They say that when the Chinese want to send their best wishes to someone they wish for them “exciting times”. Of course, what is or is not exciting varies from one person to the next. But intellectuals, in general, believe that excitement is connected with the movement of history, in all its technological, political and economic dimensions, and with whatever is new or novel to the human condition. A short while ago I came across, perhaps for the tenth time, a new version of the history of World War II. The novelty this time was that it was in colour. The period before, during and after the war was an exciting era by all standards. It was a time of amazing progress in science and technology, bringing the invention of the computer to decipher enemy code, which ushered in the modern computer age, and the invention of radar, which generated a quantum leap in military technology and strategy. At the same time there was a major development in thought pertaining to the art of war and the negotiating processes related to war, as well as to how societies adjusted to the conditions and tragedies of war, and how this affected their perspectives of the world and how to order it. Our current times are no less exciting than that World War II era, or the subsequent three decades that saw the Cold War followed by the end of the Soviet Union, the reunification of Germany and the defeat of communism, just as fascism had been defeated in the past. Meanwhile, the third industrial revolution — a revolution that relied on the production, processing, distribution and consumption of information — picked up pace. Somehow, exciting times contain a kind of evil, such as fascism and Nazism in one era, or communism in another. These days, the evil is religious fascism, which is of a different order than its predecessors. Fascism, Nazism and communism claimed to be the pinnacle of progress in human thought and promised to take the world to the highest levels of advancement. The evil at the time was secular and profane. Sometimes it claimed to represent the acme of progressivism. Today, evil is consummately reactionary and regressive. It wants to propel mankind backwards to the ages of slavery, captivity and rape. The presence of evil, alone, does not make for excitement, although generally it gives rein to the basest human instincts. Another essential element is the forces of good, or those who refuse to bow to the conditions that evil seeks to impose by brute force, massacres, torchings and other barbarous acts, and who therefore decide to fight it. While religious fascism translated its ideology into such political/military organisations such as Al-Qaeda, Islamic State (IS) group and the Muslim Brotherhood, the need for confrontation propelled Arabic, Islamic, Eastern and Western nations to the field of battle. The recent statements from Saudi Arabia and the UAE announcing their readiness to contribute ground forces in a war against IS was a declaration that the Arabs and Muslims will not leave the task of liberating Arab and Islamic territories from the grips of Islamo-fascism to Western and Eastern powers alone. The excitement here has several facets. One involves the military movements, such as calling up troops, mobilising forces and managing coalitions in general. Another is the political dimension that entails reconciling the varying interests and circumstances of diverse parties. Then there is the economic dimension that has to do with costs and marshalling the necessary funding for the war effort. Although many stakeholders are of one mind regarding the need to push back IS, their interests diverge, especially when it comes to Syria. There are times when the pace of divergence outstrips the pace of convergence, after which comes times when the scales right, and the latter prevails. Notice the manoeuvres that took place around Aleppo and how Russia asked for a suspension of the ceasefire that is supposed to be put in place in Syria on 1 March, which is to say after the Syrian regime managed to turn the tables against all the other parties in the Syrian arena. Then, after some give and take here, and pressures and counter-pressures there, came the ceasefire resolution, after a week during which negotiations between the government and opposition in Syria resumed, in accordance with the agreement reached in the Vienna conference. All this very exciting news is merely preparation not just for the war in Syria and Iraq, but also for peace in both countries and the region as a whole. That space between war and peace entails many battles, with the large quantities of dead, destruction and bloodshed that they will bring. Yet the world never stops moving, interacting and giving and taking, even as the battles rage. On the fringes of these events, which keep the world at the edge of its seat, came the wondrous and extremely exciting news about gravitational waves. This occurred in December as scientists around the world rejoiced. Gravitational waves were the last of Einstein's predictions in his theory of relativity, which he formulated around a hundred years ago and which proceeded from the fact that it takes a mere eight seconds for light from the sun to reach Earth. That brief timespan came to define what we term the speed of light across that known distance between Earth and the sun. But what about stars that are millions or even billions of light years away? It means that the light that reaches us from them today was emitted an extremely long time ago and that the stars that originally emitted that light may no longer even exist. It is a complicated story, but scientists know it well. What concerns us here is that it is not only exciting but also that it may open the doors to vehicles capable of moving at far greater speeds (such as the speed of light) and to technologies to preserve the human mind and body so as to enable people to sustain very long distance journeys. In other words, the recent discovery will lead to enormous amounts of research and new knowledge on the movement of matter, food and nourishment, the regeneration of bodily fibres, communications technology and so many other fields of knowledge. This, in turn, means that the science that we have now may only be the rudimentary beginnings of a new era for mankind. But if you are looking for something more exciting than this, perhaps you should go and watch the US presidential election campaigns, which are currently in the phase known as the primaries. There you will observe a quantum development in the US political system in progress. The nomination process appears to have ranged beyond the control of the party machinery, with party bosses setting the candidacies while the PR men and the other components of the modern president-manufacturing industry work on staging. The US primaries that we see today are truly extraordinary. When two nominees from outside the “establishment”, such as Donald Trump on the Republican side and Bernie Sanders on the Democratic side, move to the fore, you know that US politics has entered a new era. What are the ramifications of the possibility that the next US president could be a business magnate and, moreover, one who wants to manage US policy like he does one of his companies? What does it signify when a Democratic frontrunner seeks to promote a social “revolution” that could turn the US as we know it upside down? Is that man aware that the US has sometimes removed copies of the American Declaration of Independence from its embassies abroad on the grounds that it is a document that incites “revolution”? Could there be more exciting times to come than the ones we are living in? The writer is chairman of the board, CEO, and director of the Regional Centre for Strategic Studies.
