The Super Summary of World History - Alan Dale Daniel [286]
As World War II ended, a new international organization was set up to help prevent new wars, the United Nations. The organization started with hope, but as the years went on it became a debating society much like the League of Nations. Without total support from the Security Council the United Nations cannot act. There is a clear division in the world between political philosophies, and each of those philosophies sit on the Security Council; thus, when one party wants to act at least one other does not resulting in constant deadlock. Even when outright slaughters are ongoing the United Nations does not move. In Rwanda, a devastating slaughter has been going on for years, and the United Nations either cannot or does not wish to stop the murder. Even though UN forces went to Rwanda they were inadequate in size, training, and motivation; thus, the mission failed and the slaughter continued. In other areas of Africa, such as the Sudan, Muslims massacre Christians and the United Nations does not act. Famines take place all over the globe, but unless nations such as the United States do something, the United Nations seldom moves. In the United Nations no criticism can be made of such goings-on because the body will not stand for such criticism. Religiously antagonistic and ‘have not” states, whose agendas for the world are illiberal in the extreme, greatly outnumber the Western Democracies and consistently vote against the agendas of the West. Under these conditions the United Nations has devolved into stagnation.
Where the post-modern world will take humanity is difficult to say. Europe has shattered into a hive of small competing ethic regions. The same fracturing appears to be happening in Asia, Africa, and perhaps Latin America. Everyone wants to rule themselves. The shattering into small politically independent, but economically dependent, nations can hurt trade. Can these tiny areas really survive? The unifying force of religion is failing, as radical Islam stupidly adopts violence to unite people. Violence is the last method that works to unite people.
There are several trends influencing the modern world. Let’s take a quick look:
Technology
Technology is alive and well in our modern world. It is intrusive, complex, and allows technocrats tremendous power over those who do not understand the machines that technocrats have mastered. Computers are now tied to every aspect of life in the modern Western world. Mobile telephones are everywhere, and the World Wide Web (the INTERNET) has proliferated beyond comprehension.
The start of much of this technological wizardry was the Space Race between the USSR and America. In 1961 when President Kennedy announced that America would reach the moon before the decade was out, computers were machines that filled entire rooms. The number of vacuum tubes in computing machines like Univac numbered in the thousands (and they burned out a lot). One of the major accomplishments of the space program was to shrink computing technology to diminutive scales so they could fit onto spacecraft and help navigate and otherwise assist the astronauts in the complex flying needed to reach and return from space.
When the United States landed on the surface of the moon on July 20, 1969, it was the result of fantastic progress in marrying machines with computers. Neil Armstrong (the first man on the moon’s surface) and Buzz Aldrin (the second) were able to transmit from the moon to the Earth with radios that were minuscule compared to those available in 1960. When IBM launched its first personal computer it could address a maximum of 640 kilobytes of information at once. Now (2010) computers can address gigabytes of information with no problem. The growth of the power of the computer is one of the phenomena of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries that will