TM, ®, Copyright © 2005 Piero Scaruffi All rights reserved.
News of 2007
- (December 2006)
Who is being left behind.
The World Bank just published a statistic of which countries have climbed or
lost in the rating of GDP (gross domestic product) over the last 20 years.
Almost all Far Eastern countries have climbed several positions
(Singapore alone climbed 20 positions!).
Almost all Latin American countries (notably Argentina, Brazil and Venezuela)
lost positions.
The only exceptions in Latin America are Mexico and Chile (both +2).
Even Egypt and Pakistan fared better than the regional "powers" of Latin
American.
As we look ahead, it is easy to predict that the oil-producing countries
will rapidly climb positions, but that only includes one Latin country (Venezuela). It is also likely that some African countries (Nigeria, Ghana, Botswana)
will finally begin to climb positions.
Thus in the long term the real loser is Latin America. All other regions of
the world have reason to be optimistic about their future, but Latin America
seems to be condemned to become less and less relevant.
Another World Bank statistics ranks countries by their "ease of doing business". The first Latin American country is Chile (28th) followed by Mexico (43rd). Even Namibia comes
before Mexico.
Another relevant statistic was published by the OECD: patent filings (i.e.,
inventions) as a percentage of GDP. This statistic is dominated by Europe,
Japan and the USA. Again, the Pacific region (from Singapore to Australia)
is rapidly growing in the number of inventions. Again, Latin America is
virtually absent.
In december 2006 the Economist published the GDP growth forecasts for 2007:
Azerbaijan (18%), followed by Sudan (12%), Angola (10%), Mauritania, Liberia, Kazakhstan, CHina, Armenia, Ethiopia, United Arab Emirates... There is no Latin
American country in sight. Thus even Africa seems to be posed for faster growth
than Latin America. Will Africa pass Latin America in a decade or two the same
way that Asia did?
The failure of Latin America to leverage their many advantages over the rest
of the world is stunning.
Latin American countries have been independent for two centuries. They have
enjoyed more freedom and peace than any other corner of the planet. They were
blessed with virtually unlimited natural resources. They spoke Spanish or
Portuguese, which made it very easy for them to access the vast repertory of
knowledge produced by European scientists.
And, still, they accomplished very little in those two centuries.
Their countries have been overtaken by Asia, Eastern Europe and now even by
the Arab world, all places that lagged far behind Latin America two centuries ago.
It is difficult to name a major achievement of Latin America over the last
two centuries. Latin Americans just did not contribute anything of substance
(as far as technology and economics go) to the history of the world.
They seem prisoners of a "culture of failure". They failed in the political,
economic, scientific and technological arena.
Last but not least, the societies of Latin America are a mess, still plagued
by ethnic discrimination, high unemployment, outrageous wealth gaps, corruption,
etc.
The solution for many Latin Americans is simple: emigrate to the USA and
sometimes Europe.
Unfortunately, one can see this as exporting to the USA their culture of
failure. Other than salsa dancing, it is not clear what these immigrants bring
to the USA.
As of 2006, Hispanics now outnumber blacks as the largest minority group in
the USA (39 million).
But their contributions to the technological, business and scientific life of the USA lags behind most ethnic groups. Only blacks are less Internet-savvy
than Hispanics. Indians, Muslims and Far Easterners routinely outperform Hispanics in education and business. Hispanics even rank lower than Asians
in hygiene and diet. Blacks and Hispanics account for 70% of
AIDS cases
in heterosexual men, 70% of those in women, and 75% of those in children.
There are obvious historical reasons why blacks do not fare well in the USA.
It is not clear why Hispanics would fare as badly as blacks, other than due to
the cultural, social and political traditions of their original countries.
The immigrants who came to the USA from Europe and Asia were bringing a culture
of innovation that had existed for thousands of years. Even if they were poor
and illiterate, their motivation to innovate was gigantic. So much so that
the USA was literally founded on an unprecedented number of inventions.
How many inventions has Latin America produced in two centuries?
This alone would explain the gap between the USA (that went on to become the
world's superpower) and Latin America (that may become the least
developed of the regions of the world).
One wonders if the recent massive immigration from Latin America could
dramatically alter the very cultural and social fiber of the USA.
What made the USA a superpower was precisely this unprecedented technological
boom. This technological boom seems to embody precisely the opposite
philosophy of life of Latin America. Latin America is, in a sense, the "enemy"
of the "American way of life", because it is founded on values that are
the opposite of the ones that made the USA what it is today.
The problem runs deeper than Latin Americans would like to admit.
The Spanish people who colonized Latin America were not scientists and
inventors: they were mostly bandits. The "indios" of Latin America are
descendants of civilizations (Incas, Aztecs, Mayas) that were lagging
hundreds or thousands of years behind their European and Asian counterparts.
