Here in the Ethiopian countryside, as in other African countries, the women seem to be the beasts of burden. Like those I have seen carrying baskets, wicker panniers, bales of fodder, stacks of wood, claypots or babies on their backs. Most of them have no shoes. Over the last hundred kilometres the number I have seen walking solitarily or in twos or threes, single file, along the road, strap over their head or a rope across their upper chests to keep the load in place, has exceeded anything else. One long procession of women at work. Like the equally endless lines of eucalyptus trees, sucking the water from the ground and denying the short conifers and palms the same. Without trees, no life. Without water no life.

Not that there isn’t a lot to see along the side of the road. Processions of goats, orange, grey, white. Processions of hunchback cows, black or brown. Processions of donkeys, tan or light grey. Occasional mules, where a horse erred in judgement. Processions of older women with umbrellas. Children, some of them infants, selling roast kolo barley or shining shoes in the villages, rows of them, one spot, one profession, some of them calling you-you-you farangi after us, in the hope we will part company with coins or smaller banknotes. Other, more fortunate children, walking in line, sometimes two deep, homeward bound from school: some in uniform, others not, but almost all of them with a rolled exercise book in one hand, seemingly in the middle of nowhere, between the school and wherever the round straw-roofed hut is they call home. Lines of pylons now and again, otherwise lines of wooden electricity poles, many tilting precariously.

Leaving Addis Abeba it was initially processions of corrugated hovels that accompanied us, with paper laid out to dry outside on the pavement, or piles of collected plastic waste, or lines of open waste-water culverts. The hollow-block huts gave way in the countryside to less corrugated iron and rows of mud-covered wooden square houses in straight lines along the road, set back by the storm-water drains, or concrete-block sheds that were shops. Occasionally, way out in the fields one saw a procession of a solitary herdsman and cows, in one long line.

Roads as the only links

The road itself, when it turns steep, which is a lot of the time, challenges the underpowered, which is most of us here it seems, and leads to processions of drool-dripping cows plodding their way upwards, being over-taken by slightly fleeter-footed but definitely overladen mules, who are being passed by very-slow-moving trucks belching black fumes whose line is constantly interrupted by slightly faster trucks that go by names such as Dove, Mammut or Tata, but get hounded by what are by most yardsticks still slow buses that were built before 2000, the blue “Level 2” busses, which in turn get overtaken by a line of green “Level 1” busses, which in turn get burned off by horn-blaring SUVs, all for some unknown reason trying to get to the next crest of the high plateau first. Before the uninterrupted line becomes a broken line of bald tires all racing downhill, past the six-year-olds at the side of the road calling out for plastic water bottles, a means of storing the life-saving liquid in these scorched heights. Past the herdsgirl with the braided hair who stand proudly above it all, a school book in one hand, a long metal-studded crook in the other. Past a young woman in an emerald green long dress, bending into the ascent to offset the weight of the bag of rice on her shoulders. A man strides along in front of her, his crook held by his right arm over his shoulders, a huge bale of straw on the other side of him, supported by his left arm. He walks upright. I assume straw is less heavy. In front of him marches a dog, who seems to have decided in this heat he will defy his canine instinct and not chase one of the trucks.

The road through the towns is lined by blue Pepsi hoardings, each of which bearing the name of the hollow-block two-storey abode that is a truck-driver hotel in an allotment behind it. Interspersed by shops and restaurants selling just about everything, the smell of the dust and the diesel mingling with the fragrance of the roasting kolo. The towns stop as suddenly as they start, giving way to long flowing fields, with in the distance, speckled like poppies in a Van Gogh, people out working the fields, or cattle, or vultures. Now and again a line of thickset oxen pulling ploughs behind them in the sets of squared smallholder fields. The procession of fields follows a patchwork pattern, the high teff wheat runs red as the heads hang heavy readying for harvesting, the next field is yellow, and yet another green, Ethiopia’s national colors splashed here across the entire plateau. Interspersed with stubble where an unthinkable number of man-hours have been spent stooped scything or sickling the harvest. Then there are lines of maize to match the processions of corn rows.

