I’ve always seen myself as non-political, so it has come as a bit of a shock to see just how political I am. I have, in the past, sat back, with a “don’t care, can’t change anything” attitude. And then I thought back to the Six Day War in Israel and came to the conclusion that the reason for being in the Middle East in 1967 was, as I thought, out of loyalty. However, eventually, I realized that not to be the truth. It was a political decision. I disagreed with another man’s point of view and took that disagreement as far as I could under the circumstances. I was never a person that stood outside the American or the Russian Embassy, protesting about the outbreak of a Nuclear war, or some other protest; being, as I saw it, nothing more than a sheer waste of time. That so called big picture is still within me, and tells me that no matter what is protested about, the outcome will always remain the outcome.

But, just of late, I have realized that there must also be a small picture, and that is where I have found this political James. He is not interested in saving the world for whatever reason. However, he does somehow like to have a stage from which he can express the disagreements that emote him. And as far as he can tell, he has found no better way than joining the thousands of voices from around the world, and from all walks of life, that simply say to certain people: “We don’t agree with you.”

And, if that simple act can change something for the better, then I’ve no alternative than to except that I am – for better or worse……………. Political.

It is not clear that the West has successfully met the challenge of 9/11. Worse: it is not clear that the West yet fully understands what the challenge is.

To understand 2001 we have to go back to 1989, the year of the collapse of the Soviet Union, the end of the Cold War, and the fall of the Berlin Wall. It was an historic moment that few had expected. What did it mean? It was then that two stories were born, with one of which we are familiar, the other of which we seem hardly to know or understand at all.

The first narrative was that the West had won. Communism had imploded. In the end, it failed to deliver the goods. People wanted freedom. They sought affluence. The Soviet Union had delivered neither. Politically it was repressive. Economically it was inefficient. For freedom you need liberal democracy. For affluence you need the market economy. 1989 marked the victory of both. From here on democratic capitalism would spread slowly but surely across the world. To adapt Francis Fukuyama’s phrase of the time, it was the beginning of the end of history.

The other narrative was quite different but has the advantage of so far being proved correct. Unlike Fukuyama’s, it was based not on Hegel but on the 14th-century Islamic thinker Ibn Khaldun. We don’t know much about Ibn Khaldun in the West but we should. He was one of the truly great thinkers of the Middle Ages. He has every claim to be called the world’s first sociologist. Not for another 300 years would the West produce a figure of comparable originality: Giambattista Vico. Both produced compelling accounts of the rise and fall of civilizations. Both knew what most people most of the time forget: that the greatest civilizations eventually fall. The reason they do so is not necessarily the rise of a stronger power. It is their own internal decay.

Most accounts of al-Qaeda focus on the intellectual influence of the 20th-century thinker and critic of the West, Sayyid Qutb. That influence was real. But the deeper story the leaders of al-Qaeda told in 1989, without which 9/11 is unintelligible, had less to do with Qutb and hatred of the West and its freedoms; and much more to do with the key precipitating event of the fall of Communism: the withdrawal, in 1989, of the Soviet army from Afghanistan.

People no longer think in terms of the common good. They are no longer willing to make sacrifices for one another.
It was that event that set in motion the rapid collapse of one of the world’s two superpowers. It was achieved not by the United States and its military might, but by a small group of religiously inspired fighters, the mujahideen and their helpers. Ibn Khaldun’s theory was that every urban civilization becomes vulnerable when it grows decadent from within. People live in towns and get used to luxuries. The rich grow indolent, the poor resentful. There is a loss of asabiyah, a keyword for Khaldun. Nowadays we would probably translate it as “social cohesion”. People no longer think in terms of the common good. They are no longer willing to make sacrifices for one another. Essentially they lose the will to defend themselves. They then become easy prey for the desert dwellers, the people used to fighting to stay alive.

That, so it seemed to those who read history that way, is what happened in Afghanistan. It was never possible for a small group to defeat a superpower by conventional means. But it could go on endlessly inflicting casualty after casualty until eventually the superpower — more like a lumbering elephant than a wounded lion — withdrew. The desert dwellers are hungrier, tougher and more ruthless than the city dwellers who long more than anything for a quiet life.

That was the calculation. The odd thing is, it worked. And those who had fought the Soviet Union looked on in wonder at the effect of their victory. For not only did the Russians withdraw. Within an extraordinarily short time their whole empire collapsed. Ibn Khaldun was right. The society had grown rotten from within. It had lost its asabiyah, its cohesion. It had lost the will to fight.
If that is what a small group of highly motivated religious fighters could do to one superpower, why not the other, America and the West? America could not be defeated on its own ground. But what if it could be tempted, provoked, into occupying the very same ground that had seen the humiliating withdrawal of the Soviet army, namely Afghanistan itself? To do so would require a truly massive provocation, one so shocking that it would make the Americans forget what everyone knew, that Afghanistan is a death trap that ultimately defeats all invading armies. That is when 9/11 was born.

The theory was that the Americans and the Russians might be unalike in every other respect, but this they shared: that they were advanced urban civilizations in which the social bond, asabiyah, had grown weak. They were no longer lean and hungry. They were overweight and lacked the capacity for sustained sacrifice. If America could be provoked into occupying Afghanistan, it could be defeated exactly as the Soviets had been, not by any decisive battle but by sustained asymmetric warfare. The proof was that American troops had withdrawn from Lebanon in 1984 and Somalia in 1994 under just such circumstances. They had no more staying power than the Russians. Like the Russians, within a decade they would be looking for an exit strategy. 9/11 was the attempt to lure the United States into Afghanistan, and it worked.

The aim of al-Qaeda never was the collapse of the West. It was the withdrawal of American troops from Saudi Arabia, together with larger aspirations for the revival of the Caliphate and the reemergence of the Umma as a world power. But the collapse of the West was foreseen. It was not an aim but a consequence, and it followed from Ibn Khaldun’s theory of the decline and fall of civilizations.

