After the fall of iron curtain, a new age of conflicts had emerged.

In 1993, political scientists Samuel Huntington published his influential thesis "The Clash of Civilization" as an explanation for post-cold war conflicts. For years, this thesis has been regarded as a valuable pragmatic tool for American policy makers. "The clash of ignorance" is an article written by prominent scholar Edward Said. This article is a critical response to Samuel Huntington's "The Clash of Civilizations". In the article, Edward Said demonstrated the misleading fallacies of Samuel Huntington's "The Clash of Civilization" thesis, and the reasons for such misunderstanding. Edward Said first describes the paradigm of traditional western oriental thinking. He believes that it is precisely the construction of binary opposition between westerner and others that have produce most cultural misunderstandings, and the clash of civilizations. Such binary construction, insisted by Edward Said, is what makes western policy makers and Samuel Huntington to see conflicts instead of parallels. For Edward Said, the "West" as an ideological concept is crucial to the misinterpretation of other civilizations, especially Islamic civilizations, as potentially hostile and compulsive. However, words like "West" are exploited heavily by western media as an easy and pragmatic mean to convey the imaginary ideological differences between "West" and "Islamic". This form of mislabeling, according to Edward Said, leads to confusion, and ultimately results in the misinterpretation of other civilizations as potentially hostile to the "West". Finally, Edward Said proposes that instead of see differences, we should look for parallels, and instead of battling each other ideologically, we should reconcile with other ideologies. Edward Said describes our history as a universally shared history; therefore, it is our imperative to reconcile with each other, and understanding each other on firm objective bases instead of assuming imaginary ideological boundaries. This boundary is not only futile, but will be totally meaningless in the face of our shared history.

The full title of Swift's pamphlet is "A Modest Proposal for Preventing the Children of Poor People from Being a Burthen to their Parents, or the Country, and for Making them Beneficial to the Publick." The tract is an ironically conceived attempt to "find out a fair, cheap, and easy Method" for converting the starving children of Ireland into "sound and useful members of the Commonwealth." Across the country poor children, predominantly Catholics, are living in squalor because their families are too poor to keep them fed and clothed. The author argues, by hard-edged economic reasoning as well as from a self-righteous moral stance, for a way to turn this problem into its own solution. His proposal, in effect, is to fatten up these undernourished children and feed them to Ireland's rich land-owners. Children of the poor could be sold into a meat market at the age of one, he argues, thus combating overpopulation and unemployment, sparing families the expense of childbearing while providing them with a little extra income, improving the culinary experience of the wealthy, and contributing to the overall economic well-being of the nation. The author offers statistical support for his assertions and gives specific data about the number of children to be sold, their weight and price, and the projected consumption patterns. He suggests some recipes for preparing this delicious new meat, and he feels sure that innovative cooks will be quick to generate more. He also anticipates that the practice of selling and eating children will have positive effects on family morality: husbands will treat their wives with more respect, and parents will value their children in ways hitherto unknown. His conclusion is that the implementation of this project will do more to solve Ireland's complex social, political, and economic problems than any other measure that has been proposed.