KEY POINTS:
Thumbing through the Herald this week I was taken once again by the fact that much of the world is in chaotic conflict, and that nearly all of that conflict is the result of ethnic and/or religious differences.
I wonder how long it will take the world's "leaders" to understand that because they are ethnic and/or religious, such conflicts are incapable of political solutions. And that the West's constant harping on "democracy" is unintelligible to the citizens of those parts of the world who have never known it, their histories of theocracy or dictatorship stretching back for thousands of years.
One exception, perhaps, is Northern Ireland, where a truce has been achieved between bitter and bigoted religious factions, but only because the leaders of each faction have managed to subsume their religion to the interests of politics, for now anyway.
This week we read that Fiji's military dictator, Commodore Frank Bainimarama, has decided to boycott the Pacific Forum talkfest, and once again see the knee-jerk reaction of our Dear Leader demanding that he come to heel and return his country to what passes there for democracy.
Well, I don't blame Commodore Bainimarama a bit for choosing not to attend the forum and subject himself to the sort of patronising finger-wagging from the likes of Ms Clark and Kevin Rudd that reeks of an empire long gone.
Nor is it likely, as Helen Clark thinks, that there will be much reaction at home to the commodore's decision. And it is surely significant that the only real vocal opposition to his regime comes from the South Pacific Big Two - Australia and New Zealand.
The rest of the leaders of the tiny Pacific nations who make up the forum have been strangely muted in their criticism of events in Fiji, if they have said anything at all.
Perhaps that's because the Pacific people understand instinctively that Fiji's problems are not political but ethnic, and that no political patch-up job is ever going to last.
The most gruesome example of ethnicity and religion in conflict is, of course, the mad and murderous Balkans, where tens of thousands of people have been slain simply because of their religion or ethnicity. Don't think for a moment that that sort of enormity won't erupt again ... and again.
For now the scene has shifted to the Caucasus where two ethnic enclaves have resisted attempts by the Georgian hierarchy to make them rejoin Georgia, and Russia has moved swiftly to look after them.
The people of South Ossetia and Abkhazia are mainly ethnic Russians and it is to Russia they look for their future. Once again, no political compromise is going to hold.
But the blinkered attitude of the United States and Europe to the Georgian eruption is typical of what I'm talking about.
Showing an ignorance that only an American can exhibit of the nature and history of peoples elsewhere, US Defence Secretary Robert Gates says Russia needs to be told that "this kind of behaviour, characteristic of the Soviet period, has no place in the 21st century".
And much closer to the conflict, a Georgian politician says "this is not a war between Russia and Georgia but between civilisation and barbarism".
Both those statements are empty political rhetoric, although I'd rather call them what they really are - bullshit.
I don't blame Vladimir Putin and his tame President, Dmitry Medvedev, for putting the Georgians in their place. After all, he is surrounded by former Soviet satellite countries which, in their resentment, are wooing the West, and even permitting US missile installations on their lands.
How would New Zealand and Australia react if, say, Fiji and Tonga cosied up to China and agreed to have Chinese missile batteries stationed on their islands?
Only the supreme arrogance of a Bush-blind America could come up with such a boneheaded scheme, its "leaders" seemingly blissfully unaware of the effect it might have on a resurgent Russia which, incidentally, has never known true democracy in all its history.
Throughout the Middle East it is Muslim v Muslim, Muslim v Jew and Muslim v Christian. Throughout Africa, vicious tribal violence flares continually. Every nation in the European Union is reeling from the effects of Islamist migration, and nationalistic aspirations of its member states constantly threaten its fragile "unity".
Britain has its problems not just with the influx of Muslims but with the aspirations of Scotland and Wales. Hindu India and Muslim Pakistan are in a state of constant tension.
And each of these areas of conflict defies political solution, for they are not political problems. They are the result of deeply held, often fanatical, religious tradition, or of an ethnic and familial sense of belonging which stretches back hundreds of generations.
Only one man had the answer to them - and they nailed him to a cross.