When they were defeated by the Spanish conquistadores,
the Incas had not invented writing or the wheel yet.
Machu Picchu was founded 22 centuries after Rome and 44 centuries after Ur.
The Mayas fared a bit better but nonetheless lagged three thousand years behind
the Sumerians in inventing writing. And countless technological and cultural
inventions that were already widespread in Europe and in Asia never appeared
in Meso-America.
The current societies of Latin America are the product of the coexistence of
these two cultural strands: the largely uneducated Spanish and Portuguese
colonizers and the backward native civilizations.
The history of Latin America probably explains (at least in part) their
attitudes towards technology, science and business. In fact, today more than
ever the cultural gap of Latin America stands out, because never before
has the world engaged in such a dramatic technological race.
TM, ®, Copyright © 2005 Piero Scaruffi All rights reserved.
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- (December 2006)
Trends of 2006.
Here are my personal view of what are the most important trends in the world today:
- The rise of oil-producing countries and of cheap-manufacturing countries, both fueled by the gigantic USA trade deficit. Both groups of countries include enemies or at least rivals of the USA. Even if this were not case, the rise of these two blocks would inevitably dent the power of the USA. But the fact that some of these countries (from Iran to Venezuela, from China to Russia) have an
anti-USA agenda makes this trend even more relevant. The USA is basically funding its own demise as the world's superpower.
- The increasing unhappiness of Western civilization. There may be differences in the causes and the effects, but the USA, Western Europe and Japan share a fundamental trend towards unhappiness. One can see it from statistics on suicides, neuroses, depression, divorces, drug addiction, alcoholism, teenage angst, etc.
Western people are just not happy, no matter how much and how loud they laugh,
no matter how much they spend, no matter how much fun and sex they have.
This trend contrasts with a trend towards greater happiness in most of East Asia.
- The disappearance of the middle class. From Russia to the European Union to the USA, the middle class seems to be under attack. The rich are getting (wildly) richer, creating a huge and lucrative market for luxury items, while the middle class is getting poorer relative to the cost of living. In Russia and China this is due to unbridled capitalism. In the European Union this is due to a system that fails to create jobs for the children of the middle class, while taxing the middle class to death. In the USA this is due to a system that
(from outsourcing to immigration to real estate)
rewards the rich while strangling the middle class.
The net effect is that just about everywhere the middle class is forced to
shot at discount stores while luxury stores boom not far away.
- The public has largely become immune to violence. The post-yuppie generation does not identify, sympathyze or empathyze with the masses of people being killed around the world. College campuses are more interested in careers than in saving the world. The post-yuppie generation is more interested in the fancy restaurant or salsa clubs than in avoiding wars. One reason might be that the establishment has successfully decoupled the victim abroad and the victim here: e.g., there is no draft, unlike during the Vietnam war. Therefore a person who dies in Darfur is simply a person who dies in Darfur, which has no effect on your plans for friday night or on your plans for the holidays. Violence has never been so prominent in the news media, but fewer and fewer people are interested in watching it. In fact, fewer and fewer people watch the news media, as the Internet is rapidly replacing the "evening news" as the main source of information. The news sources on the Internet provides a much more superficial form of information than the traditional reportage (with live pictures, interviews and round table) of the past.
- Young people are less and less interested in changing the world. They are interested in integrating in the world that their parents created for them. They don't seem interested in questioning it.
- The trivialization of the human experience. Reality shows, MTV Jackass and YouTube are examples of wildly successful entertainment that is fundamentally based on less than average people, and often on very dumb people. Stupidity is more likely to attract the attention of millions of people than intelligence. How many people can understand the latest scientific discovery? How many people can understand a stupid action by a stupid man? The difference between the two numbers is millions. In the age of marketing, when the only thing that really matters is how many people pay attention to you, stupidity pays off because it draws attention. People are beginning to compete on the basis of stupidity: if i can do something more stupid than you, it is likely that more people will look at me rather than you.
- The demise of the hero. It used to be that everybody watched and read the same news. And that the number of news was relatively limited. Therefore the news of someone doing something spectacular was very likely to capture the imagination of the entire nation. This is becoming less and less feasible. The source of information is more and more scattered, with hundreds of Internet sites and even cellular phones providing news coverage. The "evening news" are rapidly becoming a tradition of the old generation. The post-yuppie generation will never know what a hero is because the critical mass of news coverage about one specific event is becoming virtually impossible.
TM, ®, Copyright © 2005 Piero Scaruffi All rights reserved.
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- (September 2006)
Islam and violence.