At this point, the road explodes into thin air, we have reached the Rift Valley, a massive stepped gorge, where the road descends from over 2,500 down to 900 meters, where the Blue Nile runs brown. Now the cars have to navigate the striated blacktop, crushed into furrows by the procession of trucks, lines that occasionally become whorls resembling Amharic characters or something I try and write on the bouncing back seat while the shock-absorbers groan beneath me. The road is steep, so very steep in parts that the girls who run across it in one village, bursting out of a house that is lined by yellow mountain gladiolas, arms straight down at their sides, but swinging, flipflops flapping as they rush, seem to be far faster than many an ancient truck crawling its way to the top like a beetle with a huge cargo carapace atop. However inhospitable, the flanks of the gorge are lines by processions of thin terraces, perching precariously but bearing grain among the fences of brushwood and cacti erected to keep out the next procession of goats.

Next morning we drive back along the same road. Between the villages, in the villages, between the towns and the villages, there is one constant flow of people on foot. The men again in shoes, and this time a few of the women, too – albeit only those in the light white cheesecloth shawls donned to go to church. The broken line is one long procession of wares heading for market, or purchases heading back home.

It is as though the whole of Amhara province were on the road, walking either this way, or back the other way. For the most part silently it seems. The distances they are covering to get the grain or beans to buyers is great. After all, up here on the high plateau, or so my driver Melese, one of ten children, tells me, about half of the grain in Ethiopia is grown – given a population this year of some 96 million, up from 93 million last year, the sheer tonnage of grain needed to keep people fed is immense. Especially if one remembers that Addis Abeba is now home to some 3.5 million persons officially, with the unofficial number much higher, and none of them can till fields. All of which translates into countless hands working the fields and countless feet walking along the road to market.

Paved roads can be killers

The road is being renewed, with proper layers of thick compacted gravel topped by asphalt, a project kindly paid for by a grant from Japan. Where the road is already ready, even the slower trucks are now mowing faster, no longer having to navigate the countless gaping potholes, deep enough to swallow an oil drum in the smaller versions, resembling bomb craters in the larger versions. The new road will facilitate travel north from Addis Abeba, I am told, as Highway 3 will then be able to link up the north far better. Travel times will be slashed, with the trip to Debre Markos said to soon only require a bit more than 3 ½ hours rather than the six we required. That will be real progress, hooking up the countries urban centres better in this vast country that lacks a railway network of any kind – there is a single line running from Dire Dawa to the port in neighbouring Djibouti.

Sadly, those hundreds of thousands of feet seem to have been forgotten by the infrastructure planners who design these new roads. There is no pavement, a side on which to walk, and the right of way was evidently such that the new road runs flush to the fields, other than a brief shoulder of sharp gravel. Meaning people are forced to walk on a road on which the traffic is now flowing, at times at real speed. It is a 300km-long suicide trap. Goats on strings do not understand the speed of cars. Nor do cows, or donkeys, or children. It is a national disaster waiting to happen, the kind of conflict that so easily undermines progress. If the smallholders can’t walk, there will be no food in the village market places, and no food move to the towns in the now faster trucks, and on to the cities.

Many paths to progress

There is an Ethiopian tale about the donkey, the goat, and the dog. They all feel tired one day and flag down a Level 3 bus to take them to the next village to have a cup of coffee. On the bus, the donkey pays the conductor its fare. The goat ducks down behind it and gets off paying anything. The dog, sitting at the back meekily, pays the full fare but with a large denomination Birr bill, and the conductor kicks it and doesn’t give it back the change due. This is why when buses, or trucks for that matter, come through a village a goat bleat and run away, frightened that the conductor has noticed its fraudulence. The donkey, a short-sighted beast at the best of times, knows it has paid and has nothing to worry about, and therefore simply keeps wandering it whatever direction it was moving in, ignoring all honking or cries or whips. The dog, still irate at being short-changed, comes running out, snapping at the bus, wanting to claim its money. The tale is old, and pre-dates the new roads. A contemporary version would need to include a whole group of villagers, incensed by some of their children having been mown down, or maybe it was only their livestock, or their guard dogs, board the bus, armed with their long, metal-studded sticks, and head for town to vent their anger on the planners. Progress can all too easily be impeded by such small oversights as a couple of meter of flattened dirt additionally created by a steamroller that was there anyway.

Why should Germany need an alternative, let alone an alternative to the alternatives? After all, the Black&Grand Coalition (grand as in large majority, grand as in pompous) is doing a great job in terms of steering the great central European state down the channel to further prosperity, piloted by manuals written by social market economists. The government has ensured it has set the lights on Green light for growth and stability, and that is what the majority of the population seems to want, otherwise they wouldn’t have voted so overwhelmingly for the Black&Red heavyweight tanker in the general elections.

