…through the lens of past

In recent years, with the continuing crisis in Iraq, we began to doubt the functionalities of the unipolar, unilateral world which we have grown so accustomed to since the Fall of Berlin Wall may. In the face of our alternate choices, it may probably even be our safest.

Throughout history, we have seen our choices: unilateral empires, a power struggle between two empires (the most recently the Cold War) and a barbaric age in between the fall of one empire and the rise of another. We are currently in the last scenario.

Religious fanaticism is on the ascendant; the Western World is preoccupied with a toiling war in the Middle East; China supplies the essential goods for the wider world and holds it hostage with its astounding trade power—it sounds like a description of the Crusades-era world, a thousand years past. However, such description also rings some bells in today’s world. Indeed, if one will name our present era in the historical terms, I would put forward the name ‘neo-Dark Ages’.

It is true that we have our cutting edge technology. The denizens of the Dark Ages did have their own in sanitation, agriculture and warfare. It is true that we have more social freedom—the Dark Ages too had seen their own share of the most liberal governances of the past millennium (only in pre-Renaissance era came the Inquisition which terminated all these). Most strikingly of all, both our worlds thrive in a vacuum left void by the fall of an empire.

The history of the world has been the history of the empires. The original Dark Ages were born in the tent where Romulus Augustulus formally surrendered to Odoacer, but conceived with the sack of Rome under Attila the Hun. Our present one’s beginnings are less prominent even in retrospect. The birth pangs came with the slow disintegration of the British Empire (and her social hierarchy) but the age was impregnated on two days when we let terrorists win.

The 1914 assassination of Archduke Francis Ferdinand of Austria-Hungary was carried out by the Black Hand, the Serbian state-sponsored terrorist organization. The attack was righteously vindicated by the Austro-Hungarian Empire at the risk of endangering his own sovereignty. However, another terrorist take-over in Russia passed unnoticed. Vladimir Illyich Lenin and his band of Bolsheviks were nothing more than regicides and anarchists, who when got the supreme power betrayed their own inner wolves and colored the entire Siberian tundra red with their vengeance and hatred. Britain, France and the U.S., the victors of the First World War, let these anarchists win fearing the labor unrests in their own backyards.

That marked the official beginning of appeasement and disarmament, which accompanies the Western Powers throughout the 20th century. It culminates with Chamberlain’s the ‘Peace of Our Time’ but regrettably didn’t end with Chamberlain. Disarmament was always in the air throughout the Cold War. Reagan appeased Iran in the Contra Scandal. With such politicians, it is no wonder that the greatest leaders who forged the world as we know it are Lincoln, FDR and Churchill, the men who didn’t fear to lead their countries into war to fight for the righteous cause.

It took four centuries from the fall of Rome to reunite Europe; under Charlemagne, the new Roman Empire was again founded. After Charlemagne, it was one empire after another (the Holy Roman Empire, the Ottoman, the Spanish, the Napoleonic, the British and the German) that replaced his realms and that brought Europe to forefront of the world.

The fall of the British Empire is coupled with the power-struggle between the Soviets and the Americans known as the Cold War. The Cold War rivalry produced greatest scientific and humanitarian achievements of the 20th century: the Berlin Airlift, the Marshall Plan, NATO, the Apollo Missions, World Wide Web, etc. However, after the end of the Cold War, human race had lost not only its ability to fight but also its ability to survive.

(To be continued)

The Troubled Present…

In our 21st century world, freedom is still challenged everywhere. That sacrosanct body which embodied diplomacy, tactfulness and peace, the United Nation, lies violated and unheeded. Every September, the leaders from around the world gather at the United Nation General Assembly to hear people like Hugo Chavez and Mahmod Ahmadenajed lashing out against the ideals of freedom and extolling the virtues of crime and anarchy. The world faces new challenges like war crimes, genocides, humanitarian disasters, cyber-warfare, religious fanaticism and terrorism, to solve which we should probably re-envision our existing rigorous adherences to laissez-faire foreign policies, that is to say ‘give war a chance’.

In the international scene, Zimbabwe (formerly Rhodesia) has been making news from past few years, which 84-year old Robert Mugabe desperately trying to cling on his absolute power at all costs. The Western World was once relieved that Mugabe seized power from Ian Smith, who declared unilateral independence from Britain and established white-minority government in Rhodesia. However, Mugabe proved to be a more ruthless racist than mild-mannered Ian Smith.

