Ziauddin Sardarrefuses to celebrate a thousand years of invasion, conquest, looting and slaughter

The television advertisement for the "Millennium Experience" invites us to imagine the past thousand years as a single day. We are on Easter Island, with the sun casting its shadow over the famous Aku sculptures, but there is not a soul in sight. The inviting voice of Jeremy Irons tells us: "At daybreak, these remarkable figures appeared on Easter Island. Before breakfast, Edward the Confessor had built Westminster Abbey; by late morning Michelangelo had shown us unimaginable beauty; Sir Walter Raleigh brought back the potato just in time for lunch. Shakespeare wrote sonnets in the afternoon; and the Earl of Sandwich invented the sandwich about teatime. Florence Nightingale, and later Mother Theresa, showed us the power of compassion. Logie Baird invented the television in time for the evening news and in the few minutes before bedtime we've seen a man on the Moon, the fall of the Berlin Wall and the end of apartheid." The concluding sentence asks us to "imagine what we could do tomorrow".

The Aku of Easter Island are as good as it gets as a symbol of the primitive, far in space and distant in time and culture. For western culture they have always been mute, enigmatic, savage and unutterably separate from the here and now. To begin at Easter Island is, therefore, to begin at the beginning, both in a physical and a metaphysical sense. But the story of the millennium we are about to leave has nothing whatever to do with that place and those statues; all the action has been elsewhere.

The past thousand years have been shaped by western luminaries. The list of achievements we are asked to celebrate is quite revealing. Edward the Confessor is a timely mention before the deluge. The saintly last king of the Anglo-Saxon line was adroitly succeeded by Norman invaders who, shortly after subduing the Anglo-Saxons, turned their attention to conquering the Celtic fringes. This process has only just been arrested, after nearly a thousand years of marginalisation and denigration of the Celts within the confines of their own land.

Within a decade the "unimaginable beauty" provided by Michelangelo was deemed too graphic. Reformation sensitivity required breeches to be painted over all those naked genitalia on the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel. Walter Raleigh was a man besotted by myths that led him to his ruin. In his search for Eldorado he did not discover the potato. He brought to England the fruit of the horticultural genius of the native peoples of the Americas, not a work of nature but of human creativity. He was also a leading advocate of the colonisation and appropriation of the Americas that caused the entire civilisation of those who did discover the potato to be disrupted as they were displaced, enslaved and slaughtered. The Earl of Sandwich, after whom initially the Hawaiian Islands were named, was a dissolute aristocrat who could not even stop gambling long enough to eat a decent meal. And Florence Nightingale, a rather authoritarian martinet, had compassion for British soldiers injured in a war to further the imperialist hegemony which she supported. Logie Baird gave us all the mixed blessings of having to listen to this mishmash of arrant nonsense and the means to secure the gradual denigration of cultural communication, which, yes, was once ennobled by Shakespeare.

The advertisement vaunts the very problem we have to resolve in the next millennium if it is not to be as disastrous as this one. Indeed, the ad ends with exactly the predicament that is our premise. You have to create apartheid before you can end it. You have to erect an Iron Curtain so you can rejoice at the fall of the Berlin Wall. You have to reduce people to abject poverty and trample on their dignity so you can show them compassion. If ending apartheid is a triumph of this millennium then it is a glorious own goal for the west. It marched fully formed out of the attitudes of people just like Raleigh and the Earl of Sandwich. Nor was it unknown to Shakespeare, with his Caliban and blackamoor Othello. Anyhow, apartheid was ended by its victims, not its practitioners. The mention of Mother Theresa, whose presence in western annals is so unequivocal that she is cited out of temporal context, is significant. Mother Theresa was an arch missionary and a confirmed admirer of authoritarian types. She makes the point that compassion was taught to non-western societies by the west. But this compassion is all about saving souls; it has nothing to do with eradicating poverty or helping the homeless.

The alternative history of the last millennium is just too awful to contemplate. After returning from the Crusades, the west set off, at lunchtime, to conquer and subdue the cultures and civilisations of the rest of the world. By teatime, numerous cultures and societies in the New World had been enfeebled or wiped out; and the wealth and knowledge of the civilisations of Asia and Africa had been looted, raped and laid to waste. By the time of the "evening news", the west had fought two world wars and gassed millions of Jews in the Holocaust. And just before bedtime, the brutalities of the Vietnam war were being relayed to the world, in all their horror, through Logie Baird's invention. Not to mention the ecological devastation and the eradication of the little diversity that is left on the planet. For the vast majority of the people of the planet, the "Millennium Experience" is another country.

The advertisement reflects the true consciousness of the dominant culture. The last millennium has been, from the western perspective, a coherent historic narrative, the narrative of the gradual expansion of consciousness, will to power, dominance and self-expression of Europe and its considerable offshoots over the waters. In celebrating it, we are asked to pay tribute to a thousand years of exploitation, domination and bigotry. We are about to experience a global explosion of positive proof that the greatest creation of the 20th century has been the condition of exclusion - and I speak as one who was shut out with the first breath taken by this millennium.

Before we wallow in speculation on "what we could do tomorrow" we ought to ensure that "tomorrow" is not a continuation of today. The future must have ample room for all those people whose antecedents, experiences, ideas, sentiments, beliefs and aspirations are not contained in the one, overarching dominant tale of how we got to the end of the millennium. What we have to discover in the next millennium is how not to invent apartheid, how not to promote all varieties of authoritarianism and how not to perpetuate abject poverty and inhumanity. We have to learn how to listen to cultures such as the ones responsible for the "remarkable figures" on Easter Island. They also have a millennium of history behind them. If we celebrate only one story, we begin the exclusion all over again.

Any inclusive notion of the past thousand years must begin with the acknowledgement that there is more than one way of reckoning time. The year 2000 will be 5760 on the Jewish calendar. By Indian reckoning it will be 2058. By Muslim reckoning it will be 1421. Other cultures and civilisations also have their own calendars. So by the chronology of the vast majority of humanity, the millennium is a patent non-event.

Call me a finger-wagging, anti-west puritan if you like, but I will not be celebrating the millennium. Instead, I will be fasting, along with a billion other Muslims, as 1 January 2000 will be in the middle of Ramadan. And when I sit down to eat at the end of my fast, it will not be a sandwich. I will be working on ways to fight this kind of twaddle, as no doubt it will be spewed in even greater quantities through Logie Baird's invention over the next year.

The job of remaking the next thousand years in a more humane and humble mould, where the diversity and contribution of all the inhabitants of the Earth are truly appreciated, requires much more than sipping champagne.

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