A Danish newspaper publishes cartoons of Mohammed (the man whom Muslims believe
was a prophet sent by god to a remote Arabian desert to start a new religion)
and thousands (if not millions) of Muslims all over the world condemn the whole
of Denmark, threaten the lives of all Danish citizens, attack the whole of
Europe, Israel and the USA, threaten the lives of one billion Christians; all of
this because one newspaper in Denmark published something that they think it
is not appropriate.
The Pope makes a statement that links Islam and violence (hard not to link the
two these days, given that most violence in the world takes place in Islamic
countries and the rest of the world is pretty much at peace for the first time
in the history of the world). Again, thousands if not millions of Muslims
hold the entire Christian world responsible and threaten extreme violence
against the whole of Christianity.
The principle is: if your brother does something wrong to me, i am entitled
to kill you, your family, your brother's neighbors, your brother's entire
nation, and anyone who worships the same religion as your brother.
By the standards of 2006, this is senseless. It is a stone-age tribal
mentality that the rest of the world abhors.
There are daily killings in Iraq that are inspired by brutal violence not seen
in any other part of the world since Rwanda. If the United Nations leave,
the people of Darfur tell us that they will all be slaughtered by the Arab
militias of Sudan. Some Muslim gangsters still behead their victims (a murder
is a murder, regardless of how it is carried out, but beheading the victim
requires a level of enjoyment of violence that most criminals around the world
do not have). The same ferocity is reported from the Philippines to Pakistan.
Again, it is not so much that the Islamic world has criminals. The West has
probably more criminals, and plenty of serial killers. But the Islamic world
seems to be the only one where those criminals, and even ordinary people,
still act the way stone-age humans acted. There is still a tribal attitude in
the Islamic world that the rest of the world has largely abandoned over the
centuries. There is a level of joyful brutality that the rest of the world is
not used to anymore. True: millions of Muslims do not engage in terrorism
or crime of any sort. But nowhere like in the Islamic world do you find so
much "understanding", justification and sympathy for those brutal killings.
It is difficult to find one citizen of a non-Islamic country who sympathyzes
with a mass murderer. It is relatively easy to find Muslims who sympathyze with
the sectarian killings in Iraq, with the suicide bombers of Palestine, with
the Taliban's stadium trials in Afghanistan, with Al Zarqawi's bombs against
civilians, with the September 11 terrorists, with Saddam Hussein.
How many Israelis have you seen celebrate the death of a Palestinian child?
How many USA citizens have you seen celebrate the death of an Iraqi civilian?
You can find millions of Muslims who celebrate the death of an Israeli child
killed by a suicide bomber.
You can find millions of Muslims who approve the deliberate killing
of USA civilians on september 11.
(From Jordan to Yemen it was actually hard for me to find anyone willing to
condemn either Palestinian suicide bombers or the September 11 attacks or
Al Zarqawi's terrorism in Iraq).
The fact that most terrorists in the world are Muslims is, all considered,
not so important. It is the behavior of Islamic societies and masses that
is disturbing. Whether it comes from Mohammed or not, it is hard not to link
Islam and violence. There is a repeated pattern of behavior in the Islamic world
that harks back to the stone age and that, ultimately, shows little respect
for life. (As a vegetarian, i can also add that only in the darkest regions
of the southern USA states and in the most primitive villages of France
have i met people who are still so proud and happy to slaughter animals and
who ridicule anyone who wants to protect the life of an animal).
It is hard to deny that Muslims do not share the same values that the rest
of the world (West, China, Russia, India, Latin America, Black Africa) has
come to share. Muslims may be right (that life is not so
important, and that we should go back to the tribal mentality of the stone
age) but they are just out of
synch with the rest of the world. And that is a cause (if not "the" cause)
for a lot of the trouble that is going on wherever there are Muslim communities.
The real "terrorism" comes from the behavior of ordinary Muslims.
When a Muslim accepts the logic that the entire population of Denmark must
be punished for what one Danish person has done, that Muslim has legitimized
all Islamic terrorism, which is founded on that very principle.
After all, none of the extreme violence in the Islamic world (from Al Qaeda
to the Sunni death squads of Baghdad) could exist if it were not tolerated
by the masses.
Does this passion for extreme violence and indiscriminate retribution come
from Mohammed and/or the Quran? You can draw your own conclusions: Mohammed
is the only founder of a major religion who personally killed people; Islam
was born out of a religious war and started the trend of religious wars; Mecca
was a model of religious tolerance before Mohammed and became a model of
religious intolerance after Mohammed destroyed all the other "idols"; three
of the first four caliphs were murdered; the very family of Mohammed was
massacred, and today's Sunnis are the descendants of the politicians who
massacred it; Islam has been at war since the first day it was born; the
Quran repeatedly invites Muslims to violence.