In the 1970s, the Western Powers played a role in Mugabe’s coup d’état by doing nothing and ignoring the pleas of minority white government. However, the similar laissez-faire tricks of the Western governments will not work again in Zimbabwe. Although nearly all of its neighbors are wildly clamoring for the regime change (even Nelson Mandela lends his voice), Mugabe will probably be able to cling on to his power so long as the Communist China attempts to block any international attempts to alleviate the nation’s pains.

Whenever there is Chinese and Russian antagonism, the Western World is always reduced to imposing sanctions on these pariah states. Sanctions simply don’t work. US and EU arms embargo cannot be implemented when the ‘outposts of tyranny’ receives arms, wherewithal and allegiances from Russia, China and other wannabes superpowers like Iran and Syria.

In recent memory, the Western World is always reluctant to take military or martial actions. The psychological warfare, a relic of the Cold War, has since lost its luster and has been accordingly relocated into the dustbins of history. However, its efficacy is undeniable. During the apartheid, South Africa’s athletes were banned from Olympic competitions for three decades, and barred from international competition in rugby and cricket. It was an immense psychological blow to the white minority. If we can do anything within what little freedom granted to us by the callousness of those plutocrats in Beijing, Moscow and elsewhere, we should put blanket sanction on culture, sport and luxury items, thus depriving the dictators of something to gloat about.

Instead, in the face of Mugabe’s recent undemocratic turns, the British reaction to this international conflict was shameful. Her Majesty’s Government rescinded the knighthood from Mr. Robert Mugabe, and that is all they did. When the paws of once-mighty British lion are so tied that it is reduced to removing knighthoods, it is just plain disgraceful. It is as if the entire freedom-loving peoples of the world are held hostage.

Economic sanctions don’t work on the geopolitical level either. With millions of people under dictatorships around the world just struggling to survive, sanctions make their lives worse. For the ruling-class, they eat cake in their own Rolls-Royces and villas. With help those dictatorships receive from one another, the government officials simply have means and money to live on, when ordinary people have to beseech and comply with the iron-will of the government for the privileges we took for granted.

Like in Zimbabwe, another dictatorship in Burma survives because of its natural resources and its alliance with China. Some corporate giants like Royal Dutch Shell and British American Tobacco in Zimbabwe and Total in Burma, simply refuse to shop working with the ‘governments’ of these nations. After all, they earn solid returns in dealing with these Orwellian states, in part to corruption and in part to the lack of union laws. The money gained from the natural resources the Mother Nature endowed to the land and its people usually goes into the personal coffers of undemocratically-elected few (and eventually into accounts in Cayman Islands) as unwitting superpowers turns a deaf-ear.

Elsewhere in the world, the negligence of the superpowers is almost criminal. The ongoing crisis in the Darfur region in the Sudan calls for an international action similar to one which placated the former Yugoslavia in the 1990s. However, again China, which has various trade treaties with the Sudan extremist government, has resisted denouncing the atrocities committed inside the nation. If you take these international crises to account, it turns out after all that China’s rise hasn’t been so ‘peaceful’ after all.

Clearly devised with Machiavellian intents, China’s no-interference policy benefits only a cadre of unethical politicians in Beijing. It also gives the immunity to one-China policy, which eerily sounds like Hitler’s plans to unite all Aryan races. In Tibet, Communist oppression destroys culture heritage. Even after 50 years of independence of Taiwan—whose place in the United Nations Security Council that Communist China had usurped—China is still calling for reunifications. It seems as if the reunification is in the air, but the wary Taiwanese should bear in mind what happened to the people of Hong Kong after the British handed back the territory to the Mainland China.

With China so adamantly uncooperative on the international stage, it is no wonder that two of the world’s longest reigning dictatorships border China. The real reasons behind the failure of the Korean Peninsula peace-talks lie with the Chinese. However, a lesser known impasse is with Burma, fiercely undemocratic and unyielding since the 1960s.

Earlier this year, in May 2008, a cyclone ravaged the delta regions of Burma, killing 100,000 people and imperiling many others with water-borne diseases and putrid corpses. The initial reaction of the military junta which rules the country (since 1988 ) with the benediction of Beijing and Moscow (a UN resolution on Burma in 2004 was rejected with a double-veto from China and Russia despite an overwhelming approval in the Security Council) was deplorable. It banned the international aid agencies and British and American rescue crews from entering the country. The Western Fleet, onboard which were humanitarian support, waited outside Burma as if it was a beggar waiting for permission to beg inside the country. The U.S. delivered humanitarian aid without the consent of the host governments in places like Bosnia and Sudan, but with Burma, with China next door, the scenario is almost impossible without bloodshed.