Has it happened? Not yet. But ten years on, the United States has been humiliated into renegotiating its trillions of dollars of debt. Western economies, almost all of them, are ailing. The European Union is under strain, its future in doubt. There have been riots and looting on the streets of London and Manchester, just as there have been in recent years in France, Greece and Spain. The global economy looks far less stable than it did before the collapse of 2008. In Europe, following a series of scandals, bankers, politicians, journalists and even the police have been tried and found wanting. Those who read the runes of the future are turning their eyes eastward to India, China, and the fast-growing economies of south-east Asia. The West no longer looks invincible. As a narrative, the “end of history” has proved less predictive than the “decline of civilizations”. So far, Hegel 0, Ibn Khaldun 1.

The real challenge is the underlying moral health of Western liberal democracies, their collective responsibility, and to the ideals that brought them into being. The real challenge of 9/11 is not what it seemed at the time: Osama bin Laden, al-Qaeda, Sayyid Qutb and radical Islam. These were real and present threats, to be sure, but they were symptoms, not cause. The challenge was the underlying moral health of Western liberal democracies, their asabiyah, their sense of identity and collective responsibility, their commitment to one another and to the ideals that brought them into being. The counter-narrative of 1989 and the fall of Soviet Communism saw it not as a victory for the West but as part of a law of history that says: all great civilizations eventually decline, and the West will be the next to go.

That view is not limited to enemies of the West. It was most recently stated by the Harvard historian Niall Ferguson in his Civilization: The West and the Rest. It was most powerfully formulated by Alasdair MacIntyre in his masterwork, After Virtue. My favourite version of it comes from Bertrand Russell in the introduction to his History of Western Philosophy, speaking about the tendency of the most creative civilizations to self-destruct:

What had happened in the great age of Greece happened again in Renaissance Italy. Traditional moral restraints disappeared, because they were seen to be associated with superstition; the liberation from fetters made individuals energetic and creative, producing a rare florescence of genius; but the anarchy and treachery which inevitably resulted from the decay of morals made Italians collectively impotent, and they fell, like the Greeks, under the domination of nations less civilised than themselves but not so destitute of social cohesion.

Social cohesion is what Ibn Khaldun called asabiyah. And Russell’s description of Renaissance Italy fits precisely the postmodern, late capitalist West, with its urge to spend and its failure to save, its moral relativism and hyper-individualism, its political culture of rights without responsibilities, its aggressive secularism and resentment of any morality of self-restraint, and its failure to inculcate the habits of instinctual deferral that Sigmund Freud saw as the very basis of civilization. Sayyid Qutb hated the West. Ibn Khaldun would have pitied the West. The pity is more serious than the hate.

There is a simple choice before us. Will we continue to act in ignorance of this other narrative? If so, we will replicate the fate of Greece in the second pre-Christian century as described by Polybius (“the people of Hellas had entered on the false path of ostentation, avarice and laziness”), and that of Rome two centuries later, when Livy wrote about “how, with the gradual relaxation of discipline, morals first subsided, as it were, then sank lower and lower, and finally began the downward plunge which has brought us to our present time, when we can endure neither our vices nor their cure.” If we carry on as we are going, the West will decline and fall.
There is, to my mind, only one sane alternative. That is to do what England and America did in the 1820s. Those two societies, deeply secularized after the rationalist 18th century, scarred and fractured by the problems of industrialization, calmly set about remoralising themselves, thereby renewing themselves.

The three decades, 1820-1850, saw an unprecedented proliferation of groups dedicated to social, political and educational reform-building schools, YMCAs, orphanages, starting temperance groups, charities, friendly societies, campaigning for the abolition of slavery, corporal punishment and inhumane working conditions, and working for the extension of voting rights. Alexis de Tocqueville was astonished by what he saw in America and the same process was happening at the same time in Britain.

People did not leave it to government or the market. They did it themselves in communities, congregations, groups of every shape and size. They understood the connection between morality and morale. They knew that only a society held together by a strong moral bond, by asabiyah, has any chance of succeeding in the long run. That collective effort of remoralization eventually made Britain the greatest world power in the 19th century and America in the 20th.

None of us should be in any doubt as to the seriousness of what is at stake.

It is a peculiarity of the Abrahamic monotheisms that they see, at the heart of society, the idea of covenant. Covenantal politics are politics with a purpose, driven by high ideals, among them the sanctity of life, the dignity of the individual, the rule of justice and compassion, and concern for the poor, the widow, the orphan and the stranger. G.K. Chesterton called America a “nation with the soul of a church”. Britain used to be like that too. In the 1950s there was no television at certain hours on Sunday so as not to deter churchgoing. Sundays helped keep families together, families helped keep communities together, and communities helped keep society together. I, a Jew growing up in a Christian nation, did not feel threatened by this. I felt supported by it — much more than I do now in an ostensibly more tolerant but actually far more abrasive, rude and aggressive society.

What is unique about covenant is its seemingly endless possibility of renewal. It happened in the Bible in the days of Joshua, Josiah and Ezra. It happened in America between 1820 and 1850 in the Second Great Awakening. It happened in Britain at the same time through the great Victorian social reformers and philanthropists. Covenant defeats the law of entropy that says that all systems lose energy over time. It creates renewable energy. It has the power to arrest, even reverse, the decline and fall of nations.
None of us should be in any doubt as to the seriousness of what is at stake. Europe today is pursuing the chimera of societies without a shared moral code, nations without a collective identity, cultures without a respect for tradition, groups without a concern for the common good, and politics without the slightest sense of history. Ibn Khaldun, were he alive, would tell them precisely where that leads.

The question is not radical Islam but, does the West believe in itself any more? Is it capable of renewing itself as it did two centuries ago? Or will it crumble as did the Soviet Union from internal decay. “We have met the enemy,” said the cartoon character Pogo, “and he is us.” That is the challenge of 9/11. It’s about time we came together to meet it.

This article originally appeared in Standpoint Magazine.
Published: Sunday, September 11, 2011

A FEW days ago, before the bombing here and the shootings on Utoya Island, a friend and I were talking about how the joy of being alive always seems to go hand in hand with the sorrow that things change. Not even the brightest future can make up for the fact that no roads lead back to what came before — to the innocence of childhood or the first time we fell in love.