Of all the shocking denials one can hear while traveling through the Islamic
world, the most stunning is the denial that Islam has anything to do with
violence. If Mohammed, the Quran and Islam have nothing to do with violence,
one wonders what does.
Islam's name comes from the expression "Aslem Taslam" ("surrender if you want
to be saved") that Muslims used during their invasions to convince the enemy
to surrender. That expression was first used by Mohammed in person.
Those who did not "aslem" were killed. If Muslims want to believe that their
religion is peaceful, they should start by changing its name. And, maybe,
stop threatening everybody of death.
TM, ®, Copyright © 2005 Piero Scaruffi All rights reserved.
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- (June 2006)
A new age of rampant inflation?
It has been a long time since the world experienced so many inflationary
pressures. The oil crises of the 1970s (the last time that the
West was devastated by hyper-inflation) was followed by a decade of relatively
mellow economic growth in the USA and Europe and by a stubborn period of
recession and stagnation in Japan.
After the end of the Cold War the West (and the entire world) experienced an
economic boom, but a huge amount of cheap labor flooded
the capitalist world, thus creating a deflationary pressure that has compensated
for any inflationary pressure.
There are several reasons why this balance may be approaching a sudden end:
- The main source of cheap goods, China, may increase the prices of those goods due to a) an increase in its currency, b) an increase in labor costs due to pressure to respect human rights and demands for higher salaries, c) rising costs of the materials needed to manufacture those "cheap" goods (i.e., rising commodity prices)
- Commodity prices are likely to continue rising as long as the demand continues to rise. Barred a global economic downturn, new economic powers such as China and India will keep demanding more and more mineral resources. This will increase the prices for every country in the world and therefore the costs of every good in the world.
- The huge USA trade deficit will require a steady decline in the value of the dollar, that will cause in turn a steady rise of imported goods. If inflation starts in the USA, it will spread to the rest of the world.
- Protectionist sentiment in the West will eventually force politicians to reintroduce trade barriers of some kind or another, thus further increasing the costs of "cheap" imports.
- Tighter immigration policies in the USA and the European Union will result in higher salaries and therefore rising costs
- The Anglosaxon economies are creating jobs and reducing unemployment, which inevitably results in higher salaries
- There is no technological revolution that will significantly reduce the costs of manufacturing the way that the technological revolution of the 1990s did
It will take very little to start a vicious loop of rising inflation.
TM, ®, Copyright © 2005 Piero Scaruffi All rights reserved.
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- (June 2006)
The era of peace.
For those who focus on the many Islamic wars (Israel, Chechnya, Darfur, Somalia, Philippines, Indonesia, Kashmir, etc etc), it may sound like a crazy statement, but the numbers show that we are living the most peaceful era in the history
of the world. Never have so few people died in wars. Never have entire continents been at peace. For the first time in the history of the world Europe is at peace. For the first time in its history, all of Latin America (except Cuba) is
a democracy. For the first time in history, black Africa is almost completely
at peace (minus the ever shrinking wars in Congo and Ivory Coast).
Asia has four giant powers (Russia, China, India and Japan) that are not even
thinking of starting a war. Except for small civil wars in Nepal and Sri Lanka
(both dying out) the eastern part of the Asian continent is at peace.
Most importantly, the powers of the world are at peace with each other.
Their competition is now in the economic (not military) arena.
If one does not consider the Islamic world for a minute, the world has solved
most of its problems. Needless to say, the Islamic world is 15% of the world's
population, so it is not a detail. In fact, its relevance is precisely
asserted by all the wars that Muslim communities are waging in two continents
(four if one considers also Islamic terrorism).
I have already analyzed the reasons why the Islamic world is moving in the
opposite direction of the rest of the world (see The rise of the Quran), but it is worth mentioning if the world peace
that we are experiencing may be due precisely to the Islamic wars.
Are the powers at peace for good, or are they at peace because right now
their main concern is the religious wars waged by Islam against all of them
(in Chechnya against Russia, worldwide against the USA, in Kashmir against
India, in Eastern Turkestan against China)? If tomorrow morning one billion
Muslims decided to curse Mohammed and forget about all the dogmas of Islam,
would the powers still be at peace or would they turn against each other?
History has taught us over and over again that the fall of an enemy is usually
the beginning of a new war between the very powers that were allied against
that enemy (think of Britain versus Germany after the fall of the French empire,
the Soviet Union versus the USA after the defeat of Germany and Japan, Islam
versus the USA after the collapse of the Soviet Union).
There are crises that have never been resolved (e.g., the status of Taiwan
between China and the USA, the status of Tibet between China and India,
the status of the Central Asian republics between Russia and the USA, the
status of Eastern Europe between the European Union and Russia): are they
truly fading away and becoming a footnote of diplomacy or are they simply
in a state of gestation, to become the seeds of future wars as soon as the
current common enemy (Islam) is defeated?
