The Age of Imperialism

Well, everybody has been reading their Tacitus! The Europeans especially, take the opportunity to have an Empire in this millennia, but they are not the only ones. Everybody wants an Empire!

The world changes out of all recognition again now, as it has always done in the past. It is rather like watching a life form mutate, or like watching a foetus grow. Will we become a butterfly crawling and struggling out of our chrysalis? Are we capable of becoming something so beautiful?

However, globalisation, cinema and television and the internet will bring history to life in our living rooms which will have far reaching consequences. Live Aid is just one example of how a widespread response can occur over the tea table! Are we capable of more?

The World continues to have natural disasters and volcanoes continue to erupt, Tsunamis happen, the extremes of weather worsen, diseases continue to strike, famines claim millions but war will claim untold millions, 50,000,000 in World War II alone. The terrifying cruelty of slavery and conquest across the World is responsible for many hundreds of millions of peoples forced into movement away from home to very uncertain futures, resulting in untold misery. This dreadful and commonplace practice has been pursued by many of the World’s Empires without a second thought. Only now is the miasma of this evil beginning to clear through the ongoing casual genocides still going on to this day.

History could be compared to a game of billiards. If we hit a ball hard enough, it will hit other balls and ricochet around the table and other balls will be displaced or fall down pockets and leave the game. But is it a game? A group of people sitting in a room making decisions ricochets around the World nonetheless. The game is the law of unintended consequences, and unless we see and understand the patterns of the past, we are doomed to repeat them. But what a cost!

Now we do understand that the Earth is not our plaything. Now we do understand Human Rights. Now we do understand the meaning of power. But do we understand the butterfly?

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