Anti-European EMPs

Now, state elections are a different matter altogether, and are traditionally the place where people have a dig at the political establishment. Recently this fact has been borne out once again as there have been no less than three state elections, all of them in east German states, first in Saxony, and then a couple of Sundays later in both Brandenburg and Thuringia. In all three at least 10% of those who voted did so in favor of the Alternative for Germany. (Mind you, the turn-out was admittedly pitifully low, as evidently on Sundays people have other things to do in east Germany than recollect that since 1989 they’ve been allowed to vote any way they want.) And the pundits, the TV experts, the political journalists next day, they were all shocked, stunned, gob-smacked… the whole caboodle.

It is worth noting here that the AfD narrowly missed out on a few seats in the federal parliament, having run mainly on an anti-euro platform, but ironically bagged a few slots in the Strasbourg EU Parliament, complaining that it does not believe in the need for such a parliament. Something also worth remembering it that the AfD has not been around for much more than two years, and the man who founded it and spearheads it in Strasbourg is therefore indeed a lucky man. Which is hardly surprising, since that’s his name. Bernd Lucke.

Authoritarian Germans no doubt all sat up and noticed that yes at long last their wish had come true and a real-life prof was leading a political party. What is more, he had to be right, as he is an esteemed professor of macroeconomics and therefore the kind of guy you believed on TV. No, his name is not actually pronounced Burnt Lucky, just as Farage is not pronounced “far age” as in something from a very distant past. But they have certain things in common. And no doubt the two of them cavort in Strasbourg at politico-business lunches together comparing pass notes. Yes, the two rabid anti-EU-EMPs wasting our money on the expenses for being anti in the EU– that’s the price of democracy….

Like Farage, of course Lucke doesn’t say what the EU does for us, has done for us, could do for us. In fact, the party manifestos for all three afore-mentioned state elections fail to comment positively on the subject at all. No, Lucke is compelling (once-only) TV talk show viewing, when he rants in professorial manner about what the EU doesn’t do for us. How it’s all technocrats or bureaucrats and they are eating up our money. How the EMU robs Germany of its sovereignty and its ability to budget properly. How there are all these non-austere Southerners who evidently can’t get a handle on their debts. (He neglects to mention that Germany bust the Maastricht treaty first, and big time, and that the Southerners didn’t start Kraut-bashing.) And for all his cleverness on occasion I get the feeling he and his party conflate the EMU and the EU.

Misconception of the EU

Now Lucke came good first up by campaigning against the EU outlawing the good old tungsten filament light bulb. And lucky we are that he ran a campaign against it after stockpiling countless thousands of them in the cellar. (Yepp, those professorial cellars are damn large). For, a highly modern man, through the Web he offered to sell them to us poor EU-tormented individuals who simply could not adapt to their successors. Enabling us to protest against the EU’s incursion on our civil liberties, those technocrats who imposed energy-saving lamps and then LEDs on us.

The AfD did not discuss whether we should save energy or not, as it’s heavily into burning fossil fuel, and equally heavily into exploiting the hankering for the past instead of talking about the future. So the light bulb was an easy one. Selling crooked cucumbers stockpiled in a cellar might have made less of an impression on your average German citizen and left him in more of a pickle. After all, the cucumber shows how silly all such arguments are. Of course everyone complains about having to buy EU-norm-straight cucumbers, but actually none of us law-abiding citizens are crooked enough to actually like the bent variety – it’s a matter of having the civil liberty to have a boomerang cucumber if we so wish – that’s what makes the West free.

The Alternative for Germany – yes, they’re far age. Things were better in the past. And not just did we have better light bulbs. We decided everything ourselves without Brussels or a Euro note. We did without foreigners, aliens, and refugees. There was little theft. Values were Christian, gays did not marry (assuming they even existed), and abortion was something only practiced in Holland or by illegal Roma immigrants using clothes hangers, one assumed. Well, I’m exaggerating a wee bit, but only just. As the AfD manifestos for the three states do contain a lot of this sort of stuff.

It must be said that Prof. Lucky, if I may call him that, for all his hyper-intelligence, never seems to have read any of them as when challenged on such issues he invariably denies their existence. Instead he welcomes his state election wins with a truly smug self-satisfied smile. Lucke’s look is that of the class wimp who no one ever wanted to pick for the ½-a-class-against-½-a-class soccer match, when even the severely weight-challenged girls got chosen ahead of him – the rationale being at least you could fill the goal mouth with a couple of them, whereas weedy wimp L would invariably own-goal things. No, while Prof. Lucky has not grown significantly since in stature (he still boasts a complete lack of shoulders irrespective of the bespoke suits he wears when preaching evangelism from the pulpit to kids on Sundays which his other penchant), but he has real spine, that we know. He stands up tall for ideas that are RIGHT.

