Hamer en aambeeld

When I was younger I always wondered what life would be like after the cold war. I thought that nothing could be worse than living in the shadow of the bomb, or being forced to support the USA if you didn’t like stalinism. But after the wall fell down in Eastern Europe, German neonazi’s came out of their hiding places and there were bloody wars in Rwanda, Yugoslavia and too many other places. It seemed to me that everywhere people were clinging to some long lost identities and killing off everybody else. Just as I was starting to long for a decent cold war, two planes flew into the twin towers and the world was neatly divided in two pieces again. On the one hand there is us, the good guys in the west, on the other hand there’s the terrorists. If you don’t like the terrorists you are forced to support the USA. This black and white reasoning brought back the memories of my childhood better than any eighties party could do. I didn’t like it then, and now i like it even less. At least ‘the sovjets’ had an empire to be evil in. Islamic terrorists live in the mountains and if you want to kill them it is probably extremely necessary to shoot lots of innocent people first, because that is happening in Afghanistan all the time. Also the Russians would just admit that they had WMD’s, back then we didn’t have to invent the nuclear missiles we were scared of. Another thing that was better in the old days is that we felt we had to be better than the commies. If they were a threat to freedom and democracy, then we must at least pretend that we are free and democratic. In the cold war it would have been impossible to be constantly watched by camera’s and registered at every opportunity, because that was what the enemy was doing. Nowadays, the USA doesn’t feel the need to prove themselves to the enemy. In the Netherlands, the fear of islamic fundamentalism strenghtened official support for the right to be an homosexual or an atheist. In the USA those people were discriminated like never before under George Bush. In any case, I wish that this new cold war would be a bit colder. With all this fighting going on, it is even harder to stick to your own opinions, instead of preferring one bunch of religious lunatics over the other.