Life as we know it

Image: Daily Sabah

The 2009 movie ‘Watchmen’ had characters with different super abilities, The intricate plot of the DC comics inspired adaptation culminated in the unlikely villain 'Adrian's' grand plan to foster global unity by putting an end to hostilities between the United States and the Soviet Union, both at the brink of nuclear war.

His plan was as atrocious as it was simple; give the two belligerent superpowers a common enemy to contend with. It merely required the sacrifice of the complete annihilation of major cosmopolitan cities, framing ‘Dr Manhattan’ for the despicable act and and then finally uniting the world against this perceived new and 'common' threat.

The plot is one that I have come across quite a bit in movies and it usually plays out in a similar fashion. Some maniac decides to wipe out a few billion people, unite the world and then rebuild from the ashes. Other times it’s the establishment of a ‘new’ common enemy or threat, followed by sacrifice and then world peace or in some cases just the establishment of a new world order.  It was the preferred strategy for Marvel villains Ultron, Apocalypse, Thanos and many more. 

I was watching news of the latest terrorist attack at the international wing of Istanbul airport in Turkey, these echoed recent attacks in Brussels and France in terms of execution and target. Countries around the world instinctively banded together to support the survivors and people of Turkey. In one report I watched, a military analyst viewed this recent attack as a wakeup call for countries that had previously not joined the global coalition on the war against terror to do so. They simply couldn’t afford not being actively involved anymore as the mayhem would no sooner than later get to their doorsteps. Turkey’s president Erdogan in the wake of this attack, called for a unified global fight on terrorism.

Innocent lives, so called soft targets, are increasingly being decimated in coordinated attacks across the globe. One sympathizer twitted that ‘terrorism has no religion, race, gender or nationality'. The words point to an outpouring of global empathy towards terror wherever it strikes. Politically, it dominates the landscape globally; indeed the debate on terror and immigration may have been the underlying sentiment responsible for the UK’s vote to exit the EU and the rise of an unsavoury presidential candidate such as Donald Trump; in both cases polarising entire nations.

Fundamentalist terrorism appears to want to ‘sacrifice’ humanity for whatever goals or reasons it subsists. While they still lack the capability to unleash carnage on a grand scale as in the movies, they are clearly thinking about it, proven in the fact that a pair of the suspects in the Brussels attack had monitored a nuclear scientist with the probable intent to kidnap him and acquire his knowledge.

In both the movie plots and the real life congruence, society appears to be the intended sacrifice for the cause of these maniacal extremists who seek to instate a caliphate of fear and tyranny to destroy our way of life. Are we indeed only now putting aside our prejudices to face an uglier common threat? Is terror the most effective unwitting aggregator of our collective humanity? Should unrelenting anguish be the impetus to move us to abandon our bigotry?