TM, ®, Copyright © 2005 Piero Scaruffi All rights reserved.
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- (March 2006)
Freedom of religion and freedom of speech.
Throughout the history of human civilization, religion has arguably been the
main force opposing freedom of speech. Catholics burned dissidents, Muslims
still kill anyone who "offends" Islam. The least democratic countries in the
world have traditionally been the most religious ones, such as in Latin
America and the Islamic world (the last two regions to democratize).
Even when a country has become a democracy, religion tends to be the main
factor that limits freedom of press and freedom of speech. The only significant
enemy of freedom within the USA is the Christian fundamentalist lobby.
The main enemy of freedom in western countries such as Italy is the
Catholic Church. And some of the worst abuses of human rights consistently
occur in Islamic countries.
The USA has become the main defender of religion around the world. This
sounds ironic (isn't the USA the leader of the free world?) if one does not
add what i have omitted from the previous paragraph: communism.
The main enemy of the Western democracies between 1945 and 1991 was communism,
particularly the Soviet Union. Since religion was also an enemy of the
Soviet Union, and the enemy of my enemy is my friend, the USA started a
massive program to support both Christians (to the west of the Soviet Union)
and Muslims (to the south) in order to cripple the enemy. It worked. Pope
John Paul II (a Polish Christian) and the Mujaheddin (Afghan Muslims supported
by an Islamic army made up of Muslims from all over the world) caused
the downfall of the Soviet Union and contributed to the triumph of the USA.
(Communism had actually much in common with religion, a religion with god
replace by the state, but that is another story).
The logic has remained the same. Today the USA defends Fulan Gong, a religious
sect founded in 1992 by Li Hongzhi in communist China. The USA would hardly
know of its existence if this sect operated in Western Europe. But anything
that defies the communist government of Beijing is automatically protected
by the USA. The truth is that nothing in Fulan Gong's ideology speaks in favor
of democracy, just like nothing in the Catholic Church or in Islam spoke in
favor of democracy.
The USA stepped up to defend the rights of the Muslims of Uzbekistan
and of Jews worldwide. Slowly the USA is becoming the defender of all faiths
worldwide. After the USA was attacked by Islamic terrorists in 2001,
George W Bush went out of his way to declare that his war on terror was not a
war on islam (the main cause of terror in the world), and the USA army has
been faithful to that statement, carefully avoiding to damage mosques
(buildings that according to religious superstition are holy) and to arrest
clerics (even when they openly endorsed murder).
But religion remains the main enemy of freedom, particularly monotheistic
religion. If there is a God and only one God, as Christians and Muslims
proclaim, it is hard to see how a faithful can reconcile freedom (my freedom
to do things forbidden by the Gospels or by the Quran) and his religious duties.
Monotheism "is" inherently totalitarian. The USA, originally a state clearly
separated from religion, is now living the contradiction of a strong religious
movement pitted against the rights of non-religious people to live very
non-religious lives. One has to face the question: are people allowed to
live non-religious lives or not? Today the USA does not quite know what
to answer. Abortion is not an issue because it could be murder: even the
most fundamentalist idiot knows that it is not a murder because there is
noone being murdered. It is an issue because, according to some monotheistic
religions, humans should never tamper with God's will. The issue is God's
will, not the cognitive status of the foetus. Ditto for Evolution: the issue
is not whether animals evolved or not (ancient Greeks already knew that they
do), the issue is that the holy book of three monotheistic religions says
otherwise, and those holy books are supposed to be the word of God (the only
God, an infallible God).
When the USA defends religion around the world (notably in Islamic countries),
it is exporting its contradiction to regions that are even more oppressed by
the dictatorship of organized (and especially monotheistic) religion.
The civil war in Iraq is a typical product of religion.
Countless revolutions have failed because they were hijacked by religion
(famously in Iran, which now has the most Islamic government on the planet).
The free world has long used religion as a weapon against its enemy (communism).
The free world seems to forget that it was just a weapon of convenience.
Religion is as much an enemy of freedom as communism was.
The free world should make up its mind about religion. If religion has a right
to control the minds of the people, then let's abandon the pretense of freedom.
If religion does not have such a right, then let's fight an anti-jihad
(with the heart, with the word and with the hand) against all religions
of the world.
The same contridiction can be seen at a different level, as the fight
between science and superstition. A country is admitted to the club of
"modern" countries if science has eliminated superstition. But all religion
is superstition. Believing that one has to pray every sunday in a church
or that one has to pray five times a day towards a small village of the
Arabian peninsula or that dead people are reborn or that offering food
to a god solves a problem are all forms of superstition.
