Right in the Centre - Lots of preparation and anticipation

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Published on Thursday, February 19, 2015

By Ken Waddell

The Neepawa Banner

The provincial NDP are working on a leadership campaign and preparing for the next Manitoba election. The federal political parties are preparing for an election, even sooner, slated for October 2015. Farmers are preparing budgets and gathering all kinds of inputs for the 2015 crop. Municipal councils are preparing budgets.

There’s a whole lot of behind closed doors stuff going on that is both hard to see and hard to measure. It’s just a typical February for the most part with a couple of elections thrown in for good measure.

It’s another way of saying things are pretty dull at this time of year. 

Hopefully, all this preparing that is going on will result in favourable things happening over the next few months. Leaders will emerge, some politicians will retire, summer construction will happen on our roads and some new buildings will spring up. The crops will get planted.

However, hanging over us all is, quite frankly, the threat of war, perhaps World War III.

I know that sounds ominous and very much a doom and gloom situation but a quick look at history shows that wars have been sparked by relatively small events. 

World War I was triggered by the assassination of a crown prince. That moment was seized by some countries to expand or defend their territory on land and sea. The war was discussed in dining rooms around the world for years before it happened. It was largely an economic and a territorial war.

World War I set the stage for the second world conflict as Germany, being a great and usually prosperous country could not and would not stand for becoming a minor player on the world stage. Through rhetoric and violence, the political system in Germany produced Hitler and the Nazis. Most people know what happened next.

Germany, France and Britain have all remained as powerful nations, albeit in the shadow of the United States and Russia.

Few people could see what would happen next and what is happening now. Driven by bad economic conditions in many countries, a very radical movement, the extremist Islamic movement has arisen. While still confined to a small but bloody and violent group, the movement feeds on economic problems both real and perceived. When people feel they have no hope, they tend to follow any leader that promises good things ahead. While the World War I and II leaders promised better times ahead if only they had more territory, this movement promises better times ahead if everybody follows their oppressive rules. The kicker is that it’s OK to kill or to die enforcing their rules on everyone else. For them, it’s no big deal to die, especially if you die for the cause.

It’s a dangerous combination when an individual or a group has no regard for their own life and less for anyone else’s life. Many more people are likely to die before the current situation stabilizes. 

In historic conflicts over the centuries, the stories of war came out slowly and edited by the winners. With World War I, the instigating cause, the assassination, was caught on film for all the world to see and events moved fairly quickly. With World War II, the build up was caught moment by moment on film. Events now move even more quickly. Every grisly moment is flashed around the world on the internet striking fear, and in some cases inspiration, into the hearts of people.

Unless countries unite to thwart this newest world threat, the ISIS movement, we may well have World War III.

We have a lot of preparation happening right now for things we are expecting such as elections, budgets and crops. We need to be prepared for some much bigger events.