Introduction

Within a couple of years of the 2nd Edition of Tsunami of Blood, I was convinced that my predictions were all wrong. The book was published just before the surge of Facebook™ and Twitter™ on the world stage, and it appeared that they had short circuited my concerns about what would happen with the large cadre of young Muslim men.

When the Arab Spring got going in earnest in Tahrir Square in Cairo, and President Mubarak resigned, it appeared that influences spreading around the world thanks to the globalization of social networking were changing societies extremely rapidly. It looked like innovations of attitude and perspective, which had taken place in centuries in Western Europe and the Americas, would take place in just a few years in the Muslim world.

But then déjà vu all over again, as the women were told it was not “their time,” and Patriarchy reasserted itself with a vengeance, setting women’s rights in the Muslim world back a bit, if not a decade or a century. Then the Army took over Egypt once again. Yes, they have made some progress. They deposed the Muslim Brotherhood, and other purveyors of repressive and murderous Islam, but it is extremely unclear what their long-term intentions are, and the Egyptian people are once again in a bizarre limbo about their future.

Meanwhile, in Turkey and other Muslim countries, the political push began toward more conservative Islam. The Gezi Park demonstrations of 2013 were suppressed quite violently, much in the same way as our Occupy protests were snuffed out in the United States in 2011. Now, in the summer of 2014, many of my fellow Americans are waking up to the reality that even our Rights have been seriously eroded. The police have started to treat Americans like the enemy, rather than behaving like the public servants who are designated to protect and serve us.

Now with the brutal emergence of the Islamic State in Iraq and Syria (“ISIS”), we see that the predictions I made in 2006 were precisely correct, and the world of the second decade of the 21st Century has become a much more dangerous place than many expected, given the investment we thought we were making in “democratization” around the world.

In preparing this 3rd Edition of Tsunami of Blood, I went back through the assertions and predictions from 2006. Amazingly, I felt I was reading about current events, rather than a history of things that happened a decade ago. In some sense it is tragic that my dire warnings of that time have proven correct, although they were largely ignored. It seems the United States Government cannot learn from its own mistakes, regardless of which party is in power.

As a result, I felt it important to prepare this e-book version, so that people around the world can easily see what predictions I made then, and that I am now reiterating. Social networking will not be the panacea for the ills of the world. The use of this tool may help people around the world to see what needs to be done more quickly, but in the end it is people in their local communities, who will ultimately make the thousands of changes that must come in daily life before everyone can enjoy their lives just as they want them.

I am quite proud of my country. I still believe that The United States of America represents the essence of the human spirit allowed to develop to its fullest potential. But it has not been easy to get to this place, and it is not easy to maintain. We have a very messy political system, with lots of discord on every topic under the sun. But that privilege to debate is what makes us strong.

Human Rights come only to those who take them from those who would make slaves of their countrymen. They are maintained thereafter only by constant vigilance. Many of my countrymen relaxed their vigilance after the victories of the Civil Rights Movement and the Women’s Rights Movement of the 1960s and 1970s. Now many of them are shocked that we’re back fighting the same battles we were fighting then, only this time against more organized, persistent and better funded enemies, who creep into our living rooms via television every evening. We cannot afford to lose these battles this time around either. It is the responsibility of all of us, who cherish the free development of the human spirit to its fullest potential, to be constantly vigilant and active. Liberty is never finally won!

Sadly, we are not participants in one of those “western” movies of the 1950s and 1960s, where the cavalry always came to the rescue. Of course, many in Tahrir and Taksim Squares, in Syria and in Libya, as well as in many other places, were shocked that there isn’t a global police force, that will come to the aid of people oppressed by gangsters posing as fundamentalist theologians in their societies. We all must first save ourselves!

We have all had to learn painfully that not everyone claiming to be religiously pure is in fact working in the best interests of the community. We Americans are obviously inept at understanding what is best for the majority in another cultural environment. We can participate in the stopping of genocide and ethnic cleansing, but in the end we all need governments around the world, which will protect and serve rather than treating their own people as the enemy.

It is my hope that with this reissue of Tsunami of Blood, my fellow human beings will continue to evolve in their understanding of what it takes to have a righteous and respectful society, where all men and women can live their lives in peace and develop themselves and their children to their fullest potential.

Donald L. Conover
September 2014

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