There is no road back to the scent of the Julys when I was young and leapt from a boulder into the ice-cold meltwater of a Norwegian fjord. No road back to when I stood, 17 years old with 10 francs in my pocket, by the harbor in Cannes, France, and watched two grown men in idiotic white uniforms row a woman and her poodle ashore from a yacht. I realized then for the first time that the egalitarian society I came from was the exception and not the rule. No road back to the first time I looked, wide-eyed, at the guards with automatic weapons surrounding another country’s parliament building — a sight that made me shake my head with a mixture of resignation and self-satisfaction, thinking, we don’t need that sort of thing where I come from.

For many years, it seemed as if nothing changed in Norway. You could leave the country for three months, travel the world, through coups d’état, assassinations, famines, massacres and tsunamis, and come home to find that the only new thing in the newspapers was the crossword puzzle. It was a country where everyone’s material needs were provided for. Political consensus was overwhelming, the debates focused primarily on how to achieve the goals that everyone had already agreed on. Ideological disagreements arose only when the reality of the rest of the world began to encroach, when a nation that until the 1970s had consisted largely of people of the same ethnic and cultural background had to decide whether its new citizens should be allowed to wear the hijab and build mosques.

Still, until Friday, we thought of our country as a virgin — unsullied by the ills of society. An exaggeration, of course. And yet.

In June I was bicycling with the Norwegian prime minister, Jens Stoltenberg, and a mutual friend through Oslo, setting out for a hike on a forested mountain slope in this big yet little city. Two bodyguards followed us, also on bicycles. As we stopped at an intersection for a red light, a car drove up beside the prime minister. The driver called out through the open window: “Jens! There’s a little boy here who thinks it would be cool to say hello to you.”

The prime minister smiled and shook hands with the little boy in the passenger seat. “Hi, I’m Jens.”

The prime minister wearing his bike helmet; the boy wearing his seat belt; both of them stopped for a red light. The bodyguards had stopped a discreet distance behind. Smiling. It’s an image of safety and mutual trust. Of the ordinary, idyllic society that we all took for granted. How could anything go wrong? We had bike helmets and seat belts, and we were obeying the traffic rules.

Of course something could go wrong. Something can always go wrong.

On Monday night, more than 100,000 citizens gathered in the streets to mourn the victims of the attack. The image was striking. In Norway, “keeping a cool head” is a national virtue, but “keeping a warm heart” is not. Even for those of us who have an automatic aversion to national self-glorification, flags, grandiose words and large and expressive crowds, it makes an indelible impression when people demonstrate that they do mean something, these ideas and values of the society we have inherited and more or less take for granted. The gathering said that Norwegians refuse to let anyone take away our sense of security and trust. That we refuse to lose this battle against fear.

And yet there is no road back to the way it was before.

Yesterday, on the train, I heard a man shouting in fury. Before Friday, my automatic response would have been to turn around, maybe even move a little closer. After all, this could be an interesting disagreement that might entice me to take one side or the other. But now my automatic reaction was to look at my 11-year-old daughter to see whether she was safe, to look for an escape route in case the man was dangerous. I would like to believe that this new response will become tempered over time. But I already know that it will never disappear entirely.

After the bomb went off — an explosion I felt in my home over a mile away — and reports of the shootings out on the island of Utoya began to come in, I asked my daughter whether she was scared. She replied by quoting something I had once said to her: “Yes, but if you’re not scared, you can’t be brave.”

So if there is no road back to how things used to be, to the naïve fearlessness of what was untouched, there is a road forward. To be brave. To keep on as before. To turn the other cheek as we ask: “Is that all you’ve got?” To refuse to let fear change the way we build our society.

Jo Nesbo is the author of the novel “The Snowman.” This article was translated from the Norwegian by Tiina Nunnally.
A version of this op-ed appeared in print on July 27, 2011, on page A23 of the New York edition with the headline: The Past Is a Foreign Country.

As is so often the case in disputes, the main conflict at Dale Farm is not between right and wrong, but between two different ‘rights’ – in both senses of that word. Some would say that the fault is all on the side of the Travellers who have built small homes and/or situated caravans on the site without planning permission. “They’re breaking the law; it’s as simple as that,” one person remarked to me. The Jewish principle would be dinad’malchutadina (‘the law of the land is the law’). We are obliged to follow the laws of the country in which we live. But what if there is another law that conflicts, as is so often the case in legal disputes in the Talmud? How do we decide which law to follow?

One of the things we should do is to consider the principles behind the conflicting laws. First of all, what is the law that the Travellers have broken? It is planning law, designed to protect the Green Belt. As an environmental activist, I support the goals of this law. And there is no doubt whatsoever that the Travellers have not ‘played by the rules.’ However, there are other facts that are conveniently being ignored by those pursuing this eviction.

 First of all, the Travellers are being evicted off THEIR OWN LAND, purchased many years ago on government advice. Government officials knew that the situation of the Gypsy and Traveller communities was only going to get worse. All over the country, sites that were once used for the moveable caravans were being closed down, developed and made off-limits. As those who have been desperately seeking alternatives to Dale Farm will tell you – there simply aren’t other places for them to go and to live as they wish.

Maryann, a woman in her 70’s, spoke warmly of the days when her people were able to travel to different places and to live in their preferred way of spending a few months in one place, then moving to another. “Our traditional way of life is almost gone,” she said. “Our young people have accepted that, though it still makes me sad. What we are trying to do here is to save something of it, keeping families and the community together.”

 Another woman I spoke to was almost hysterical: “I’ve seen where the Council want me to go. It’s on a housing estate where there is a lot of anti-Traveller feeling. They think we are all criminals. And the place has lots of glass; even the doors are glass and it doesn’t feel safe. Apart from being separated from many of my neighbours, I wouldn’t be able to sleep a wink in such a place.” Her assessment of the potential danger seemed more than reasonable to me.

The Travellers are vilified just as Jews were in this country in the early part of the twentieth century. And the language used clearly echoes the rhetoric of anti-Semitism. If you don’t believe this, have a look at the website www.jewify.org for examples of newspaper articles which substitute the word ‘Jew’ for ‘Gypsy’ or ‘Traveller’. The results are quite chilling.

 People may not be aware that the Travellers, along with the Gypsies and a limited number of other groups with similar lifestyle patterns, are officially recognised as ethnic minorities, just like our own Jewish community. As such, they deserve protection under European human rights law. Though undeniably different from the mainstream, their way of life is no less valid than our own – albeit that current planning law was not designed to accommodate it. The Travellers’ way is to live very closely together, in caravans or small semi-permanent dwellings. Their dwellings might seem too close for conventional English tastes, but who is to say that this is NOT a good way to live, if appropriate services can be arranged?

