Remember the glory days of the 1990s, when our interconnectedness -- the ever-tighter embrace of Disney characters, the Swoosh, and the Golden Arches -- was endlessly hailed? It was the era of “globalization,” of Washington-style capitalism triumphant, and the planet, we were told, would be growing ever “flatter” until we all ended up in the same mall, no matter where we lived. Only a few years later in a twenty-first-century world that, from Ukraine to Libya, Syria to Pakistan, seems to be cracking open under the strain of religious-political conflicts of every sort, isn't it curious how little you hear about that interconnectedness? And yet, through time as well as space, we couldn’t be more linked (and not just online), as the Charlie Hebdo murders and the response to them indicated.
Think of the Parisian killers of that moment as messengers from the European past. After all, the place we have long called “the Middle East” was largely a post-World War I European creation. The map of the area was significantly drawn, and a number of the countries in the region cobbled together, by and for the convenience of European colonial powers France and England. Jump slightly less than a century into the future and what one set of powers created, a successor power, the last “superpower” on planet Earth, helped blow a hole through in 2003 with its invasion of Iraq -- and the damage is still spreading.
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