The same stance is adopted by his side-kick, his National no. 2, who is actually a was-been-come-good from the 1980s CDU in Hessen, a man who Walter Wallmann used as his front desk officer until deciding Johnny Walker would do the trick instead. I am talking about the AfD’s chief candidate in Brandenburg. The man in question goes by the honest name of Alexander Gauland. Now, we all know the Nazis called the federal states gaus, and we all know that the rural countryside is called the land in German, but no, his name has nothing to do with that His name, if one checks out his manifesto, goes with the nuclear variant. Gauland couldn’t stop the “I-told-you-so” grin on his face when he won his 10%+. He simply thought he was super. And, yes that is apposite, as actually he is, and should be called Mr. Super-GAU-Land. Nomen est omen, or rather omin-ous. Just what sort of a super-GAU he is as in greatest atomic accident possible can be gleaned from a glance at the manifesto he championed shows – don’t worry, you only need look at the first page to get the gist of where is Gau is coming from.

Free Brandenburg!

The manifesto calls in its headline for the courage to champion a bodenständige free Brandenburg: that’s the earth, that’s back to the earth, that’s back to the past, to the farmers’ life. And it comes pretty much close to revitalizing the Blut-and-Boden mythology they managed to cobble together here after Fontane had finished writing tiringly long novels about the Brandenburg Marches and before the 1945 defeat. The manifesto that Gauland touted started by saying “The politics of recent decades has taken the western world and our country to the limits of what they can endure and to the verge of no longer being able to function.” Hark, ye citizens of Brandenburg, your state has almost ceased to function. The same paragraph goes on to talk about the economic over-exploitation of the natural habitat, the fact that many people are over-strained by having to perform under pressure. Oh, and lest it be forgotten, the constant involvement of Western states in military conflicts, another bugbear, and that despite the lack of funding and the fact that almost all European states are really cash-strapped, European institutions are constantly being expanded and we keep on taking in new member states and discharging international duties.

Well, Mr. Gauland, sorry, you’ve nuked us with so much in that first paragraph that I’m left breathless. But I must admit, on collecting a few thoughts: I haven’t noticed much of this massive EU-expansion. I have admittedly noticed Germany standing up and taking its rightful place on the international stage, and, as an export-driven economy, now also participating in stabilizing the international order. And the state around me seems to be functioning, collecting my taxes, providing me with water and electricity, etc. Indeed, looking through your manifesto, Mr. Gauland, I don’t find any list of the expansion in question.

What I do find, and this really shocks me, is that two sentences later, and still on the first page of your manifesto, you are busy stating in big words that the root of all this evil is that “the economy is geared to the needs of global corporation who monopolize economic power” instead of being nice to us. Well I hate to say it, Mr. Gauland, but some of that I’ve read before, back around 1933, when the global corporations also got lambasted for conspiring against us all, and, dare I say it, being Jewish, too. Back then the claims were also all that the majority of the population was having to bear an awful strain as well…

In case you haven’t noticed it according to the Gaulands of this world that “awful strain” is truly diabolical in the ancient forests of Thuringia. There, the election manifesto found out that wind turbines were trashing the beauty of the countryside and making poor Thuringians pay for national policy fuckups, where a few profit and the “predominant part of the population pays”. The AfD knows why. “The Old Parties claim it is necessary to change our form of energy because of ‘anthropogenic climate change’.” Wait for it, here comes the double-Thuringia-whammy: “The AfD discerns considerable scientific uncertainty as regards the linkage of a long-term forecast climate trend and manmade greenhouse gas emission. The scientific status does not justify…” Like everywhere else, no evidence is given for this statement, no sources cited for such spurious claims. In fact the paragraph closes by saying grandly “a global problem cannot be solved by national or European go-it-alones.“ Of course it can’t, which is why Europe should persuade everyone else how serious the problem is. Or we should bundle Prof. Lucky and Super-GAU onto a plane and send them to somewhere already hard hit by climate change in the Sahel zone. They could do some real help there digging wells.