Maryann pointed out that all of her children and grandchildren live on Dale Farm, where they can all help and support each other. How many of us can say that our families are that close? I believe that the obligation to protect this ethnic minority’s way of life is a human rights issue that, in this particular and unusual case, may need to ‘trump’ the planning law designed to protect the ‘Green Belt’. 

Moreover, I would point out that applying the term ‘Green Belt’ to Dale Farm is flawed. This site was hardly virgin countryside. One of the locals, I would guess in her late 60’s, described to me how they used to burn tyres in this place when she was small. Land just to the east of the site was used from 1978 until 2001, with Council knowledge and approval, as a scrap metal yard. If the ‘Green Belt’ can give way for that, why not in this case for homes for families with nowhere else to go? I worry especially for the elderly in the Travelling community and for their school-age kids, who have had access to services such as health care and education because they have been allowed to stay at Dale Farm. What will happen to them when they are evicted?

In making decisions between two ‘rights’, we need to ascertain as best we can all the facts, then consider the human implications.

We expect this of the wider society concerning issues that affect our Jewish community. For example, we support shechitah as a method of slaughter, even though the majority of the wider British society supports stunning animals on humanitarian grounds. We argue that to abolish kosher slaughter would be a threat to traditionally observant Jewish life and thus to us as an ethnic group. Shechitah thus continues to be allowed because of the principles of tolerance and of protecting a minority group.



I would suggest that the same reasoning should be applied to the desire of the residents at Dale Farm to live in their time honoured way. As we used to say back in the 70’s – “Support the fringe – the edge is closer than you think.”

I didn’t see the programme with Terry Patchet, but I do have a possible contribution to a discussion. It’s a poem that arose as I was in the process of preparing a funeral for a man who had, with great dignity, thought and caring, or so it seemed to me, ended his own life. I will attach it.

A man has died –
and in the telling of his story;
in the listening, reading,
being with his somehow presence,
I am led to wonder
what’s the vow that underpins his life?

His writing is so deep in truth and love;
his children show me who he was
in things as simple yet profound
as how they stand;
his pictures show a warmth and joy,
his face so light-filled
that it lifts above the paper –
I could almost touch his cheek
and feel a blessing.
He knows the freedom of his choices –
neither bound by others nor a doctrine;
and in the end
he makes a brave and quiet choice,
a gentle, peaceful way to leave behind
his failing body
now his earth-bound work is finished.

And I know his vow is Love.

We’ve already just survived another such millenarian scare with the passing of May 21, 2011, when many were prophesying the coming of the Last Days. This was a specific prophecy I hadn’t heard of until just a couple of days before the apocalypse was supposed to occur. Talk about being out of the loop! But then I don’t pay much heed to apocalyptic prophecies. My inner mentor John used to say that prophecies focused your attention on a particular date or a specific event, leaving you oblivious to other potentially more important or challenging events that then blindside you.

This year is already a case in point. A great deal of attention in the form of books, videos, movies, articles, websites and the like has gone into focusing on 2012 as a year of catastrophes, but as far as natural disasters go, already we’ve had an earthquake and tsunami in Japan of historic proportions which brought on a nuclear emergency; and in the United States, an historic outbreak of tornadoes in the American Southeast, historic levels of snow and rain, and massive flooding of the Mississippi. Plus in the political and social arena, there’s been the historic (note how I need to keep using this word to describe the unprecedented nature of the events occurring around us) rise of the “Arab Spring” and the accompanying unrest and regime changes going on in the Middle East.

In all the buildup towards 2012, I don’t remember any psychic or prophet saying anything about 2011. This year got overlooked, and yet look around! It’s hardly an ordinary year, and it’s not even half over.

Back in the sixties when I lived in California, there was a new prophecy every year that the San Andreas fault would split with a great earthquake, and the western half of the State would slide into the Pacific. These prophecies were usually very specific, giving a day and a time when this would occur. When the time came nothing happened. Within a few weeks, a new psychic would emerge with yet another prophecy giving a new date and time for the following year, and the fever of expectation and speculation would begin all over again.

Such prophecies invariably come with lurid images of disaster and destruction; there’s a long history of this in Western culture. Usually, the scenario is that a special group will be saved (which almost always includes the one making the prophecy) while everyone else will either die or go through a period of tribulation and suffering. For evangelicals, the true believers will be raptured into heaven while the sinners go through hell on earth and then just hell. For many in the New Age and metaphysical movements of the Fifties, Sixties and Seventies, those who had the “right vibrations” would be taken up by friendly flying saucers while the rest of the earth was “cleansed” (i.e. those without the “right vibrations” being killed off by disasters and earth changes). Same scenario though with different modes of being saved and different winners, but in either case, most of humanity loses.

I call this “apocalypse porn.” It can be addictive, and it reduces people to victims in a planetary disaster movie. It is disempowering because it suggests that change cannot come through human effort and transformation or through joy and creativity but only through disaster and suffering.

There is a lighter version (“soft-core apocalypse porn”) in which the earth or civilization are not wholly destroyed but there are still enough disasters and catastrophes to bring about a change of consciousness in people that in turn will lead to building a bright, new world. But if you think about it, this is a highly inefficient and uncertain mode of transformation. How often do abuse and violence (and that’s what we’re talking about when we talk about apocalypse as a mode of human evolution and growth) lead to inner transformation and an expanded, more holistic consciousness? They are more likely to instill post traumatic stress syndrome and a constriction of consciousness as fear and the memory of pain settle in to the body.

When I asked John once about apocalypse, he said, “Humanity is not going to get out of doing the hard work of changing itself and creating the world you want. If you’ve created a mess in the world, you’re going to have to learn to clean it up yourselves.”

Once I met a famous psychic on the day after the day when she had predicted apocalypse would come. She wasn’t embarrassed by being wrong, she was livid, directing her anger at God, the universe, and everyone. “I hate this world,” she said. “I hate it! It has to be destroyed. I want it destroyed! Why wasn’t it destroyed? God has betrayed me!”

