News Round-Up

How Berlusconi survived his scandals: “In some ways, Berlusconi is the Italian political equivalent of Bank of America or AIG: he is simply too big to fail. Too many who have carved out their slice of power would risk losing it all in the monumental shakeout that would follow Berlusconi’s exit from politics. And even in that unlikely scenario, the Prime Minister would have his ownership of the nation’s major private television networks to fall back on” [We doubt his statement that he is the best Prime Minister in Italy's 150-year history, but we have to agree that he is the most influential Italian of his generation.]

Tom Friedman is (again) on alternative energy: Applied Materials is one of the most important U.S. companies you’ve probably never heard of. It makes the machines that make the microchips that go inside your computer, and it maintains a real-time global interaction with all 14 solar panel factories it’s built around the world in the last two years, none in the U.S.: five are in Germany, four are in China, one is in Spain, one is in India, one is in Italy, one is in Taiwan and one is even in Abu Dhabi. Germany now generates almost half the solar power in the world today and, as a byproduct, is making itself the world-center for solar research, engineering, manufacturing and installation. With more than 50,000 new jobs, the renewable energy industry in Germany is now second only to its auto industry. AM’s biggest U.S. customer is a German-owned company in Oregon. [Usual Friedman Soundbite: So, if you like importing oil from Saudi Arabia, you’re going to love importing solar panels from China.]

…meanwhile, environment gets ignored (again): Carbon cap-and-trade bill, the legislation to limit national greenhouse-gas emissions, passed the House in June. However, Senate majority leader Harry Reid told reporters that the Senate might have to wait to act on cap and trade until after tackling health care and banking reform. Given how controversial cap and trade remains (the bill was weak but a bill nonetheless) even among many Democrats in the Senate — Republicans remain almost unanimously opposed — action in the election year of 2010 might be even tougher. The White House has taken  unilateral steps— like the move to place the first-ever national limits on greenhouse-gas emissions from automobiles — but that might not be enough.

Why the Illegal Immigrants should have healthcare: Insuring undocumented workers is ethically murky and politically impossible. If we’re hiring illegals, we have a moral obligation to care for them. Given that illegal immigrants have broken our laws, it makes sense that large numbers of upstanding citizens oppose any measure that would encourage more foreigners to sneak into America or make their lives easier once they’re here. However, American Journal of Public Health, contends that immigrants typically arrive in America during their prime working years and tend to be younger and healthier than the rest of the U.S. population. As a result, health-care expenditures for the average immigrant are 55 percent lower than for a native-born American citizen with similar characteristics. So if you add cheaper people to cover to the pool, you reduce the average cost. If illegals were covered, this hidden tax (on free emergency and charitable care) would decrease. Employers  have an incentive to hire undocumented immigrants because they don’t require coverage, thus giving illegal immigrants an unfair advantage in competing for jobs. Also, many undocumented workers leave the country before they’re old enough to require much medical care.

A Hope for Peace in Somalia? President Sheik Sharif Sheik Ahmed, who became president in February, is a former high school teacher, who became president in February. His moderate Islamist government is widely considered to be Somalia’s best chance for stability in years, which included 21 years of dictatorship and the 18 years of chaos that followed. Ahmed has both widespread grass-roots support inside the country and extensive help from outside nations, who are counting on Sheik Sharif to tackle piracy and beat back the spread of militant Islam. After years of ambivalence about Somalia, the United States is playing an increasingly active role here, and recently shipped 40 tons of weapons to Somalia to keep Sheik Sharif’s government alive. This week, American commandos killed a Qaeda agent in southern Somalia in a daylight helicopter raid. However, Ahmed has a disarrayed armed force–many of his commanders still have ties to the Shabab, the Islamist insurgents working with Al Qaeda. If not for the 5,000 African Union troops guarding the port, airport and Villa Somalia–the presidential villa–his government would quickly fall. (The Shabab and their insurgent brethren now control most of Mogadishu and much of the country).

Meanwhile, we continue to exploit Africans: A British oil trading giant, Trafigura, has agreed to a multimillion-pound payout to settle a huge damages claim from thousands of Africans who fell ill from tonnes of toxic waste dumped illegally in one of the worst pollution incidents in decades. Trafigura, one of the world’s largest oil traders, allowed contaminated sludge from a tanker ship was fly-tipped under cover of darkness near Ivory Coast in August 2006. The incident caused at least 100,000 residents from the west African country’s most populous city, Abidjan, to flood into hospitals and clinics although Trifigura has always insisted the foul-smelling slurry, dumped without its knowledge by a sub-contractor, could not have caused serious injury or illness. [Trafigura, a privately-owned multinational which has 1,900 staff working in 42 offices around the world, last year claimed a turnover of $73bn (£44bn), a figure double the entire GDP of Ivory Coast]. Internal Trafigura emails, obtained by Greenpeace, show that Trafigura struck a series of bargains on the international markets in 2005 and early 2006 to buy cheap and dirty petroleum, called coker gasoline, and rather than send the oil to a refinery, Trafigura used a tanker as a floating processing plant creating toxic sludge on the high seas.

