Where Are We Now?
Recently I started thinking about how there’s never been a time in my life—which began in the mid-1950s—when there hasn’t been war somewhere in the world. I then Googled this question: Where is war ongoing in today’s world?
Wikipedia identifies fourteen different armed conflicts, including the obvious, Ukraine and Gaza, and the less obvious wars of the Mexican drug cartels and of Haitian gangs. The World Population Review identifies about thirty conflicts, with a color-coded map of each war, the Geneva Academy of International Humanitarian Law and Human Rights identifies forty-five. To these lists of politically, financially, and ethnically motivated wars, we may add the ideological war against academia, liberalism, and those deemed “woke” by right-wing politicians and the war against women, particularly those of child-bearing age, both now flourishing in the U.S.
I’ve long considered George Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four (published in 1949), the most prescient novel ever written in English. In it he described human existence controlled by eternal war (War is Peace is a Party slogan), of existence in a state of constant surveillance, of populations controlled by expansive, totalitarian, governments, of pernicious rhetoric, of the constant, intentional breakdown of culture and spirit. “If you want a picture of the future,” says O’Brien, a character who personifies totalitarianism, “imagine a boot stamping on a human face—for ever.”
And here we are.
December 21, 2023
Selma Moss-Ward
Editor
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