But when you look at a map of the middle east after its division, and compare it to the map of Europe from the same time, something appears remarkably different.
The borders are almost entirely straight in the middle east. And this isn't just a middle eastern thing. It's an empire thing.
The borders of some nations in Africa are similarly straight. Look at the borders of Egypt, Libya, Algeria, Namibia and Angola.
These are borders which were drawn solely in the interest of the empires they used to belong to, not the inhabitants of the regions. Back in the 19th Century, when Goldie travelled down the River Niger signing deals with local tribe leaders, he didn't consider the effect it would have when they were all made into one big country under British rule. Just look at what happened in the territory formerly known as Rhodesia and Nyasaland. The different parts of the nation had vastly different needs and extremely different economies. Rhodesia had a signigicant and growing European population, but Northern Rhodesia (now Zambia) and Nyasaland (now Malawi) had extremely small populations of Europeans, which was a cause for racial tension until the state's dissolution.
The carving up of the middle east after the first world war can generally be considered as one of the worst long term plans emerging from the war, along with the League of Nations. The region was partitioned with little regard to the people's culture and how they live their lives, and largely in the economic interests of the Empire. The Kurdish still today live in a position of purgatory. The division of Israel and Palestine caused horrible conflict in the region and still does today within the nation, with no solution appearing to be sustainable.
Today, the region is still destabilised. You can make an argument that it was caused by the Iraq War, which itself was caused by 9/11. The issue is that you can go as far back as you like looking for a root cause, but that itself is a flawed approach. Today, culture wars still exist in the region, be it Turkey's current war on secularism, the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, as well as the Syrian Civil War. It's difficult to see a way out. As Dan Carlin puts it, the world seems to be in self destruct mode, and has been for the last century.
But from this it's important to remember that people are different. The Culture War in America is one of conservative values vs liberal values. When we look at that nation's current political state, there is certainly a worrying picture. More people than ever are voting out of distaste than desire. The public are largely choosing, in their minds, the lesser of two evils. Donald Trump's potential reference to an assassination of Hillary Clinton was a worrying moment. Not only for security concerns and expressions of violence. It showed a very basic intolerance. An intolerance of democracy and an intolerance of another culture. Interestingly, liberals are the ones who have grappled with democracy far more than conservatives, as can be seen in the UK's exit from the European Union. Economists, business leaders, and leading civil servants have all warned against brexit, but the people chose to leave, So what does that mean for the liberal? If it does more harm than good, are they justified in actions that fly in the face of democracy? But then how can these champions of freedom claim their people are free?
It is a troubling dilemma. And it may be wishful thinking, but we need to remember that we are more similar than we may seem at first. The most important part of a good and free world is tolerance. Tolerance of ignorance and of malevolence. Tolerance of ingenuity and brilliance. Once tolerance is out of the window, everything that is just follows. It is wishful thinking that we can simply tolerate others, because some of us can't. Then what? Do we tolerate the intolerant? The world around us is clearly fragile, and this is a question that will stop waiting for us to answer it soon.
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