Book: The clash of civilizations

... youth is the personification of protest, instability, reform and revolution. History knows many examples when the value of the share of young people in society coincided with such events.

We are witnessing the "end of the progressive era" dominated by Western ideology, and into the era in which multiple and diverse civilizations will interact, compete, coexist and accommodate each other.

In 1953, when less than 15 percent of Iranians were literate and less than 17% lived in an urban, Kermit Roosevelt and a few CIA agents quite easily suppressed the rebellion and restored the Shah to his throne. In 1979, when 50 percent of Iranians were literate and 47% lived in cities, no application of American military power could no longer hold the throne as Shah.

For people who are searching for their roots, important enemies, and most potentially dangerous enmity always occurs along the "fault lines" between major world civilizations.

In Russia the religious revival is the result "of a passionate desire to find identity, which can only give the Orthodox Church, the sole unbroken link with the Russian 1,000 years of history"...

Identification of prosperity with the West, and underdevelopment - with the non-West will not outlast the twentieth century. The rate of this transformation is striking.

With the development of revolution the moderates, the Girondins and Mensheviks lose radicals, the Jacobins and the Bolsheviks. The same processes tend to occur in the wars at the fault lines. Moderate, which has set a narrow goal, such as autonomy, and not independence, not to achieve their goals through negotiations - which are almost always at the initial stage fail, and they complement or displace radicals seeking to achieve far more distant goals by violent means.

The West won the world not superiority its ideas, values or religion (which was brought only a small number of representatives of other civilizations), but rather by superiority in applying organized violence. Westerners often forget this fact; the non-West will never forget.

The basic political ideologies of the twentieth century include liberalism, socialism, anarchism, corporatism, Marxism, communism, social democracy, conservatism, nationalism, fascism, and Christian democracy. One thing unites them: they are all the offspring of Western civilization. No other civilization has generated quite a significant political ideology. The West, in turn, never gave rise to the dominant religion. All the world's major religions were born in non-Western civilizations and, in most cases, before Western civilization.

Bigotry, using the language of Toynbee, it is not a viable option.

In social psychology there is a theory of distinctiveness, which argues that people define themselves with what distinguishes them from others in the circumstances: "everyone is aware of himself in terms of those characteristics that distinguish it from other people, especially people from his ordinary social environment a woman psychologist in the company of dozens of women in other professions is to think of himself as a psychologist; being next to a dozen male psychologists, she is going to feel like a woman". People define their identity with what they are not.

In the emerging world of ethnic conflict and the clash of civilizations, Western belief in the universality of Western culture suffers from three drawbacks: it is wrong; it is immoral and it is dangerous.

In the war between the civilizations of the loss is a culture.

“Why do we kill children?” - asked the question in 1992, a Serbian soldier and himself answered him: “Because someday they will grow up, and we have to kill adult”.