Do we believe in Newton, Darwin and Einstein, or do we believe in prophets?
If a person claims that Paris is the capital of Germany, that person is unlikely
to obtain a job in a geographical institute. But if a person claims that an
invisible being called Allah had nothing better to do than speak to a citizen
of Mecca named Mohammed or that a Jewish kid of Betlehem was actually the son
of an invisible being called God (all based on their words), that person is
still likely to obtain a job that requires rational skills.
The free/modern world is living in an age of transition, away from religion
but not quite embracing science, away from dictatorship but not quite
embracing freedom.
TM, ®, Copyright © 2005 Piero Scaruffi All rights reserved.
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- (february 2006)
Survival strategies for the non-Islamic world and for the Islamic world.
The world has roughly tried five strategies to deal with the Islamic world:
bomb (Russia), erase (China), ignore (Chirac), fence (Sharon)
and reform (Blair/Bush).
The Soviet Union and now Russia have resorted to massive violence in order
to restrain Islam and basically turn it into a secular movement. They taught
the Muslims of Central Asia that mosques and madrasas are cultural monuments,
not religious sites. This has largely worked: none of the former Soviet
republics has a majority of practicing Muslims.
China first tried the Soviet method, but apparently it has been more
successful using the method first experimented by Hu Jingtao in Tibet:
erase the culture by improving the economic conditions, by creating
economic opportunities for the Muslims themselves and, last but not least,
by relocating masses of non-Muslims into Islamic lands. Opposition to Chinese
domination of Turkestan has largely faded because everywhere in Turkestan
the Muslim population wants to live in the newly rebuilt Chinese areas
(broad clean avenues, shopping malls, high-rise apartment buildings,
modern schools and hospitals) not in the old Muslim quarters (narrow dirty
noisy streets and poor decaying infrastructure). And, in any case, there
will soon be more ethnic Chinese than ethnic Turks (more non-Muslims than
Muslims).
Sharon's fence is a broader metaphor for a desperate view of the relationships
between the Islamic world and the non-Islamic world. The fence symbolizes the
desire to just stop every possible contact with Muslims.
Contrary to what your average Islamic propagandist tells you, Israel is
ideologically opposed to the indiscriminate killing of Muslim civilians.
A democracy just cannot do that without alienating the support of its own
electoral base. Thus Israel cannot use the Soviet system. It cannot use
the Chinese system either, because it does not have the huge Chinese population
to settle in Muslim areas. Therefore Israel had to come up with a different
solution. Sharon's fence is the first rational solution that Israel came up
with.
Chirac's model is the good old European model: live and let live. Chirac wants
the west to ignore the Islamic world, do business with their dictators (which
really means "import oil" because the Islamic world buys or sells very little
else) and let their dictators and clerics do what they will. This view was
very popular with Europeans because Europeans thought it was not worth "saving"
the Islamic world. Many Europeans view the Islamic world as a stone-age world
that cannot be easily reformed, and in any case should not be reformed by
outsiders. Having had centuries of experience when European countries colonized
the world, Europeans talk because of more or less direct experience.
The Blair/Bush model is the opposite model. They also want to do business with
the Islamic world, but they also want to reform the Islamic societies so that
the relationships become more rational and civilized. They oppose the idea of
a fence (because either impractical or unfair or unnecessary). They oppose
the idea of tolerating the various dictators of the Islamic world.
Like Israel, they cannot use the Soviet or Chinese methods.
Therefore they came up with the ultimate missionary project: reform
the Islamic world according to the democratic values of the Christian world
(a contradiction that is very clear to Osama and Zarqawi but still eludes
Bush, Blair and all the "moderate" Muslims of the world).
Some would want to add the Indian model to the picture. After all, India
has more Muslims than any other country in the world (Islamic or not).
But India also has the highest number of victims to religious/ethnic clashes.
So it is more an anarchic model (where the government lets mobs fight each
other) than a centralized model.
After the publication of cartoons that made fun of Mohammed (the man whom
Muslims consider a holy prophet and whose depiction is, they think, forbidden),
and the subsequent violent protests in many parts of the Islamic world,
there has been a huge backlash against Islam in Europe.
This was the proverbial last straw. Europeans had already exhausted their
patience with the endless list of Muslim grievances. A Dutch filmmaker was
killed for insulting Islam, and few Muslims objected to that killing.
Muslims blew up the Madrid station. Muslims sent death threats to anyone
daring to speak against Islam. Muslims rioted in the streets of French
cities. Basically, every month some Muslims make the headlines in Europe
for trying to impose their will over the entire continent.
