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Generational Dynamics Web Log for 6-Feb-06
Cartoon controversy explodes into worldwide confrontations between Muslims and Westerners

Web Log - February, 2006

Cartoon controversy explodes into worldwide confrontations between Muslims and Westerners

Muslims around the world are electrified and outraged by the publication of 12 cartoons depicting the prophet Mohammed. In one of them, Mohammed is wearing a turban shaped like a bomb with its fuse lit. In another, Mohammed is telling suicide bombers to slow down, saying, "Stop, stop, we're running out of virgins."

The 12 cartoons first appeared in Denmark’s Morgenavisen Jyllands-Posten daily in September, but the outrage only began to take hold in the last couple of weeks.

Muslim anger especially increased last week when a number of European newspapers in France, Germany, Italy, and Spain reprinted the cartoons, to express solidarity with Jyllands-Posten. On Saturday, a New Zealand newspaper reprinted the cartoons.

Muslims around the world have retaliated, with demonstrations, with boycotts, and sometimes with violence. Uncontrolled mobs in Syria and Lebanon attacked the Danish and Norwegian embassies. Five people were killed in Afghanistan, as was a 14-year-old boy in Somalia. Rallies have also taken place in India, Thailand, Indonesia, Iran and Gaza and other countries. Even far-away Chechnya has banned Danish humanitarian groups.

There's now little doubt that the cartoon controversy is going to be a continuing source of Muslim anger for a long time to come.

It's hard to understand why this "trivial" incident seems to be getting blown out of proportion, and so to explain what's going on, I'll need to put the incident in the context of a more complete theoretical description from Generational Dynamics. The following paragraphs summarize the process that's occurring:

Suppose an island has two species of animals, A and B, which compete with each other for food on an island. Suppose that species A has some advantage -- it's stronger or taller, for example -- so that A gets more food than B. As populations of both species grow, members of B will find less and less food to eat, and they'll quietly starve to death. In time, B will become extinct.

Now suppose that A and B are two tribes of humans. Human beings have intelligence -- something that animals don't have. Intelligent human beings do not die quietly, and tribes do not go extinct quietly. Instead, they figure out what's going on and they go to war. There's no choice about this, because there's not enough food for everyone, as population grows. There must be a genocidal war to reduce the population.

Even if A and B are pretty much identical, speak the same language, have friendly relations, intermarry, and so forth, eventually food will become scarce as population grows, and there will be more and more poverty. They'll form "identity groups" in anticipation of the coming confrontation. They must do this, because you can't have a war unless you have an enemy. They might form identity groups based on where they live, or based on some slight differences in skin color, for example. If there are no other differences then they'll make something up: they'll develop competing religions, and form identity groups based on religious differences. But they will always form hostile identity groups.

A and B will look for reasons to dislike each other. A will blame B for hunting in A's forests, and B will blame A for being offensive or for raping B's women. There will be a series of shocks, surprises and confrontations. Diplomacy and politics can hold war off for a while, but both sides feel instinctively that their existence and their way of life are at stake. Positions will harden, and patience will decrease.

Eventually a small confrontation between the two tribes will spiral out of control into full scale war. What Generational Dynamics has found is that these genocidal crisis wars tend to be cyclic, occurring every 70-90 years or so, the length of a human lifetime.

In order to understand the remarkable reaction to the Mohammed cartoons, note the sentence above, "There will be a series of shocks, surprises and confrontations."

That's what's going on now. The cartoon controversy might have come to nothing at another point in time, but it appears to have come at exactly the right time, a time when anxiety about poverty and powerlessness in the Muslim world is at just the right level, perhaps at a kind of "tipping point." The cartoon controversy is a kind of catalyst that was needed at this time in history, and if it hadn't happened then something else would have served as a catalyst.

Let's compare this to an event from another era, the Boston Tea Party, that preceded the American Revolutionary War.

A financial crisis in the English banking system in 1772 was disastrous to colonial businesses, especially in the Northeast, and many were forced into bankruptcy against their will. So when the English Parliament passed a new tea tax in May, 1773, the colonists were infuriated and radicalized, and in December 1773, a group of Boston activists dumped 342 casks of English tea into Boston Harbor.

At any other time in history, this might have been considered an expensive prank. The tea was ruined, but it could be easily replaced, and no one was hurt. But at that moment in history, it filled a need.

This trivial, childish prank, the Boston Tea Party, became world famous. It was so electrifying at the time that it surprised and shocked both the colonies and England. After that, one provocation after another on both sides finally led to war within two years.

There's no way to predict when such things will happen - when a trivial incident or a silly squabble will cause a major reaction way out of proportion to the original incident. But that's what happened with the Boston Tea Party, and that seems to be what's happening with the Mohammed cartoons. Even if the worldwide demonstrations calm down in the next few days, these cartoons will be used by radical Muslims to continue to inflame Muslims for months to come.

Of course, not all the shocks and surprises leading to war are trivial. We've already seen several -- the 9/11 attacks, the retaliatory wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, and the terrorist attacks in Bali, London and Madrid are shocks that have occurred before now, and were much more than trivial.

As I've been saying on this web site since 2002, the world is headed for a new "clash of civilizations" world war, with almost mathematical certainty. The chances are that 2 billion people or more will be killed in this war, based on my computations of population versus food supply. The world will approach this war through a series of shocks, surprises and confrontations that can't be predicted in advance. However, we can be fairly certain now that the Mohammed cartoon controvery will turn out to be an important milestone in the development of this world war, and will be considered an important historical event. (6-Feb-06) Permanent Link
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Generational Dynamics Web Log for 6-Feb-06 Cartoon controversy explodes into worldwide confrontations between Muslims and Westerners

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Generational Dynamics Web Log for 6-Feb-06
Cartoon controversy explodes into worldwide confrontations between Muslims and Westerners