There are many things wrong with apocalypse porn as an attitude towards life, the world, humanity and the future. It gives the hope of escape, of change without the hard work of mindfully changing. It can delight in the drama of disaster. It is divisive and exclusive. It expresses the desire of one group of people that another group be destroyed. It glorifies death as a solution. In this it is no different in spirit from a person saying “I’m having problems with my neighbor, so I think I’ll go kill him.” Pulling a trigger is so much easier and simpler than sitting down with that neighbor and negotiating to work out the problems between you.

Apocalypse porn excites the imagination in one way but in another it deadens it. Thus, it creates closure. Apocalyptic prophecies talk about the end of the world, not the beginning, even though the word apocalypse itself comes from a root word meaning “revelation.”

In the Old Testament, Jonah prophesizes doom and destruction to the people of Nineveh unless they change their ways; then, sure that they won’t, he goes out a safe distance into the surrounding desert to watch God blast the city into nothingness. At that point, he is fully into apocalypse porn. But nothing happens. No fireworks, no earthquakes, no floods, no fires, no plagues, no meteor plunging in from outer space. The people have in fact repented and changed, which was the objective. Jonah had been thinking closure, but God, as always, was thinking opening.

We could say that the problem with Nineveh is that the people’s wanton, wasteful actions were creating closure, and God wanted them to stop and through love open themselves again to wider, richer, healthier, more creative possibilities.The prophecy really was if you keep on this way, you are going to close yourself into oblivion. What God wanted, though, wasn’t destruction but birth.This is true for the Mayan calendar and the 2012 prophecies. The individuals with whom I have discussed this who are scholars of Mayan culture and history tell me that for the Mayans themselves, December 21st of next year isn’t an ending but a beginning, the start of a new Long Count. And beginnings, like our celebration of New Year’s Day, always bring new possibilities. Again, not closure but openings.

I make a distinction between a prophecy and a prediction. Though both attempt to foretell the future, the former is a sentence while the latter is a recitation of observable facts. There is a world of difference between saying “If you keep smoking, you will damage your lungs,” which is a proven medical fact, and saying, “If you keep smoking, you are doomed!”

Predictions can be based on logical assumptions. They can be as simple as “if I build along earthquake fault lines, there is a high probability that eventually my buildings will fall down; if I build in a flood plain, there is a reasonable probability that my house will be washed away.” We are engaging in behaviors in our society that are far from balanced, healthy, loving, compassionate, and wise. Consequences will arise and are arising from this. But it doesn’t mean that we’re doomed and have no future. A statement about human stupidity implies difficult and unpleasant consequences ahead but it is not a statement of closure. We can re-imagine ourselves. We can change. We can do things differently. We can learn. We can grow. These are the options that apocalypse porn obscures or even denies.

There is another side to this coin, though. In September of 1962, when I was seventeen, I started college at Arizona State University. For at least a couple of years before this, but increasingly so in the first months of that year, there had been a growing number of psychically-received prophecies that a nuclear war was about to break out between the United States and the Soviet Union. A month later, it was revealed that Soviet missiles had been discovered in Cuba, and the Cuban Missile Crisis began. As was later shown when top secret documents from that time were revealed, we apparently did come within minutes of a nuclear holocaust. Civilization didn’t end that October in nuclear fires; the prophecies were incorrect. But psychics were definitely tuning into a possibility.

Delmore Schwartz, an American poet, said “Even paranoids have real enemies.” Prophecies, though they may be wrong in their specifics, may still be evidence that something important is going on and that we need to pay attention. May 21, 2011, definitely was not the end of the world, and December 21, 2012, will not be either. But they join a growing collection of impressions, prophecies, dreams, visions, and intuitions from literally hundreds of thousands of people around the world that humanity is on the brink of world-transforming change. The importance of this does not lie in the details of each individual impression or prophecy; almost certainly most if not all of them will be mistaken or wrong in their specifics. But taken together, they represent a powerful collective intuition that we as a species have reached a turning point (or tipping point) of some nature. It’s more than time that we paid attention.

True prophecy always holds out hope. This is because the function of prophecy really isn’t to foretell the future; it’s to inspire awareness and change in the present. It is, as I said, about opening, not about closure.

Apocalypse porn is not true prophecy. It inspires fear, and fear is notorious for creating boundaries, constrictions, and a narrowing of imagination, creativity and possibilities. We are at a time, I believe, when we cannot afford to be narrowed. If all the prophecies are right in essence, if not in specifics—and I believe that they are—then we need to reach out to each other across our boundaries to enhance communication and co-creativity. We need each other, not simply to survive but to think together, to feel together, to intuit together, to co-create together. We need to be expansive and collaborative with each other and with the world itself. For if the prophecies are correct in essence, and again I believe they are, then we are in the presence of immense possibilities and opportunities which can best be realized if we act together with love, compassion, and mutual respect.

At their best, prophecies—and prophets—reflect who we are in the moment and help us be in touch, as Lincoln put it, with the angels of our better nature so that we can engage the world and the future with wisdom, courage and vision. Apocalypse porn does none of that. It is simply a loss of faith in the human enterprise, a coward’s vision of a world grown too frightening to engage and a wish for the death that will provide escape.

It was this phrase, “walking on this Earth” that caught my attention. I was suddenly struck with the power and privilege involved in “walking on this Earth” and the richness that human beings bring to the world as they do so. The President’s statement, as it reverberated through my own mind, triggered thoughts that went far beyond the idea of death and focused instead on the potentialities of life. . .

. . . I’d been thinking about this throughout the week since. When President Obama said what he did about “walking the Earth,” my mind went to a whole other context than that of Osama bin Laden and his death. The question popped into my thoughts, “But who will we see walking on this Earth?” And the answer was, we see each of us. We are all continuing to walk this Earth.

This may seem too obvious to be worth a passing thought. But in addition, I had this image of someone walking the earth, and each time this person’s feet hit the ground sparks were generated. In my mind, “walking the Earth” was not simply a metaphor for being alive but became an image of power, a power generated by movement and engagement. In the curious ways that thoughts have of forming and associating with each other, I felt in that moment that it wasn’t enough just to “stand” on the earth, that is, simply to be here. One has to “walk” on the earth, extending one’s self into the life of this world.