The perception by many in Europe is that Europe is slowly becoming an Islamic
dictatorship, in which the will of a few local Muslims and, more importantly,
the will of millions of Muslims who live outside Europe, decides what
Europeans can do, write and think.
For millions of Europeans this is a paradox. It took centuries for Europeans
to get rid of the dictatorship of their own religion (Christianity, mainly
represented by the Roman Church). Now not only there is fear of a new religious
dictatorship, but it is not even a European religion that tells Europeans to
obey the Roman dogma, it is someone else's religion that comes to Europe and
tells Europeans to obey the Meccan dogma.
An undesired consequence of the cartoons riots is the sudden popularity
of right-wing politicians.
An Italian minister, who is a member of a right-wing party, proudly displayed on national television a shirt deemed offensive by Muslims. The Italian prime minister Silvio Berlusconi asked the minister to resign. The minister resigned.
(Incidentally, Libya later suspended the interior minister who ordered the police to fire at the demonstrators that were attacking the Italian consulate, in other words punishing the minister who tried to stop the mob).
The resignation of the Italian minister is another gift to the right-wing parties of Europe: a minister was forced to resign because Muslims rioted against
a European country. Does that mean that, from now on, European ministers
will have to resign every time a Muslim mob, somewhere in the world, riots
against some European countries?
(Not long ago, a Spanish prime minister lost an election because Muslims blew
up the Madrid rail station).
European right-wing parties, from Holland to Denmark to France to Italy, sense
a historical opportunity. For decades they have been viewed as nostalgic and
senile people who long for the grotesque parades of Mussolini and Petain.
Suddenly, they can present themselves as the real defenders of European
freedom and (gasp) democracy. They are the only ones who stand up against
the Islamic dictatorship. Thus the continuining provocations by the right-wing
politicians. It is the old Sharon strategy: Sharon provoked the Palestinians
into starting the intifada, so that the Israeli people would vote for the
right-wing party and elect him, Sharon, prime minister. It worked in Israel.
It may work in Europe too. More and more European right-wing politicians
are publicly offending Islam in the attempt to obtain the trust of millions
of European voters who are getting more and more concerned about the growing
influence of Islam on their countries.
Sharon and Bush are becoming ever more popular in Europe.
There are now millions of Europeans asking for the expulsion of Muslims
from Europe and for the creation of some sort of "fence" (not literally, of
course) along the Mediterranean that would stop Muslim immigration to Italy.
As an Italian viewer said on television, "If you like the Quran better than
democracy, why don't you move to Saudi Arabia instead of western Europe?"
Europeans do not see Bush as a friend of the Muslims (which he actually is).
They see him as the Western leader who has invaded two Islamic countries
(Afghanistan and Iraq). And they see him as a strong defender of western
values, compared to the pathetic wimps who rule France and Spain.
(Ironically, most Muslims make the same mistake: they view Chirac as a friend,
and Bush as an enemy, when in fact it is Bush who believes in the feasibility
of reforms in the Islamic world, and Chirac is the one who believes it is
pointless to try).
At the same time the Anglosaxon citizens (USA, Britain, Australia) have been
moving closer to the original French view. The public opinions of the
USA, Britain and Australia are growing more disillusioned with the Islamic
world. It seems like a lost cause: the Islamic world does not seem to be
interested in cultural progress, democratic reforms, equality for women and
so forth: it seems to be interested only in the Quran.
Why waste energies, time, money and lives to export the western model of
progress and democracy to one billion people who just do not care for it?
Bush de facto joined Chirac's "ignore" party when he
(at last) called for an end to the USA's addiction to oil.
What is missing from this picture is the Islamic view of coexistince with
the rest of the world. It is difficult to tell what the majority (not the
minority) of Muslims want. There are indications that they are even more
confused and afraid than Europeans. Many Muslims in Europe know that they
are being treated humanely by a social system that is unparalleled in the
rest of the world, and they don't want to lose what they have. Few Muslims
of Europe want to go back to their countries. But all of them feel that,
for one reason or another, they are being increasingly discriminated,
humiliated and abused. In a sense, they feel what the Jews felt in the 1930s.
And the anti-Islamic talk of the right-wing parties is not very different
from the anti-Jewish talk of Adolf Hitler.
It is also difficult to counter the anti-western propaganda of Al Jazeera,
that does everything it can to inflame Muslims worldwide. Al Jazeera is a
factor that western countries keep underestimating. It is responsible for
much of the anti-western feeling in the Islamic world. It routinely emphasizes
and blows out of proportion anything that happens in the world that can be
possibly conceived as an attack against Islam. It rarely criticizes the tyrants
of the Islamic world (and only on very minor issues) but it constantly
criticizes everything that the USA, Europe, Russia, China and India do.
