no longer the human being around which all revolves, for this current asserts that nature has a stronger right to claim pole position. Since then, and especially since the Wall came down, we’ve been living not in a post-It but in a post-all society. Whether or not the movements believe in being hyphenated or not.

Post-modern backlash

To briefly recapitulate, post-modernism amounted to a rejection of a firm focus on function followed by form, with this refusal characterizing architecture and then design. Post-modernism in philosophy, as in the rejection of grand narratives, is similar in thrust. If, in an affluent society (whereby society invariably here means life in an industrialized nation) for most people most functions are evidently fulfilled, then there is quite literally no need to emphasize function any longer. Instead, we can have fun with the form. If the grand narratives of ‘good’ vs. ‘bad’ are no longer applicable, as most people in (Western) society have never had it so good, then it is time to move on to more varied narratives – and, since these are the opposite of their grand forbears, we can assume them to be small ones.

Ever since the Wall came down, the USA became the world hegemon in a unipolar world, the USSR reverted back to being Russia, Europe united, the BRICS got named, and globalization became a stock phrase, some commentators have brought another post-It into play: post-history. Here, form (chronology) and function (differentiation) both collapse. The champion of this post-ism, Francis Fukuyama, argued in the mid-1990s that with the victory of capitalism, and the assertion of the liberal free market economy as the be-all and end-all of social structures, humankind no longer needed to evolve any further in terms of economy or culture – we had achieved all we needed in terms of good governance, and life could now happily go on this way until the Final Judgment.

Post-democratic post-capitalism

This idea is to a certain extent at loggerheads with the next post-phase into which we have all ostensibly moved. According to British academic Peter Crouch, we are now entering or have arrived in a post-democratic society. And no this is not because our governance system is so superbly established that we can all rest on our laurels and simply enjoy the good life. It is because, or so he suggests, multinational corporations directly or through lobbyists control government. Added to which, their power is extended as only a small percentage of the electorate actually turns out to vote – presumably because they don’t believe in the representative nature of government, one could impute.

One of the later additions to this now established tradition of “after-thoughts” is perhaps post-capitalism as posited by management theorist Peter Drucker and others. And, of course, that is to ignore the fact that the one philosopher or other, perhaps influenced by cyberpunk novels, is already championing post-physicalism. One should perhaps quip that what follows on from capitalism is actually not post-capitalism, with capital being a property only of organizations, but e-mail capitalism, where capital is controlled by electronic means.

Post-It future

However, the two last ‘posts’, putting history and democracy to bed, are perhaps the ones to be taken seriously. For what they do is detract from the underlying malaise, namely that we are not ‘after’ something, but have simply forgotten that we are ‘before’ something. There was a time when the economists, philosophers, political scientists and sociologists sought to elaborate what we could be as opposed to what we are, occasionally outlining these are places that were not, u-topias. What we are now is, no, not post-utopian society, but a society post-visions. While at the same time, we as the Western world with its notion of liberal democracies lay claim to showing the way forward for the world, to having a value system superior to that of the East or the South.

We live in a post-vision world, or so the post-mortem that observers may note in a few decades’ time. Thinkers in the West have become lazy, perhaps lulled by material prosperity into focusing only on by-products of past problems and relating us now to that then – they have succumbed to the post-disease. There was a moment when climate change could have become an issue that called for a new vision of the world we live in (not post-socialist or post-capitalist, pre-over-heated). But that moment passed, at the latest in Warsaw at the Climate Change Conference, where the post-industrialized nations could not agree with the industrializing let along the pre-industrial nations, the differences in past, present and future collapsed and with them the talks.

Post history – post-future

This stalemate has infected our thinkers, and thus there are no utopias being devised, held up for our politicians to mull over. The outcome of Fukuyama’s “end of history” would seem to have been intellectual torpor. If liberal democracies and market economies are the be-all and end-all of all, then why bother thinking any further? And if liberal economies have moved into post-democracies, then the thinking would be in vain, anyway. If all has been achieved, what’s left? Or, for that matter, what’s right? The phenomenon to be noticed among the main political parties in the West certainly since Tony Blair took power has been a race for the middle as the place to garner the most votes. But in doing so the politicians have forgotten what their original role is, for the middle-ground is characterized by stasis, that is why it is in the middle. This is not consensus politics, as it is so often called, it is simply consensus. For opting for the greatest possible common denominator is to resign from trying to persuade people to accept your position. It marks the onslaught of non-politics – as it means avoiding taking a position or riding things out to avoid it being obvious you haven’t taken one. Something many Western governments seem to be good at. No doubt some smart commentator will soon start banding the term ‘post-politics’ about in an effort to describe this state of affairs. But before that happens let us hope, since hope dies last, that intellectuals, rather than thinking in tanks think outside the box and come up with a pre-something idea worth fighting for the world over.