And the French won the Cold War for us? In new documentary movie, L’Affaire Farewell, the French claims that a French mole in the KGB leaked information so devastating that it hastened the implosion of the Soviet Union. The CIA’s website still carries a compelling essay, declassified in 1996, by Gus Weiss, who wrote, “[The] Farewell dossier… led to the collapse of a crucial [KGB spying] programme at just the time the Soviet military needed it… Along with the US defence build-up and an already floundering Soviet economy, the USSR could no longer compete.” The French taupe, or mole, was Colonel Vladimir Vetrov of Directorate T (codename Farewell), the industrial spying arm of the KGB. In 1981-82, he gave French intelligence more than 3,000 pages of documentss, the names of more than 400 Soviet agents posted abroad and the successful Soviet strategies for acquiring, legally and illegally, advanced technology from the West. His expose of the abject failure of the Communist system to match rapid Western advances in electronic micro-technology influenced President Ronald Reagan’s decision to launch the “Star Wars” programme in 1983: a hi-tech bluff which would drag the USSR into an unaffordable, and calamitous, attempt to keep up with the democratic world. Vetrov never asked for money or for a new life in the West. He was an “uncontrollable man, who oscillated between euphoria and over-excitement”,  who was later executed for stabbing his mistress and killing a policeman in a Moscow park in February 1982.The detractors, however, say that the whole affair, they said, had been concocted by the CIA to test the loyalty to the West of the Socialist president, François Mitterrand, after he was elected in May 1981 and to sound out jealousy among competing French spy services. Farewell was “run” – at the mole’s own insistence – by a relatively small, French counter-espionage agency, the Direction de la Surveillance du Territoire (DST), which was not supposed to operate abroad.

Debutantes debut again in London: For the first time since 1997, young women dress in virginal white, curtsey to a minor royal and partake of a giant cake at Queen Charlotte’s Ball. Queen Charlotte’s Ball – originally started in 1780, as a birthday whim for George III’s consort – acted as the starting point of the Season for centuries. Once held in May, it began the Season, a six-month whirl of parties and events to launch young ladies, aged 17 to 18, of certain wealth and/or breeding on to the marriage market. Before 1958, the debutantes (debs as they were called) were presented to Buckingham Palace too, but Queen Elizabeth halted the practice not because it was anachronistic but because, as Princess Margaret put it, “every tart in London was getting in.” Today, the ball is held in September, rather than May – which is considered too close to exam time, but it, as it always has, now raises funds for the west London maternity hospital and research centre that bears Queen Charlotte’s name.

Boom or Bust in Iran

Iran’s Ahmadinejad once called for a baby boom to double the country’s population to 120 million and ‘defeat’ the west. In the end, baby boom may just be a weapon to topple Iran’s theocracy.

I am not a subscriber to Carlyle’s Great Man theory. Socioeconomic factors–which coincidentally produced these great men–form and shape the great events. And sometimes we don’t even need a great men to helm the birth of a great event.

It is under this light that I view the ongoing struggle in Iran. It is not a battle amongst Khomeni or Moussavi or Ahmadinajed. It is a battle of ideas and concepts greater than these men. It is a battle between theocracy and its oppressed masses. It is a battle catalysted not by the Western media (as they alleged) but by an Iranian baby boom. Yes, you read it here first, a baby boom is going to topple the Iranian theocracy.

Baby Boom. It is a dangerous concept. A boomer is not born political but it usually matures into a highly political one. Consider the United States’ baby boom from the late 1940s to the early 60s. It led not only to social unrest of the 60s and the 70s but also to the stagflation and other economic problems of the 80s.

The youth are dreamers and idealizers. It was only logical that they were at the forefront of Woodstock and anti-Vietnam movements. When they reached an older age, an economy that couldn’t provide enough jobs for them went into a recession. This shockwave left by the post-WWII babyboom was not only felt in the United States but also reflected in the socioeconomic woes of many Western nations from the 60s to the 80s. The ‘68 Student Revolts in Paris and labor unrests in England leading to Thatcher years were a few example of this babyboom.

But Iran today do not mirror post-WWII Europe and America. Its boom is similar to the Romanian one that happened artificially in 1960s. Always known from repressing women, Romanian strongman Nicolae Ceausescu implemented harsh antiabortion measures in 1967. After this infamous decree, the total number of births doubled immediately. From 1966 to 1976, Rumania produced nearly 40% more babies than might otherwise have been expected. In 1972, there were twice as many children in kindergarten as the year before. In 1989, twice as many 22-year-olds were flooding into the labor force. As Ceausescu was unable to create jobs in the late 1980s as rapidly as mothers created babies in the late 1960s, a disenchanted demographic was born. In a communist country where jobs were everything, this spelled the doom for Ceausescu’s regime.

The Islamic Revolution and its misogynist stance in Iran brought forth a similar pattern. The country’s population grew from 35 million in 1979 to 65 million. Population growth peaked at 3.2% in 1986. Now, in a nation where the legal marriage age is nine, and where Islamic doctrine calls for more babies, at least 45% of the population is under 20 and 60% under 30.  (Prophet Mohammed said two things opposing birth control: that he was proud of those who had a large number of children and that he hoped that the number of Muslims would outnumber all other faiths by Doomsday).