In the EU but no obligations please

All of this pretty much comes together in the general thinking by the AfD that we should batten down our borders, keep our fossil fuels from oozing out, no doubt, stop the Poles from coming in. Because, hey, the AfD knows that there are masses of criminals out there, lurking, waiting to be nasty. As the Brandenburg manifesto makes very clear. Well, OK, the statistics for crime are actually down, bar a few small towns, and there it is unclear whether the figures for the criminals caught are not because of the fenced traffic going through from elsewhere. But the fears are not. And fears are an easy way of getting votes, and can be stoked and stoked. Like saying there’s no climate change and we can gladly burn coal whenever we so like. Just like Gauland thinks speed traps should be abolished – hey, one of our civil liberties is also to speed as we like. Waste fuel. Burn rubber. Spend our money rather than pay taxes so others spend it. We’re fed up with politicians ‘up’ there who don’t know what the common man wants. We’re common men. We’re here in the beer halls, with our fingers on the pulse of what ordinary Germany wants. (It’s hardly beating for the booze, mind.)

Speaking of beer halls brings us back to colors, the AfD’s campaigning colors: Insipid blue and white – the nationalist colors of Bavaria, Land of the Free, well State of the Free, and Super-Land of the beer halls. Especially in October. But the AfD have hone one better. They’ve added the blood of the earth. The blue-and-white-and-red (Faraga would love those British colors). Maybe, on balance, the dash of red is added for the votes they pinch form the far Leftists who hate international capital, or for the blood of the brains of those who thought they might be an alternative.

A devilish huddle

What happened next is less a matter of the imagination and more of historical fact, but perhaps because there were so many facts, the overall picture has been largely left uncharted. The roles played by the National Security Advisers (Colin Powell, Condoleeza Rice) the Secretaries of Defense (Dick Cheney, Donald Rumsfeld), the Secretaries of State (Colin Powell, Condoleeza Rice), by Paul Wolfowitz as their main underling, and by Dick Cheney as Vice President all depended on a view of the world first promoted by Bernard Lewis in a September 1990 article in The Atlantic on “The Roots of Muslim Rage” and then lent official status by Samuel Huntington.

Lewis opined that:
“In the classical Islamic view, to which many Muslims are beginning to return, the world and all mankind are divided into two: the House of Islam, where the Muslim law and faith prevail, and the rest, known as the House of Unbelief or the House of War, which it is the duty of Muslims ultimately to bring to Islam. But the greater part of the world is still outside Islam, and even inside the Islamic lands, according to the view of the Muslim radicals, the faith of Islam has been undermined and the law of Islam has been abrogated. The obligation of holy war therefore begins at home and continues abroad, against the same infidel enemy.” It need not concern us here whether this black-and-white view attributed to Islam was actually an example of a myopic analysis by Lewis and its dualism would not have withstood empirical assessment. What must concern us is that having created such a monolith, he then also described its opposite. He assumed two things. Firstly, he suggested, “suddenly, or so it seemed, America had become the archenemy, the incarnation of evil, the diabolic opponent of all that is good, and specifically, for Muslims, of Islam.” Secondly, he re-establishes the dualism in geopolitics: “More than ever before it is Western capitalism and democracy that provide an authentic and attractive alternative to traditional ways of thought and life. Fundamentalist leaders are not mistaken in seeing in Western civilization the greatest challenge to the way of life that they wish to retain or restore for their people.” What reach the fundamentalist leaders had, and whether they did indeed think in such a manner is not of any relevance. Because even if they did not, Lewis in an influential journal said they did and was believed. And he told his fellow Westerners that they were going to have to sharpen their swords and prepare to do battle, not just any battle, but The Battle as foreseen in the Revelation of St. John, of Good with a capital g against Evil with an equally capital e: the battle of Armageddon. It is in fact a battle to be in found in Christian, Islamic and Jewish eschatology. For Lewis concludes by saying: “It should by now be clear that we are facing a mood and a movement far transcending the level of issues and policies and the governments that pursue them. This is no less than a clash of civilizations.” Now in a unipolar world that spells trouble.

Civilizations can’t clash

Harvard’s Huntington, whom Kissinger describes as “one of the West’s most eminent political scientists” takes up the image of the clash and uses it as the linchpin for proposing a new post-Cold War world order that is structured around such clashes and certainly has nothing in common with Fukuyama’s notion that history had been ended by vanquishing Communism. Huntington first voiced the idea in an article for the august journal Foreign Affairs in 1993, and then elaborated on it in a full-fledged book published in 1996. Crucially, between Lewis and Huntington came Gulf War 1, came Western audience participation in a war thanks to journalists who were in bed with the soldiers and new multimedia opportunities. And those audiences were shown an image of Iraqis as Muslims that was as alien to them as the footage of Afghani Talibans was to be.

