A World Without Anchors
Dispatches from
G a i t h e r
Stewart
European Correspondent • Rome
Aftermath of coup attempt in Turkey. Getty
The world has lost its anchors. The concept of permanence no longer exists anywhere. What were once perceived as anchors of security have transformed into uncertainty and darkness, to fear and terror,. Everything people thought of as integral is today disjointed, and once significant words themselves empty and meaningless. Everything has changed. Love has lost its power to dominate and has become transitory and its keeper, the heart, illogical. The world seems overcome with the criminal impulse. To kill is good. To die is nothing. Madness seems to have taken a hold on everyone and everything, each person erratic and lost.. Even death which unites all living beings like nothing else has changed. Death has become insignificant. Death is banal. Yet we know that death ends everything. How many lives ending in our times. The Palestinian novelist, Elias Khoury, puts stories on the same footing as life, because a story is about a life that didn’t happen, life is a story that didn’t get told.
What anchors hold Turkey together if not the threat of death. A criminal holding together a nation of eighty million people and no one understands why or how it came about that the putsch that failed ended so many untold lives and empowered its mad leader to up the ante and lift the anchor and set sail on the transitory, in which direction no one knows. Six Italians whose stories will never be told died on the seashore of Nice, France together with seventy-eight other lives adrift.
While the mass proletarianization of the Islamic world, accompanied by Western-made globalization continues unabated, so also the intensification of the reality of exclusion and growing inequalities in that “other” world of over one billion Muslims. And thus grows the numbers of Muslims intent on killing indiscriminately the peoples and destroying the symbols of their tormentors too busy with getting elected to consider putting a halt to murderous globalization. And thus the “assymetrical” war of kamikaze bombs and bullets mowing down now also Europeans, a war which can hardly be won or even controlled without the contribution of the people of partly European Islamic Turkey, today radicalizing at home instead of pacifying across its borders. A situation which began in the 1970s following the onset of mass unemployment in the Islamic world of workingmen, transforming them into defeatists and creating their thirst for revenge for the losses they have suffered.
After decades of this catastrophe, unstoppable, apparently inevitable in a world where only power counts, an unstoppable attack on the Islamic way of life, what is the response of the West today to death? The response is weeping and mourning the dead, the granting of ever greater powers to western governments and their institutions and leaders. And in the Occident’s most powerful and power mad country, a madman contestant for leadership believes his electoral opponent should be executed.
Meanwhile wave after wave of refugees, young men, women and many children trying to escape the mayhem created by the West in their lands, continue to set out for Europe from Africa and the Middle East across the dangerous waters of the Mediterranean Sea, many of whom end up in the graveyard at the bottom of that ancient sea.
The chaos in Turkey, the terror spread by the Islamic State (IS-ISIL-ISIS), the ascendancy of populists like Donald Trump, and the exit of Great Britain from the European Union (Brexit) are all expressions of the lifting of familiar anchors of security worldwide, which should be sufficient to convince sane human beings to re-think their behavior. The Italian philosopher, Massimo Cacciari, notes that “the essential aspect of ancient tragedy consisted of the catharsis that caused it in the first place. But modern man has been struck blind and consequently insane. The world has apparently been struck blind and rendered mad by a chain of events only apparently disconnected one from the other and which contribute to the Great Global Disorder: the Turkish chaos, the ascendency of Donald Trump and Brexit, while the West holds fast to its conviction that its culture is still an unbreakable network covering the entire planet. Never have mere words been more significant than the expression made popular in German: Wen die Götter verderben wollen, den schlagen sie mit Blindheit. (Whom the gods want to ruin they strike with blindness.)
Our Senior Editor based in Rome, serves—inter alia—as our European correspondent. A veteran journalist and essayist on a broad palette of topics from culture to history and politics, he is also the author of the Europe Trilogy, celebrated spy thrillers whose latest volume, Time of Exile, was recently published by Punto Press.
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