IF THE WORLD DOES NOT COME TOGETHER NOW, IT NEVER WILL

We are rapidly approaching an irrevocable split in the world between east and west. However, as you will know, this is not the only fracture point in our world. Nations, and groupings within nations, either of ethnicity, religion or belief are tending to disassociate from each other consistently emphasising differences rather than similarities.

It is fast becoming the ultimate tragedy within the long human story and appears ready to culminate in unending misery.

At its very best the human race showed solidarity one human to another worldwide, as the Scottish poet Robert Burns once wrote far back in 1795:

‘It’s coming yet for all that,

That Man to Man the world over

Shall brothers be for all that.’

We are so far from that reality now, arguably further than we have ever been as a species. We are clearly living through a crisis that has the potential to split the world in two forever, with two entirely separate evolutionary, governmental, cultural and social paths. Either this, bad as it is, or a global conflagration that might leave the survivors fighting to the death for extremely scarce resources, or, more positively, joining together to ensure common survival.

Perhaps this latter path could be taken now before it is too late? And I am sure we all know by now that the hour is very late indeed.

The United Nations succeeding The League of Nations was meant to be the guarantor of communal action, of exhaustive debate leading to agreement and the avoidance of war. In recent years the primary dominant power in the world, the USA began seeing its destiny as an agency acting directly, not communally, to safeguard its own interests. This has led to the loss of significance and efficacy of the United Nations and therefore an increasing incapacity to fulfil its function.

The USA now wages wars on a multiplicity of levels, financial, economic, social and via myriad avenues of influence. It and its allies use the United Nations not as a forum for achieving agreements but as an arena for accusation. This cannot but undermine and rend impotent the primary reasons why the United Nations was created and the hopes that lay behind its creation.

We face endless strife, division and disagreement without end, we face resource wars and more wars over security, borders and rights, within our societies we face culture wars, the battle for ascendancy of one view or belief system over others. We are fast losing sight of our common humanity.

Is it now totally impossible to roll all this back seeing the dark future we are fast approaching? Will we instead march forward with every national and individual army to the next battle and the next and the next until the whole world is at war?

This is the crossroads beyond which there may be no other. Only a roiling black mushroom cloud of our ultimate oblivion.

We must decide now before it is too late. Because if the world does not come together now, it never will.