There is a global war under way that most people, even many of its casualties, are unaware is even taking place. I don’t have to look back beyond a few months’ headlines to count this war’s many casualties. A hundred forty-seven murdered at a university in Garissa, Kenya. Sixteen killed in terror attacks in Paris at the magazine Charlie Hebdo and at a kosher supermarket. The thousands killed in Eastern Ukraine. The opposition leader gunned down on a bridge on his way home in Moscow. Then there are the countless wounded and imprisoned victims of this global struggle.
Globalization has effectively compressed the world in size, increasing the mobility of goods, capital, and labor. Yet this compression takes place across not only space but time as well, as the twenty-first century’s borderless technologies and ideas collide with once sheltered cultures and regimes intent on existing as in centuries past. This is less the famous clash of civilizations than an attempt by these “time travelers” to hold on to their waning authority by stopping the advance of the ideas of an open society. Radical Islamists set the time machine to the Dark Ages and encourage the murder of all who oppose them.
Vladimir Putin wants Russia to exist in the great power era of tsars and monarchs, dominating its neighbors by force and undisturbed by elections and rights complaints. The post-Communist autocracies, led by Putin’s closest dictator allies in Belarus and Kazakhstan, exploit ideology only as a means of hanging on to power at any cost.
In the East, Kim Jong-un’s North Korea attempts to freeze time in a Stalinist prison camp bubble. In the West, Maduro in Venezuela and the Castros in Cuba use socialist propaganda to resist increasing pressure for human rights. Boko Haram warlords employ religion as an excuse to slaughter their rivals. Others, such as the religious monarchies in the Middle East, are guilty by association for creating favorable conditions for violence with their archaic restrictions on free society. What unites the time travelers is their rejection of modernity, their fear and hatred of what we should simply call “modern values” to replace the obsolete and condescending term “Western values.”
Globalization has brought these relics into contact and competition with the modern world that threatens to destroy their environments and authority. This contact also provides them with markets for their natural resources and with the technology they use for murder and repression, so they cannot disengage entirely. The time travelers cannot fight head to head with the ideas and prosperity of the free world, so they use the only weapons they have: ideology, violence, and disregard for the value of human life. They combat the lure of free speech and free markets with irrationality: radical religion and nationalism, cults of personality and dogma, hatred and fear. Despite the denials of many politicians and pundits it is quite possible to lose a fight you refuse to acknowledge you are in. Even worse, ignoring the reality of the conflict puts more innocent victims on the front lines instead of trained soldiers and law enforcement. There are no easy solutions for homegrown terrorists or nuclear-armed dictators, but we must begin by ending this culture of denial.
— Winter is Coming (Garry Kasparov), Loc. 4334–59
The idea of the book is in these paragraphs.