When did the 21st Century begin?

Carlos Alberto Montaner

In November 1815, the royal houses of Europe, meeting in Vienna, wrote a death certificate for the French Revolution and built a system of international coexistence that lasted 100 years. There, at the Congress of Vienna, among balls, hunts and a few instances of adultery, the defining lines of the 19th Century were drawn.

That amusing fête came to an end on June 28, 1914, with two gunshots that killed 20 million people. That happened when Serbian nationalist student Gavrilo Prinzip assassinated Archduke Francis Ferdinand in Sarajevo. At that moment an ungodly free-for-all erupted; a few weeks later, World War I began, leading to the consequent demolition of three empires -- Russian, Pan-Germanic and Turkish -- while the English and French began their inexorable decline.

There is some consensus among historians that the 20th Century began that summer of 1914. That was when the Bolshevik revolution began to brew in Russia, to be followed later by the rise of Nazi-fascism, World War II and the Cold War. In 1989, with Gorbachev as gravedigger, the 20th Century was gleefully buried under the rubble of the Berlin Wall.

When and where was the 21st Century born? A good hypothesis was formulated by Argentine analyst Esteban Lijalad. It began in Buenos Aires on July 18, 1994, the day a massive bomb killed 85 people and wounded 300 others. The powerful artifact, hidden in a van, was placed outside the offices of the Israeli-Argentine Mutual Association (AMIA), a charitable organization that provided social assistance to people of all religious creeds. According to the official investigation, the author of the suicidal attack was a Muslim terrorist named Ibrahim Hussein Berro, 29; the Hezbollah Shiite militia organized the operation, and the theocratic government of Iran financed it and provided the material means.

The brutal event encapsulated all the ingredients that we would later experience on a global scale. First, the use of suicide terrorists who act against civilian targets where the victims are always unsuspecting innocents. Second, the use of anti-Semitism and hatred toward Israel as pretexts to attack any country, person or institution that is arbitrarily described as contrary to the purported designs of Allah. Years later, those gangs of criminals or family members -- sponsored sometimes by Teheran, others by Damascus or the Talibans in Kabul -- would strike in Kenya, New York, Washington, Beirut, Tel Aviv, Madrid and London.

A bad state of affairs. It is already grave and nauseating enough that fanatical Islamism tries to perfect Hitler's work by annihilating the Jews and destroying the State of Israel, but the final objective is even more delirious, mad, dangerous and all-encompassing: to put an end to Western civilization and the very weak moderate Islamism, imposing on earth the reign of a vengeful and inflexible Mohammed who in the same breath sentences to death uncomfortable writers and blows up a bus filled with children. It is Jihad in its most lethal version; a universal holy war in the name of the Prophet, unleashed by the most radical sector of Islamism, the sector that will soon have nuclear weapons and has already expressed its willingness to use it against any vestige of rationality, laity, and modernity.  

There is more, however. The attack on the AMIA also serves to calibrate the poor response of free societies to this new danger. In the best of cases, the investigation carried out by the national authorities was inept and negligent. In the worst, there was corruption and bribery of officials so that no one could fully get to the bottom of the case. There was no real  international response to support the Argentines. Nobody understood that the AMIA massacre was a local battle within a true international war. Not even the member countries of Mercosur put up a solid front to Teheran and coordinated their defense strategies. Everyone acted as if they were facing an isolated, scarcely important anecdote. Even today, 13 years later, almost no one has noticed that that fateful July 18 may have been the start of the 21st Century. 

July 29, 2007

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