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Thursday, March 16, 2006
Arinday: Friedman's theory: 'The World is Flat' (Conclusion)
By G.H. Arinday, Jr.
Sunfare
PERHAPS, one would wonder over the author's discourse on two world's most important events: The Fall of the Berlin Wall, and the destruction of New York's World Trade Center and designated symbolical numbers (11/9) and (9/11) respectively for both events.
Some political analysts or theoreticians may disagree with Friedman's arguments, but if one follows him, the author possessed an extraordinary mind with surgical deftness to isolate new ideas from the worn-out clichés usually characterizing an event.
The Berlin Wall was dismantled by freedom-seeking peoples, where every human being would be free to realize his or her potential-and who then summoned the courage to act on that imagination. The tearing down of the infamous wall took place on November 9, 1989, that's 11/9.
From behind the Iron Curtain came out millions of humanity to savor the whip of fresh air in the Free World, and thereafter from the Orwellian "Animal Farm", from the Baltic stares, Balkan countries already mired in internecine strife between the Muslims and the Orthodox Christians; the wheat-producing Ukraine and into the far east ends of the Soviet hegemony, bordering China, the empire broke down brick by brick just like Berlin's.
One scintillating and indisputable thing Freidman believes is that "imagination" has not and "can never be commoditized". It is an explicit affirmation that one in the natural order of things cannot be totally imprisoned because of his imagination-the desire to be free.
Stressing on the realm of imagination, the author pointed out the "imagination" was a big problem when the leader of a superior-power state-a Stalin, a Mao, or a Hitler-became warped. The people under heavy pressure to follow one's imagination would inevitably results to disaster, if not total annihilation.
But a new imagination without precedence in the past has emerged: "The small can act very big today and pose a serious danger to world order-without the instruments of a state." Oh well, suddenly we have Osama bin Laden!
Culled from the report of the destruction of the World Trade Center on September 11, 2001, known briefly as 9/11, it was an engineering entrepreneur by the name of Khalid Mohammad Sheikh with a degree from North Carolina Agricultural and Technical State University who "architected" such diabolical scheme to destroy America's landmark, and as it was to him like "looking adventure capital" for the world to witness the disgrace of a superpower! Osama bin Laden was fully convinced of Mohammad's mad adventure and sometime in March or April 1999, the brain of "adventure capital" was summoned, telling him that al-Qaeda would support the plan to wipe off America's symbol of affluence (the Twin Towers) and indeed "planes operation" was the most tenable option to achieve his dreadful imagination.
Osama bin Laden made out of his business conglomerate and hired the specialists and assigned Mohammad's nephew, Ali Abdul Aziz Ali, who managed the disposal of funds. In brief, al-Qaeda concentrated on his own core company including being the chieftain of the macabre enterprise and the development of what Osama calls the "suicide supply chain", assisted by his deputies Mohammed Atef ad Ayman Zawahiri, ideologically speaking.
Using all available facilities, including money-laundering, the plane flight schedules, the mechanics of planes like Boeing, at about 8:02 in the morning of September 11, 2001, the plane was hijacked.
At about 8:14 in the morning that day five men including Mohammad Alteh maneuvered the Boeing plane to Manhattan and slammed it between 94th and 98th floors of the World Trade Center.
Freidman calls the "generation of 9/11" as the period "of strategic optimists, the generation with more dreams than memories and actuates with more imagination every day". He wondrously admits that the infamous event has flattened the world and carries the ever-presence of the demons we fear most, coupled with own "small" fears of political noises or nuisances, which situation could be taken advantage by al-Qaeda's franchised "capital adventurers" like the Abu Sayyaf and al-Qaeda regional Islamo -Leninist Jema'ah Islamiya.
Freidman's book is not only engrossing but really shows how the world has been "flattened" by the unconventional war of terrorism fueled by ultra-religious fundamentalism interpreted through the cutting-edge of fanaticism.
(Erratum: Soviet Union launched the Sputnik in 1957, not 1857 as published Wednesday. - Ed)
(March 16, 2006 issue)
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