The Al Jazeera viewers see a world that "is" a conflict between
the rest of the world (aggressor) and Islam (victim), and react by enacting
that very conflict between Islam (aggressor) and the rest of the world (victim).
It is Al Jazeera that instills in the minds of millions of Muslims the idea
that the whole Danish country and actually the whole European population and
actually the whole Christian world (not just one small newspaper) is guilty of
offending Islam (not just of doing to Mohammed what has been done for years
to Jesus, Buddha and any other religious figure).
It is Al Jazeera that scientifically turns peaceful ordinary people into beings
full of rage (and, statistically, some of them into suicide bombers).
It is always surprising how hostile the emotion of an Al Jazeera
viewer are at the beginning of a conversation, and how friendly they become
by the end of the conversation: Al Jazeera viewers never hear the "other"
version of the story.
Muslims do not fully realize how dangerous this collision drive is.
When the entire non-Islamic world allied to fight the Taliban in Afghanistan,
they basically rehearsed a scenario that had never happened before: the USA,
Europe, Russia, China and India united in a war against a common enemy. Who was
the common enemy that managed to unite such antagonizing powers? Ultimately,
it was Islam. The Islamic world, brainwashed by Al Jazeera's
hysterical propaganda and by the chronic stupidity of the Arab leaders, does not
realize that something similar could happen on a larger scale.
Trouble from the Philippines to Bali to Thailand to western China, to northwestern India to southern Russia to the cities of Paris could manage to unite the
world powers against the Islamic world.
Put it this way. Every time there is a lull in Islamic turbulence, the news
shifts towards some disagreement between the USA and China, the USA and Russia,
the USA and Latin America, and even the USA and Europe. Thus this is still
a rather divided world, with several powers vying for regional and global
power. Whenever Muslims riot in some part of the world or carry out a
terrorist attack, the news shifts dramatically: gone are the tensions between
the world's superpower, and one ghost rises above all the others, the ghost
of Islam.
The Islamic countries are not fully realizing how close they are to the abyss.
TM, ®, Copyright © 2005 Piero Scaruffi All rights reserved.
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- (January 2006)
A precious resource: people.
As the USA is trying to stem the flow of immigrants into the country, the
rest of the industrialized world has to cope with sharp declines in population.
In fact, a study by the United Nations projects that the trend will soon spread to China too. The sharpest declines are occurring in Russia and Eastern Europe,
followed by Japan and then Western Europe. For the time being, the USA is
still immune from this "disease".
We live in the age of GDPs. A country's status in the world is measured by
the size of its GDP. The GDP also depends on population: if the population
of a country decreases, the GDP is unlikely to remain the same (especially
if, at the same time, the population ages dramatically, as it is happening
all over the world). Countries with smaller GDPs are destined to irrelevance.
Therefore countries with shrinking populations are destined to irrelevance.
That includes most of the "powers" that used to run the world: it is not
only their influence that is waning, it is also their population that
is disappearing.
The simplest way to restore the demographic balance of a country is to import
people, just like a country imports mineral resources that does not have.
Today Japan imports oil, tomorrow Japan may realize that it needs to import
people as much as it needs to import oil if it doesn't want to go into
a social and economic tailspin. If this happens, there will be more and more
countries competing for people, just like today they are competing for
resources such as oil. Contrary to common sense, it is likely that the
competition will be about uneducated, lower-income people: developed countries
produce plenty of educated people for high-level jobs. The dearth of people
is more visible in low-level jobs. For example, even the USA (with a fast
growing population) had to relax immigration laws in order to get more
nurses from abroad, and it routinely closes both eyes on the illegal Mexican
immigrants without whom California farmers would go bankrupt.
It would seem like the world has an abundance of poor people, but that may
change rapidly. Most countries of the planet are experiencing an economic
boom (possibly the largest in the modern history of humankind) which may
soon cause the same double-edged phenomenon: an increase in people's wealth
and a decline in number of births. While it is difficult to believe that
the vast poor masses of Pakistan or Indonesia will soon be rich enough to shun
opportunities in other countries, it is not difficult to believe that
new trends in population will cause fewer and fewer people to be willing
to move to other countries (if you are an only child, it is more unlikely that
you abandon your parents than if you are one of ten children).
We may be heading into an age in which rich countries will start competing
to get immigrants.
So far the USA has been blessed with a steady inflow of immigrants of exactly
the kind it needs (a mix of educated and uneducated ones). And this may
account for the USA's continuing prosperity. Stemming immigration at a time
when it may be becoming a precious resource is like burning down oil fields
at a time when demand for oil is skyrocketing. Nobody would be that stupid,
right?
The USA got it all wrong on immigration.
TM, ®, Copyright © 2005 Piero Scaruffi All rights reserved.
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