That debate centres on one major question: does environmental stress cause conflict?Now that the world has become a village, do the villagers realise sufficiently that they must take account of the fact that they share their ecological space with each other?After arriving in Brazil, in 1997, I well remember a speech by a retired general of the US armed forces at MIT in which he argued that further rapid deforestation of the Brazilian Amazon region could be considered a direct threat to the national security of the United States. A casus belli.Whatever value you want to attach to these words I leave to the imagination of your good selves. But it is clear that issues of environment and natural resources are becoming more and more part of the debate on conflict and peace.. Well, at last, and for the worst of all reasons, we are buzzing about Chechnya like furious bees.
In that sense, at least, those homicidal men and women who took over the theatre in Moscow achieved something. They imprisoned the innocent, killed three of them and terrified the rest, until the Russian authorities stormed in leaving more a hundred dead and many more injured. The media and the Russian authorities describe them as Muslim separatists, not as paramilitaries fighting for freedom from Russian occupation, which is how they see themselves. We may loathe their latest act of terror – and I do without reservation – but that is no excuse to misrepresent deliberately the excruciating struggles of the Chechen people, which, in the eyes of radicalised Muslims is just one more example of how unfair the world is to their people.Depressingly, the only time Muslims get seen and heard by the world is when the pitiless among them turn to sickening violence or if they threaten Armageddon. Until this happens, their grievances and aspirations are ignored or crushed by the powerful.
When it happens, moral authority is claimed by the latter to perpetuate accusations against all Muslims. Serb nationalists are not seen as Christian terrorists, nor did their activities ever blight all other Christians But Muslims are different. We now know, guys, that damned Muslims are the indisputable barbarians in the new globalised world where all the rest of humanity has embraced the postmodern universe of pleasure and profit.Even Russia, our old enemy now smiles and shakes our hands. Old Communists are so much more civilised than these clothheads who did the twin towers, Bali and now Moscow, not to mention all those sniper murders in and around Washington All bloody al-Qa’ida, obviously. I wouldn’t be surprised if Ulrika was molested by a Muslim (you know how they are with blondes).You could see this as the continuation of what Edward Said and other scholars have called “Orientalism”, the demonisation of and unjustifiable violence against Muslims through history.