Signally, our Harvard intellectual quotes the above passage from Lewis, whom he describes as a “leading Western scholar of Islam”, only as a means for extending the argument’s applicability and giving it blanket coverage: He opines that “similar observations came from the Islamic community.” (213). (The evidence he gives is rather meager: two statements from TIME magazine in 1992 and one from New Perspectives Quarterly, which is published by Jerry-Brown-sponsored Institute for National Strategy and has keen pol-sci experts Oliver Stone and Michael Douglas as two of the members of its Board of Directors.) In fact, since he views the matter as the very fabric of the new world order, Huntington broadens the hypothesis even further: “These images of the West as arrogant, materialistic, repressive, brutal, and decadent are held not only by fundamental imams but also by those whom many in the West would consider their natural allies and supporters. (214).

US: We know what’s best

In other words, by 1996, 17 years after the failure of US policy in Iran, the fall of the Shah, and various attempts by Bush Sr. to bankroll Iraq into bludgeoning Iran, and a brief interventionist escapade under “Storming Norman” with Colin Powell as Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, the American establishment had decided that the Middle East was qua Muslim one thing and one thing alone: a clear and unequivocal enemy that challenged its hegemony. And since the geopolitical construct offered to shore up this position was crypto-religious, under Condoleeza Rice the geographical designation (which refused to follow religious fault lines) had to be expanded. Instead of the Middle or Near East, American policymakers started focusing on the “Greater Middle East”, which includes Afghanistan, Pakistan, Turkey, and various of the Central Asian ‘stans’. And Rice declared that the appropriate policy to pacify this hydra was not to chop off seven heads in Crusader fashion, but to introduce “transformational democracy” in all the relevant countries. After all, if the existing feudal structures were open to possible abuse by Islam, as had been seen in Yemen, then they needed to be replaced by modernized structures.

The idea has a flaw so simple as to be shocking. If Western democracy evolves from a free market economy in an industrialized society, then you need the economic basis for it, and that did not fit the non-diversified, oil-or-gas-producing, rent-seeking societies in question. And it has a second flaw, one that is even more stunning: If, according to the Huntington school of world history all Muslims are anti-Western, then introducing such democracies would be tantamount to shooting oneself in the foot, as it would invariably open the door to popular Muslim governments. And oops that was surely not Rice’s intention? After all, she was acting under Dick Cheney, and we can assume that what he had in mind was to keep control of the oil – a goal he certainly achieved with Gulf War 2.

Fighting a devil you made

However, what Col, Condy, Dick, Don and Paul did achieve was to fashion the world of the Middle East in their image, an image that was at the time a complete real con by neo-cons, as neither Lewis nor Huntington actually offered evidence for their claims. And the Big Five under George W. were ironically assisted in the undertaking by the very person who became their nemesis for so long and who thought just as dualistically: Osama bin Laden, the man who so despised the feudal totalitarianism of the House of Saud that he wished to do a Saddam and topple it. It was the attacks of Sept. 11 which gave the younger Bush administration populated by the older Bush confidants the justification for their world view, almost a decade after they had first embraced it.

Indeed, it is fair to day that in the 21 years since Huntington published his essay, the Middle East has disintegrated into a tribal free for all, irrespective of the hopes attached to a jasmine spring or Tahir Square. (The young Islamic social-media generation may call for democracy online, but it does not influence the flows of money or weapons.) For the arsenals and the troops are commanded by the old scheming men who plot away behind the scenes and control the oil. Toppling an autocrat such as Gaddafi or attempting to do so (Assad) does not create a clean state of affairs, does not turn a failed state into a successful one, it just makes things worse and moves societies further into the mold Lewis suggested already applied. After all, as mentioned in passing, you need economic development if you want democracies to take root, not unilateral commodity extraction. You need masses of jobs (Huntington at least said Islam was such a powder keg because of the high birth rate in the Middle East.) We now have a Middle East that is in the throes of inner Islamic conflict between Sunnis and Shiites, between young unemployed men and old rich men, and significantly the major emerging block calls itself “Islamic State”, known as ISIS for short.

The old American men should have remembered what Bob Dylan had to say on the subject back in 1976: “I married Isis on the fifth day of May. But I could not hold on to her very long. So I cut off my hair and I rode straight away. For the wild unknown country where I could not go wrong.” It is simply a pity Dick, Colin and co. did not cut off their hair and ride in penance for a place where they could not screw up about 20 years ago and instead forged a Middle East in their own gravely mistaken image.

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.