How to Win a Cosmic War: Confronting Radical Religion by Aslan Reza

Author:Aslan, Reza [Aslan, Reza]
Language: eng
Format: mobi
ISBN: 9781446441138
Publisher: Random House
Published: 2011-02-28T16:00:00+00:00

Part Three

THE END OF THE WAR AS WE KNOW IT

CHAPTER SIX

Generation E

There is no more deliriously frenetic airport in all of Europe than Heathrow. Its five broad terminals stretch across miles of low-lying greenbelt in West London and take in more international traffic than any other airport in the world. If there were an axis around which all air travel spun, Heathrow would be it. Indeed, Heathrow is less an airport than a cosmopolitan village: a Babel of exotic faces and unfamiliar tongues; a blaring, boisterous jumble of people elbowing their way from one end of the world to the other.

I arrive at Heathrow at the crack of dawn, the fog in my mind as thick and turbid as the fog that unfurls on the tarmac as we hit the runway. There is no immigration officer to pull me aside as I disembark, so I am free to catch a ride with the other passengers pushing their way through the dips and bends of Terminal 3—a few of us branching off every now and then to other, unseen terminals—until we are all, at last, deposited at passport control.

It is hard not to notice how the more globalization has eroded our borders, the more ostentatious the policing of those borders has become: the labyrinthine queues, the firm-faced officers, the eager dogs, the color-coded signs, the stalls that trap and herd passengers along like cattle. This is all a matter of security, of course. But it is also a matter of control—or rather, the illusion of control. In a world in which national boundaries are becoming increasingly irrelevant, there is some comfort in knowing that here, at the edge of our fast-fading territorial frontiers, the state still maintains a measure of control, not over identity, perhaps, but at least over to whom it does or does not grant entry.

There is a difference between Heathrow and some other airports, however. Look up and you see it: two distinct paths for travelers to take. The first is marked for visitors like myself; we wait patiently in a long line that snakes around a metal maze to be properly identified and registered as “Guests of the United Kingdom.” The second path, marked with a ring of golden stars on a shiny blue square, is not just for British citizens, as one might expect, but for “Citizens of the European Union.” Those who take this route—whether French or Spanish or German or Dutch or Latvian or Swedish or Romanian or Maltese or any one of twenty-seven separate nationalities—need barely slow down as they flash their matching passports at the sleepy immigration officer slumping in his cell. For the citizens of these nation-states, passing from one country in Europe to another is a bit like strolling from neighborhood to neighborhood.

Freedom of movement among the citizens of Europe is not a new phenomenon. Europeans have trod on one another’s lands, spoken one another’s languages, eaten one another’s cuisine, and shared one another’s cultures for centuries. But the creation

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.