Divided: Why We're Living in an Age of Walls

by Tim Marshall

The traditional media were organized so that they were limited; for example, professional newspapers for the steel industry, which would only write about steel, provincial papers could only report about their region. So even if one outlet went rogue, there was limited damage. The internet spoiled that model. For the first time in recent history individual Chinese people have access to the tools of mass communication, and there were a few years where the internet ran amok. Some people think the government is paranoid; I’m not so sure, I think they are very soberly aware of everything.

Thirty years ago the biggest employer in the USA was General Motors and the average salary of a worker there was (at today’s rates) about $30 an hour. Now the biggest employer is Walmart and the hourly rate is about $8.

as a rule of thumb, in the lottery of life the odds are not good if you are black. It remains clear that historical and contemporary racism is a major factor in the startling disparities between ethnic groups. This is true even at the very beginning of life. In the richest country on earth infant mortality is at 4.8 per 1,000 births among the white population but 11.7 for black people – roughly equivalent to a middle-ranking nation such as Mexico.

One study says that if white American and black American high-school educational attainment rates were measured as if each were a separate country, the former would be equivalent to the UK and the latter Chile.

The report said that in the past 1,000 years fewer books have been translated into Arabic than are translated into Spanish in Spain in one year.

Many Arab secularists blame the problems and lack of freedom on what is sometimes referred to as ‘the closing of the Arab mind’. This is a reference to the ending of the practice of ‘ijtihad’. The direct translation of the word is ‘effort’, but it relates to the interpretation of religious problems not precisely covered by the Koran or the Hadith – the reports of what the Prophet Muhammad did and said. For several centuries any learned Muslim scholar could come up with original thinking on religious questions, but by the end of the Sunni Abbasid caliphate (750–1258) it was declared that the gates of ijtihad were closed. There was now to be no questioning of the laws and interpretations laid down by the great men of previous generations.

‘the threat of terrorism is used to justify walls, but the underlying issue is almost always unauthorized movement by the poor’.

Generations of tourists and student backpackers return from India infused with the spirit of Hinduism, which promotes friendliness, non-violence, spiritualism and vegetarianism. Few see that alongside that is one of the most degrading social systems on the planet.

Western writers are often squeamish about using the word ‘tribe’, and some Western and African academics will even tell you the colonialists invented the concept. They are simply playing with words because they are embarrassed that the word tribe has, wrongly, for some people become synonymous with backwardness. Nevertheless, within many nation states in Africa and elsewhere tribes exist – it seems pointless to deny their importance.

The early Portuguese explorers were impressed with the scale of the city and the stunning works of art and architecture it contained. In 1691 Lourenco Pinto, a Portuguese ship’s captain, observed: ‘All the streets run straight and as far as the eye can see. The houses are large, especially that of the king, which is richly decorated and has fine columns. The city is wealthy and industrious. It is so well governed that theft is unknown and the people live in such security that they have no doors to their houses.’ In 1897 this jewel of West Africa was destroyed by British troops as they tried to expand their control of the continent.

Just four months after the wall went up, twenty-eight-year-old train driver Harry Deterling pointed the passenger train he was driving at the wall, opened the throttle and smashed through the fortifications.

Without guidance from its Russian masters, the politburo was making policy on the hoof. It decided to allow East Berliners to apply for travel visas to visit West Germany. This was a process that could have been managed, and the Communist authorities might have been able to buy time and engineer ways of staying in control, but one of those small details that can change history got in the way. The man tasked with announcing the visa decision on 9 November was the Minister of Propaganda, Günter Schabowski. He had just returned from holiday, had not attended the meeting at which the policy was decided, and had no idea of any of the details of the process, which included briefings for border-guard commanders the following day so they could follow orders. When he was asked ‘When do the new regulations begin?’ he hesitated, and then replied, ‘As far as I know immediately, right now.’ There were already thousands of East Berliners at the wall; within hours there were tens of thousands on both sides.

A poll conducted by ICM Research in 2016 found that 52 per cent of British Muslim respondents believed that English law should be changed to make homosexuality illegal again.

Yes, the very sight of the Gaza Wall, the barriers around Bangladesh, the barbed wire between Hungary and Serbia offends our sensibilities and is testament to our failure to resolve our differences.