The world we live in is going
through more than one crisis
simultaneously.
The environmental crisis >
The world we live in, our entire civilization, is going through more than one crisis
simultaneously.
The first is the so-called crisis of world order. Just a little more than twenty years ago, following
the collapse of the world Communist system, mankind seemed to have no alternative to the
global assertion of liberal democracy. However, reality proved far more complex than forecasts
of “the end of history”. Political diversity spread through the world like a bush fire. This is no
sign of a crisis in itself, but following the breakdown of the Yalta–Potsdam system no new world
order that would be recognized as legitimate by all nations has ever taken shape. As a
consequence, our world has not become more secure: simply, instead of one grave risk of a
Third World War we now face a growing multitude of new challenges and diverse threats. They
are increasingly more difficult to neutralize or contain; moreover, frequently it is really hard to
recognize and rate them by importance, impact and the need for urgent response.
Admittedly, that has happened in large measure because the community of democratic nations
was not ready to face up to new challenges, to the substitution of the ideas of aggressive
nationalism and religious extremism, primarily militant Islamism and the “universal Caliphate”,
for the ideology of worldwide communist expansion.
The demographic crisis >
The demographic crisis >
International terrorism >
The environmental crisis >
Western political, business and intellectual elites made the erroneous presumption that with the
demise of Communism the main problems of global development would be “technical” rather
than political and that nothing would stand in the way of human progress led by the democratic
community of Western nations, and failed to recognize new dangers. Values such as freedom,
human dignity, human rights and justice that form the foundations of Western democracy began
to be viewed as a given against the background of universal euphoria. In practice, however, they
began to be overshadowed by runaway consumption, which, multiplied by modern technological
capabilities, became one of the main causes of the world economic crisis which broke out in
2008.
Politicians and political institutions – governments and parliaments – have inadvertently created
a virtual world, a world far apart from the real world of real people. As a consequence, crooked
politicians have wormed their way to power, corruption and mercenary lobbying practices have
risen dramatically.
Public political activity has subsequently declined. A broad mass of the people, primarily young
people, became severed from political life and excluded from decision making on crucial national
and local problems.
Although to a large extent this is true of both post-Communist countries and developed Western
democracies. As a result of the runaway growth of incomes of top world businessmen, primarily
financiers, politics is becoming elitist and new social and ethical gaps have opened up in society.
Belief in the values of Western civilization is on the wane: principles such as the integrity and
professionalism of civil servants and businessmen, the State as a hired servant of civil society
and the separation of powers as a guarantee against bureaucratic arbitrariness are no longer
sacred.
These adverse developments undermine the moral and political leadership of the Western
community in the eyes of the other – larger – part of humankind, strengthening the positions of
political groupings that advocate the ideas of a “special road” or “special order” for their people
and even groups of nations and faiths. To this end, inhuman misanthropic values are being
preached every now and then to provide an ideological foundation, and archaic geopolitical
dogmas of the mechanistic balance of power, spheres of influence and struggle for lines of
communication, markets and raw material sources are being unearthed.
One more crisis, the one in the economic and financial sphere, seems the most burning issue
and hence is in the focus of attention, requiring no extensive comments. Perhaps, the only thing
to be added here is that it will be overcome and, moreover, will make it possible to attain still
higher structural and technological levels of development, including in the consumption of
natural resources and the preservation of the environment and climate.
The demographic crisis, with the populations of many developed countries shrinking, is
accompanied by uncontrollable migration from overpopulated poorer countries of Asia, Africa
and Latin America to the USA and Europe, including Russia. Processes such as the fast growth of
closed ethnic communities living by their own laws, and their higher birthrates, are already
causing acute social tensions in host countries and carry the seeds of dangerous conflicts.
Developed democracies, with their human rights and freedoms, humanism and political
correctness, tolerance and rigid restrictions on state security powers, have proved defenceless
against the new “invasion of barbarians”. The latter are medieval in mentality, values and
behavioural standards and hate the societies that have sheltered them. At the same time they
make clever use of democratic freedoms and guarantees to undermine European civilization and
conquer it from within. The niche formed in the democratic state self-defence system is being
occupied by Neo-fascist politicians and organizations, radical nationalists and militarized racists
who, in their turn, are jeopardizing European democratic accomplishments made through
suffering during centuries of despotism, fanaticism, revolutions and wars.
Nature, which we have shamelessly exploited for ages on end, has finally rebelled against us.
The environmental crisis calls for a huge financial investment, and most important, a radical
restructuring of social consciousness. It is a dangerous delusion to think that Man is the paragon
of creation. Man is but a link in the living chain and owing to his intellect can and must protect it
carefully.
International terrorism is a phenomenal crisis posing extraordinary risks. It is a new reality of
the twenty-first century, one which has plunged the world into a state of permanent war. The
bloody traces of this war are to be found everywhere − in New York, London, Madrid, Mumbai
and Moscow.
