"Samuel P. Huntington is the Eaton Professor of the Science of Government and Director of the John M. Olin Institute for Strategic Studies at Harvard University. This article is the product of the Olin Institute's project on "The Changing Security Environment and American National Interests."[source]
Open up another browser window and do a Google search on Samuel P. Huntington's "Clash of Civilizations" from 1993. Now read it. The whole thing. In parts if you have to, but read it. It deals with how the fault lines of conflict have changed and are changing across the world since the end of the Cold War(which in the scheme of human history is not that long ago), and how the lines are being re-drawn by culture, rather than by princes, nation-states, or ideologies.
It relates today because of the changes that the office of the president has seemed to underwent since 2000 and the Terry Schiavo case. During this Bush administration, there has been more emphasis on morals and religious tackings than I can remember for any other presidency. He and his brother, Jeb Bush, have done most everything in their power to prevent a husband from removing the feeding tube of his wife who has been in a persistant vegitative state("Lights on, no one's home") for about 15 years, only to be rebuffed by the Supreme Court and other legal avenues.
The media on the Terry Schiavo case, in relation to Huntingtons "Clash of Civilizations", functions as a network of seismographs, giving definition as to where the fault lines lay on such an issue on the sanctity of life in the different cultures. CSM has an interesting article on different countries' reactions to the case.
Will someone go to war or commit a terrorist act because of this? I think and hope not, but it is issues similar to this(like Women on muslim holy ground during the Gulf War) that stoke some people into action. I will be interested to see how this event plays out amongst the American Party supporter lines and what rationale people will adopt when she passes away in the next couple of days.
Posted by Jeffrey at March 25, 2005 10:37 PM