[Z]

I've been reading this wonderful book about China by Martin Jacques and, among many other things, he raises a point that I've long agreed with - that democracy is just yet another value imposed on the rest of the world by white men. It's the new form of slavery, of Christian missionaries, of colonisation. A large chunk of the world has arbitrary borders drawn by people who had no understanding of the land they were carving up, who had only money in mind when they made those decisions. I think that democracy and the idea of the nation state is not a universally accepted value, nor will it ever be, because the vast majority of the world is not anywhere near developed enough to sustain it.

I think it would be for the best if Africa and the Middle East just dropped the pretense and reverted to tribal kingdoms in many areas; I think it would calm the campaigns of ISIS, Al Qaeda, Boko Haram and the various other notorious groups that use extreme violence to prove a point: they don't want Western values. I think we really are on the cusp of World War III; a world war that will be centred around the Middle East and I think that the West will idly watch and do little to intervene until things get much, much worse. You could even argue that it already began a couple of years ago when the situation in Syria started to deteriorate massively - the world is a complete mess right now and the West is too busy taking part in dick measuring competitions with Vladimir Putin to notice. Not that I think that it's even our place to say or do anything - offer humanitarian aid, absolutely, but we as a collective have done a great deal of damage to the world, perhaps we should step back and wait until we're asked to help instead of sticking our noses where they're not wanted once again.

What do you think?