Osama bin Laden extended himself into the life of the world in violent ways. In this he was unfortunately not alone, and I’m not just thinking of his fellow terrorists. We all have, on occasion, walked the earth with feet of anger and intolerance, fear and hate. Such footsteps raise clouds of distrust and violence around us. At the same time, all of us on occasion have also walked with feet of love and kindness, setting off sparks of goodwill and blessing.

People haven’t fully grasped how terrifyingly powerful Friday’s earthquake was. Imagine a force that is 8,000 times stronger than the New Zealand quake, a force so great that it pushed Japan’s landmass eight feet closer to America, a force that even shook the planet, shifting the earth’s axis by four inches! Yet, in Tokyo, the city of skyscrapers, not one building fell.

Two years in Tokyo makes one rather casual about earthquakes. Mild ones strike every week, some so weak, you don’t notice them, others with a slight shake that last 10 to 20 seconds. When the March 11 earthquake struck, my initial reaction was “oh well, another earthquake”. But suddenly things turned ominous. The shaking became intense. The floor began moving so much that standing upright became difficult. Our two-storied residence was rattling and shaking as if a giant wicked witch was shaking the earth as if it were a child’s rattle. I was absolutely sure the roof would come clattering down. And what was scary was that the earthquake was going on and on. It just wasn’t stopping. There was the deafening sound of the tectonic plates crashing below one’s feet. The shaking, rumbling and heaving must have gone on for at least two minutes before I realized- “Oh my God, this is the biggie”. When we moved to Tokyo, our Japanese friends had told us: “You are brave to come now. The giant earthquake is 70 years overdue!”

When the shaking finally stopped, I rushed to our terrace to see if the 60 storied building about a kilometer away still stood. I was 100 per cent sure that it would have disappeared from our skyline. I was certain every tall building nearby would have been reduced to a heap of rubble on the ground by this mother of an earthquake. I stared in disbelief. There the Mori Tower stood, the giant, glass-sheathed monster of a building, looking as it always did – a sensational spaceship that had parked itself in our midst. I looked around. Not one window pane in any of the buildings nearby had even cracked! I looked at myself. Not a scratch. I looked at our well-stocked library – not one book had fallen.

I was humbled by human brilliance. Imagine the ingenuity of Japanese earthquake proof technology that had withstood an earthquake that even shook the planet! Japanese technology is expensive, but worth every penny – it makes the difference between life and death.

As I knew this earthquake would be headline news on all TV channels in a matter of minutes, I called my loved ones in Norway, Australia and India to say we had survived a powerful earthquake. Just as well I did. Within half an hour, mobiles and landlines jammed as a stunned world watched an epic tragedy unfold. But amazingly, throughout this ordeal, the internet worked flawlessly. I was able to send and receive emails, make and receive phone calls on Skype. Again, I marveled the genius of technology created by man.

But that quickly changed as I watched in horror television footage of a tsunami caught live. I have never ever been more stunned by anything I have seen in my entire life. The earthquake had struck a meager 130 km from the coast of Japan. So within minutes, a 10 meter high tsunami tore into Japan’s northeast coast at the speed of a jumbo jet, uprooting, crushing, wrecking and tossing around everything that stood in its path – ships, cars, trucks, farmlands, houses, even factories. TV anchors were saying the death toll in the earthquake was about 3 dead. And I was silently screaming at them; “What rubbish are you saying? Are you not watching your own footage of this tsunami? Whole villages have been swept away by this destructive tsunami. This is thousands, maybe tens of thousands people, perishing before our eyes!”

I was humbled by the petrifying power of nature. I have never seen such force before and I hope I never will. The overwhelming feeling I had while watching the tsunami as it crashed in was how utterly powerless we humans are. How pathetic our arrogance. How shallow our ambitions. How utterly silly our material possessions. Nature tossed cars, boats, houses like worthless toys. Possessions that humans obsessed over, slaved a whole lifetime to accumulate, which they envied and yearned to own. Broken, twisted, mangled and cast aside like scrap. In a matter of minutes, prosperous towns and villages reduced to a junkyard.

As I watched the destruction, I couldn’t help but thinking that humankind would be better off returning to their Shinto (Japan’s animist religion), Hindu and pagan roots. We need to resurrect our reverence for nature enshrined in these old religions, but now forgotten in our mindless quest to plunder the planet for our greed and selfish cravings. The emptiness, worthlessness and transience of our new religion – materialism – were all too evident.

Friday March 11, 2.46 is a moment that all of us who were in Tokyo and the other affected areas and who are alive to tell our tales will remember for the rest of our lives. It is like the moment JFK was assassinated or 9/11 happened, remaining etched in our memories forever. This was like all of the world’s worst catastrophes combined together: measuring 9 on the Richter scale, the earthquake was among one of the worst to hit the world, followed by a terrifying tsunami and a rapidly escalating nuclear emergency that seems on the brink of spinning out of control. It is like catastrophic events from Noah’s Great Flood to 9/11, all combined at one time in one place!

Over the past two years I have come to admire many Japanese traits – carefulness, diligence, mindfulness, politeness, caring, honesty, safety standards, punctuality, cleanliness and social ethic. When the earthquake struck, my Japanese friend was trapped on the 37th floor of a skyscraper that was swaying like palm tree. Truly scary! The elevators shut down automatically and all the Japanese walked down the stairs in a calm and orderly fashion. In most other countries, if the earthquake had not killed people, the stampede would have!

I also have to marvel Japan’s disaster preparedness. Japanese authorities conduct regular emergency drills, bring earthquake simulators so we can physically experience the rattling of a size 7 earthquake, and instruct residents to stock plenty of food, medicines and water and expect electricity and water supply to stall for three days. But in Tokyo there has been no disruption. At home we have stocks of everything for a couple of weeks. We have Iodine tablets, masks and anti-radiation suits should a nuclear meltdown and blowout happen. We are now in unchartered nuclear territory, so we really cannot speculate what the outcome will be. The nuclear crisis is very serious, but knowledgeable experts say, it is not apocalyptic. My heart goes out to the heroic technicians battling in the nuclear plant and the people killed and shattered by the deadly tsunami. It would be a greater tragedy if the world forgets the plight of these brave employees who could die or be permanently impaired and the freezing, hungry and yet uncomplaining tsunami survivors whose lives have been ruined forever.