The crisis of values, which is partly a consequence of the crisis of the world order, in large
measure, demonstrates the limited opportunities offered by civilization, which is intent only on
material consumption and the “glamour” of capitalism. In such a system millions of people lose
sight of meaningful human existence and fail to find a sensible and appealing cause in life. The
result is the catastrophic spread of drug addiction, moral degradation and crime.
With access to ICT, young people in the poorer countries have en masse realized the extent of
their exclusion from Euroatlantic civilization and the impossibility of enjoying its benefits. And,
the simplest solution (one usually funded with petrodollars) is to destroy it. It is this motivation
that underlies the increasingly destructive manifestations of anti-globalism.
This tragic list of crises can be supplemented with shortages of food and drinking water, mass
starvation in many countries, man-made disasters and dangerous new epidemics and
pandemics.
Nevertheless, in spite of the formidable nature of all these crises, they can be resolved in
principle or, with reasonable policies, and the resulting damage can be reduced to acceptable
levels.
At the same time all these crises, however serious, overshadow in our mind the most important
crisis, one which we all fear but will not face up to. In the thirteenth century Thomas Aquinas
called that syndrome ignorantia affectata – “cultivated ignorance” – since knowledge makes life
harder to live. However, there is in fact one single crisis which, if not averted, will be impossible
either to control or contain and whose consequences cannot be cleared up. What I mean is a
nuclear crisis with the actual use of nuclear weapons.
The risk of such a crisis is quite real. There is a critical mass of aggressive authoritarian regimes
and terrorist organizations in the world which will go to any lengths to assert their right to
existence. If a human being can be used as a delivery vehicle for explosives, if one can sacrifice
his or her life to kill others, why not annihilate humanity as a whole?
The nuclear crisis is the only one that carries irreversible consequences and threatens the very
existence of the human race on our planet.
The risk of this crisis is also rising because humanity is for many reasons no longer aware of real
threats while, on the contrary, overreacting to insignificant or even imagined threats. People are
more interested in English Premier League results than, say, in the fact that Iran is a mere 300
to 500 days away from obtaining enough uranium-based explosives to develop nuclear weapons.
A certain “monetization” of the public mind is taking place. Many businessmen have become
oblivious to the European and American experience in cooperating with Nazi Germany of the
1930s and the 1940s.
Hundreds of European companies are now cooperating with nuclear weapons-hungry Iran, just
as Nazi industrialists and scientists built crematoriums, produced arms and all but brought Hitler
close to the nuclear bomb and appropriate delivery vehicles by 1945.
It took a different force and a different mindset that would be no “servant of blind will” to stop
Hitler and his collaborators. That was the coalition of the anti-Hitler Allies. That was the mind of
the great anti-Nazi physicists, including those from among the Jews who knew of the fate of the
European Jewry, wholesale genocide, and the possible scale of a future nuclear catastrophe for
Europe and the rest of the world.
Moral counterweights and civilization’s instinct of self-preservation thus worked in the mid-
twentieth century.
A number of states are straining today to obtain nuclear weapons. To survive, the totalitarian
regimes are again ready to put the world on the brink of catastrophe. North Korea was the first
to treacherously avail itself of the fruits of peaceful nuclear cooperation within the framework of
the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT) and then, under a thought-up pretext, withdrew from
the treaty, developed and tested nuclear weapons, and is now developing long-range missile
systems.
After many years of secret activities banned by the treaty, Iran has followed suit and is now
openly beefing up its nuclear potential. It has put into operation another uranium enrichment
plant and has been flaunting bans under UN Security Council resolutions.
Iran is increasingly getting closer to the acquisition of nuclear weapons and missiles of an ever-
growing range. Iran’s possible withdrawal from the NPT or continued violations of the Treaty with
impunity will terminally undermine the nuclear non-proliferation system. The Iranian nuclear
bomb is bound to trigger a chain reaction of “nuclear club” expansion. A considerable number of
states both in the Middle East and elsewhere will get nuclear weapons. Many of these countries
are unstable and balancing on the brink of radicalization of ruling regimes and civil war, which is
fraught with the disintegration of power institutions. This dramatically lowers the threshold of
nuclear weapons use in regional or internal conflicts with a high probability of escalation to the
global level in the near future.
An even greater threat is that in the current course of developments international terrorists will
inevitably get access to nuclear materials and explosives. Al Qaeda and other extremist Islamic
organizations make no secret of such intentions.
A primitive terrorist nuclear explosion on a Hiroshima scale not only in Tel Aviv but also
Washington, Moscow, London, Paris, Rome, Berlin or Tokyo will kill hundreds of thousands of
people and transform the entire civilized world into a hostage of terrorists. This will put an end
to our civilization the way it has been over the past five millennia or so.