Well these are strange times. Everything is changing in human civilisations and change creates conflict. Some speak of World War III

The main area is now the middle east with the main focus area Israel and the surrounding countries. Israel is now invading Libanon formally to revenge the rocket shootings and the kidnapping of soldiers doing unproportional damage but this is all about provoking Iran to make the wrong move so the Israel/US movement can take care of the nuclear weapons of Iran that are done in 5 years. (Don’t forget that Israel also has nuclear weapons)

Iran is primarely ruled by fanatically religious people who want to save their way of life in these changing times. It is all about culture and they feel the ‘west’ is taking their identity. (The history with the ‘puppet shah‘) The fanatics their identity is determined by religion. What happens with people which feel their identity is threatened: they are going to fanatically defend their values into the extremes. This fear of losing ones identity is what I think is the main issue. It fuels the terrorizing each other from both sides. But this creating fear and destruction only makes the separate camps stronger in their group thinking and believes.

On the other side I once visited a Neo Conservative Republican news site and forum. I wanted to taste the opinions and why some conservative Americans where thinking differently than what we here in Holland/Europe are used to and wanted to taste what lobby was fuelling the current US government. Sometimes we get to see absurd US fox news items on Holland here on TV and I wanted to know the how and why behind their thinking. I saw that many thinking was based on emotions and tried to bring some emotional neutral counter arguments. After some long ‘discussions’ I got banned from the side because I ‘trolled’. While I stayed emotional neutral and tried to bring my point of view to see the contrast…

This side also seemed to close themselves up with emotional and conservative thinking. I hoped to find some open minded people that were not afraid to test their and my believes but this was the first time I landed in such a close minded community. I was used to an open internet like we know today with wikis, google, flickr, open source etc and open discussions like I had in my philosophy classes in school and regularly with friends.

Both camps seem to use the internet and the 24 hour newschannels to fuel and polarize their audiences. The world is polarized into a new world war with to opposing camps. Is this necessary…

The internet seems the vehicle of globalisation, it connects people with different ideas. It opens countries that seems to be dictated and closed for long times. (although sometimes this goes step by step) It individualises people, it sparks new ideas and creativity. But in the outskirts of the web it also combines groups of same interests and gives them a way of polarizing each other and fueling grouping against other believes. It is both open and closed minded depending on the people and government using it.

It seems the current conflict is about conservative thinking against open mindedness. The main polarizing parties are trying to conserve their culture by radicalizing it. It creates hate because of grouping, because of pointing out the differences. It creates fear. It creates black and white grouping like in a chess game and a thinking on how to defeat each other. But in chess both parties lose a lot of pieces before the game is over and before one side has won.

The world is not yet a place for the us ‘religion’ right now… Many people only want their own trusted groups and cultures and don’t want to understand why the other side acts the way they do. We have to give up right vs wrong, good vs evil and black vs white first. We need to share creativity, ideas, experiences and respect each other.

The only way to stop the next world war is to stop saying it is a war. Listen to each other and try to life with each other. Give all the people some space. But well, governments have their own agendas… Well, I think any large scale organizational structures are of the past. (governments, monopolies etc) The structure of the future is really democratic: the internet. It is only a matter of time. Web 2.0 is the second step now.

I got an email asking where I got the image of that good looking chess board above. (forgot the credits…) Well, from here: http://www2.powercom.net/~3dchess/wood.htm

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