Seven tough days have gone by. But the end is not in sight yet. The aftershocks continue. The nuclear radiation fears intensify. TV channels do what they seem very good at – confuse viewers and aggravate panic. Many foreigners are leaving. I am staying on because I believe my place is beside my husband. And in the streets of Tokyo, the Japanese go about their daily lives, tense, but with their fabled calm and civility intact.

http://www.anitapratap.com

BOSTON — Halfway around the world from Tahrir Square in Cairo, an aging American intellectual shuffles about his cluttered brick row house in a working-class neighborhood here. His name is Gene Sharp. Stoop-shouldered and white-haired at 83, he grows orchids, has yet to master the Internet and hardly seems like a dangerous man.
Evan McGlinn for The New York Times

Gene Sharp, 83, is known for writing about nonviolence.
Related: Unrest Spreads, Some Violently, in Middle East (February 17, 2011)
Secret Report Ordered by Obama Identified Potential Uprisings (February 17, 2011)
Bahrain Turmoil Poses Fresh Test for White House (February 18, 2011)
Protests Take Aim at Leader of Libya (February 17, 2011)
Police Fire on Protesters in Iraq (February 17, 2011)
Freed by Egypt’s Revolt, Workers Press Demands (February 17, 2011)

But for the world’s despots, his ideas can be fatal. Few Americans have heard of Mr. Sharp. But for decades, his practical writings on nonviolent revolution — most notably “From Dictatorship to Democracy,” a 93-page guide to toppling autocrats, available for download in 24 languages — have inspired dissidents around the world, including in Burma, Bosnia, Estonia and Zimbabwe, and now Tunisia and Egypt.

When Egypt’s April 6 Youth Movement was struggling to recover from a failed effort in 2005, its leaders tossed around “crazy ideas” about bringing down the government, said Ahmed Maher, a leading strategist. They stumbled on Mr. Sharp while examining the Serbian movement Otpor, which he had influenced.

When the nonpartisan International Center on Nonviolent Conflict, which trains democracy activists, slipped into Cairo several years ago to conduct a workshop, among the papers it distributed was Mr. Sharp’s “198 Methods of Nonviolent Action,” a list of tactics that range from hunger strikes to “protest disrobing” to “disclosing identities of secret agents.”
Dalia Ziada, an Egyptian blogger and activist who attended the workshop and later organized similar sessions on her own, said trainees were active in both the Tunisia and Egypt revolts. She said that some activists translated excerpts of Mr. Sharp’s work into Arabic, and that his message of “attacking weaknesses of dictators” stuck with them.
Peter Ackerman, a onetime student of Mr. Sharp who founded the nonviolence center and ran the Cairo workshop, cites his former mentor as proof that “ideas have power.”

Mr. Sharp, hard-nosed yet exceedingly shy, is careful not to take credit. He is more thinker than revolutionary, though as a young man he participated in lunch-counter sit-ins and spent nine months in a federal prison in Danbury, Conn., as a conscientious objector during the Korean War. He has had no contact with the Egyptian protesters, he said, although he recently learned that the Muslim Brotherhood had “From Dictatorship to Democracy” posted on its Web site.

While seeing the revolution that ousted Hosni Mubarak as a sign of “encouragement,” Mr. Sharp said, “The people of Egypt did that — not me.”

He has been watching events in Cairo unfold on CNN from his modest house in East Boston, which he bought in 1968 for $150 plus back taxes. It doubles as the headquarters of the Albert Einstein Institution, an organization Mr. Sharp founded in 1983 while running seminars at Harvard and teaching political science at what is now the University of Massachusetts at Dartmouth. It consists of him; his assistant, Jamila Raqib, whose family fled Soviet oppression in Afghanistan when she was 5; a part-time office manager and a Golden Retriever mix named Sally. Their office wall sports a bumper sticker that reads “Gotov Je!” — Serbian for “He is finished!”

In this era of Twitter revolutionaries, the Internet holds little allure for Mr. Sharp. He is not on Facebook and does not venture onto the Einstein Web site. (“I should,” he said apologetically.) If he must send e-mail, he consults a handwritten note Ms. Raqib has taped to the doorjamb near his state-of-the-art Macintosh computer in a study overflowing with books and papers. “To open a blank e-mail,” it reads, “click once on icon that says ‘new’ at top of window.”

Some people suspect Mr. Sharp of being a closet peacenik and a lefty — in the 1950s, he wrote for a publication called “Peace News” and he once worked as personal secretary to A. J. Muste, a noted labor union activist and pacifist — but he insists that he outgrew his own early pacifism and describes himself as “trans-partisan.”

Based on studies of revolutionaries like Gandhi, nonviolent uprisings, civil rights struggles, economic boycotts and the like, he has concluded that advancing freedom takes careful strategy and meticulous planning, advice that Ms. Ziada said resonated among youth leaders in Egypt. Peaceful protest is best, he says — not for any moral reason, but because violence provokes autocrats to crack down. “If you fight with violence,” Mr. Sharp said, “you are fighting with your enemy’s best weapon, and you may be a brave but dead hero.”

Autocrats abhor Mr. Sharp. In 2007, President Hugo Chávez of Venezuela denounced him, and officials in Myanmar, according to diplomatic cables obtained by the anti-secrecy group WikiLeaks, accused him of being part of a conspiracy to set off demonstrations intended “to bring down the government.” (A year earlier, a cable from the United States Embassy in Damascus noted that Syrian dissidents had trained in nonviolence by reading Mr. Sharp’s writings.)

In 2008, Iran featured Mr. Sharp, along with Senator John McCain of Arizona and the Democratic financier George Soros, in an animated propaganda video that accused Mr. Sharp of being the C.I.A. agent “in charge of America’s infiltration into other countries,” an assertion his fellow scholars find ludicrous.

“He is generally considered the father of the whole field of the study of strategic nonviolent action,” said Stephen Zunes, an expert in that field at the University of San Francisco. “Some of these exaggerated stories of him going around the world and starting revolutions and leading mobs, what a joke. He’s much more into doing the research and the theoretical work than he is in disseminating it.”

That is not to say Mr. Sharp has not seen any action. In 1989, he flew to China to witness the uprising in Tiananmen Square. In the early 1990s, he sneaked into a rebel camp in Myanmar at the invitation of Robert L. Helvey, a retired Army colonel who advised the opposition there. They met when Colonel Helvey was on a fellowship at Harvard; the military man thought the professor had ideas that could avoid war. “Here we were in this jungle, reading Gene Sharp’s work by candlelight,” Colonel Helvey recalled. “This guy has tremendous insight into society and the dynamics of social power.”

Not everyone is so impressed. As’ad AbuKhalil, a Lebanese political scientist and founder of the Angry Arab News Service blog, was outraged by a passing mention of Mr. Sharp in The New York Times on Monday. He complained that Western journalists were looking for a “Lawrence of Arabia” to explain Egyptians’ success, in a colonialist attempt to deny credit to Egyptians. Still, just as Mr. Sharp’s profile seems to be expanding, his institute is contracting.

Mr. Ackerman, who became wealthy as an investment banker after studying under Mr. Sharp, contributed millions of dollars and kept it afloat for years. But about a decade ago, Mr. Ackerman wanted to disseminate Mr. Sharp’s ideas more aggressively, as well as his own. He put his money into his own center, which also produces movies and even a video game to train dissidents. An annuity he purchased still helps pay Mr. Sharp’s salary.
In the twilight of his career, Mr. Sharp, who never married, is slowing down. His voice trembles and his blue eyes grow watery when he is tired; he gave up driving after a recent accident. He does his own grocery shopping; his assistant, Ms. Raqib, tries to follow him when it is icy. He does not like it.

He says his work is far from done. He has just submitted a manuscript for a new book, “Sharp’s Dictionary of Power and Struggle: Terminology of Civil Resistance in Conflicts,” to be published this fall by Oxford University Press. He would like readers to know he did not pick the title. “It’s a little immodest,” he said. He has another manuscript in the works about Einstein, whose own concerns about totalitarianism prompted Mr. Sharp to adopt the scientist’s name for his institution. (Einstein wrote the foreword to Mr. Sharp’s first book, about Gandhi.)

In the meantime, he is keeping a close eye on the Middle East. He was struck by the Egyptian protesters’ discipline in remaining peaceful, and especially by their lack of fear. “That is straight out of Gandhi,” Mr. Sharp said. “If people are not afraid of the dictatorship, that dictatorship is in big trouble.”

Andrew W. Lehren contributed reporting from New York, and David D. Kirkpatrick from Cairo.

Almost 20 years ago, Samuel Huntingdon forecast a ‘clash of civilisations’. In the past few months, this clash has become outright war.

Christian minorities, who have lived peacefully in Muslim countries for generations, are finding themselves subject to increasingly violent persecution. Churches are being attacked in Egypt, Iraq, Nigeria, Indonesia and the Philippines. The recent assassination in Pakistan of a Muslim politician who defended a Christian woman sentenced to death for ‘insulting’ Islam was particularly shocking.

Pakistan has had blasphemy laws since its inception, but never before have they been used to persecute Christians. The Church of England has had a bishop in Lahore since 1877 to minister to Pakistan’s three million Christians, but only now has this become a dangerous mission. The victims are not just Christians. In the last two years, the Muslim world has sought to expel most minorities. The Sufis and Ahmadis in Pakistan feel just as anxious as the Christians. The Baha’i in Iran have long been persecuted, while the West turns a blind eye.

What we are witnessing is a growing, violent, worldwide intolerance. Pakistan’s steadily more aggressive application of its blasphemy laws has been mirrored by an ominous enthusiasm for religious registration laws in many countries, from Serbia to Uzbekistan. Europe knows only too well what manner of evil can spring from a mania for registration.

President Sarkozy put it succinctly a few weeks ago. ‘We are witnessing a wicked kind of religious cleansing,’ he declared.

It’s all too easy to imagine what might happen next. Persecution will lead to counter-attacks which could spark a civil war. A civil war will claim far more lives than any straightforward battle between nations. When communities separate, bloodshed is seldom far behind. One of the most murderous events in postwar history was the partition of India, in which nearly a million lives were lost.

The casualties in any forthcoming conflict will almost certainly be largely Christian. A recent report suggests that Christians now account for three-quarters of the world’s persecuted religious minorities.

So what to do about it? The problem is so varied and so widespread that it seems impossible to imagine a political solution. It is not a state but a religion that is threatened, so how to respond? Christians can turn to the police — but in many countries the police have other priorities. Churches can hire security guards; that was the precaution adopted by the Church of Christ in Maiduguri, Nigeria. But the guard was killed on Christmas Eve by an al-Qa’eda-inspired Islamic sect, along with a pastor and two choir members who had been practising for a late-night carol service.

Of all the Christian leaders worldwide, the Pope has been the most outspoken about the suffering of Christian minorities — little wonder, as the Vatican is constantly fed reports from his dioceses worldwide. His Christmas homily may have seemed inappropriately macabre: ‘This child has ignited the light of goodness in men and has given them strength to overcome the tyranny of might,’ he said, quoting Isaiah. ‘But at the same time, the rod of his oppressor is not yet broken. Boots of warriors continue to tramp and the garment rolled in blood still remains.’ But his words proved all too apt when a suicide bomb killed 21 Coptic Christians in Egypt days later. When the Pope condemned the attack, Cairo recalled its envoy to the Holy See in protest at what they saw as ‘meddling’.

The 7th of January is Christmas day for the Coptic church and, given the violence of the preceding month, many were braced for another tragedy. What happened next is an extraordinary event which went unreported in the British press. As Egypt’s Christians made their way to mass, they found they had protection: hundreds of Egyptian Muslims who, in protest at the jihadis’ agenda, had come to offer themselves as human shields by gathering outside the church. The front pew of a church in the Cairo district of Omraneya was filled with Muslims taking a stand against terror.

Tales of religious persecution in the Muslim world are likely to abound this year. The struggle for religious tolerance may well become the defining conflict of the decade, and the best chance of defeating this evil lies with those brave Muslims who are prepared to risk their lives for their Christian neighbours. All power to them.

Editorial: Spectator, 15 January 2011 p3