Some birth control measures were implemented in the late 80s and 90s, but very little was done to provide education and employment to these boomers. Now, it is too late. The boomers have arrived; in 2007, unemployment was nearly 12%; now it is 20%–a steep rise considering Iran’s economy was free from much ramblings in the financial sector last fall.

In a study conducted in 2000 by a reformist mullah called Mohammad Ali Zam noted that 73% of Iranians (86% of students) did not say their daily prayers. It was a surprising secular turn for a country which had embraced a religious revolt only a generation ago. With these numbers and this modernism in mind, it is not surprising that the most news of the Iranian revolt arrived to us through Twitter and Facebook.

Iran’s theocracy may be able to survive this wave of unrest, but it will not outlive the babyboomers. This is always had to govern a nation this frustrated–especially if the disenchanted are the impressionable youth. But as we anxiously await and observe this dramatic denouement in Iran, we must also gear up for further climaxes in the region.

Approximately 70 percent of Saudis, Iraqis and Afghans are under 30. The Middle East witnessed an enormous babyboom as the oil prices peaked in the 70s. Whereas the mullahs in Iran had succeeded in reining the population growth by the 90s, other countries failed. They now need lebensraum, education, employment and energy resources. As these commodities become scarcer, we face a daunting challenge. We must help them or would risk losing these youth population to radicalism. Hamas, and Hezbollah both won democratic elections thanks to their populist approach directed towards the youth. Should we prevent such outbursts of vox populi? Do we have moral imperative to soften their tone?

By the sheer force of its numbers, the boomers remodel societies as they passed through them. Their effects are unpredictable. In hoping for change, the boomers usually meet their self-fulfilled prophecies. We must hope so in Iran and we must ensure that their hopes and dreams are for the society’s remodeling rather than its shattering.

Present Future in Iran

As punditry flares up and revolution falters in Iran, we look back to look into not forward.

If there is one thing that political scientists and analysts fear, it is unpredictability. It is like a Himalayan mountaineer fearing a blizzard—merely a job hazard. However, since we had tried so hard to present our field as a branch of science (with all these professional looking charts, pies and equilibrium diagrams), we try to predict obstinately in the face of political vicissitudes.

To ‘predict’ the unpredictable, we usually set up tree diagrams and probability charts to see the likelihood and ramifications of an event. We just don’t want to get off-guard. Last weeks’ events in Iran were interpreted thus—with analysts from left, right and centre unfolding the future of the Iranian people and pulling off that old phrase ‘domino effect’ from the dusty shelves.

The scene was highly reminiscent of the collapse of the Soviet Empire twenty years ago. The cataclysmic event was so unexpected that the political scientists had to resort to analyzing predictions of a Russian filmmaker. In the film, released in 1989, Gorbachev was overthrown in 1992. The Russian heartland is ruled by an ultra-nationalist military dictatorship, the Baltic republics by Catholic radicals, and Central Asia by fundamentalist emirates. Tanks patrol the streets of Moscow, and throughout the country a fearful, starving populace wreaks revenge on former Communist Party members, Jews and intellectuals. The film also predicted ethnic anarchy between 15 newly independent republics.

The implosion of the Soviet Union finally arrived, but the most dramatic of predictions didn’t materialize. Ethnic anarchy and fanatical nationalism never solidified. Although regional tyrants did seize power in Central Asian republics, religious radicalism also turned out to be a false prediction. The names of former Communist Party members were protected, once again showing the triumphant of common sense over wild imaginary predictions.

In the 1960s and the 1970s, the United States fought in Vietnam under the shadow of this ‘domino effect’. Analysts feared dominoes from Indonesia and the Philippines to Bangladesh and Burma would fall into the Soviet sphere of influence if the United States were to falter in Vietnam. And eventually falter it did, but dominoes did not fall. True, Laos and Cambodia were lost to the communists but interpreting Communism as a monolith, we didn’t see the killing fields of Pol Pot nor Chinese wars in Indochina in our crystal balls.

That is why last week’s predictions by neocons and liberals alike of Iran’s future may or may not hold. Neocons are gleeful that their bête noir, President Ahmedinajed is still there. Liberals want the cracks in the system to become chasms that could potentially become the regime’s doom. But are we missing the point? Are we missing any other possibilities?

That is why we need to take Iran’s new revolution at its face value. It is as big as the revolution that brought the ayatollahs to power and is a clarion call not only to the West but also to the ayatollahs and other regional leaders. Apart from that there is very little we can predict for the future. The action is now when it comes to Iran.

A window has opened briefly in Iran and in waiting for a better opportunity, we might be missing our chance. After all, future unfolds in mysterious ways. We could either be spectators in the future or the leaders and guides of the current situation. But in the world where mass hysteria sometimes trumps rational predictions, we should be acting now. Now more than ever.

The Tale of Two Deaths

Twin obituaries to a generation’s face, and its voice — by someone who doesn’t belong to that generation.

Yesterday, I started to write this obituary of Farrah Fawcett. For an actress who made her name during one season of a popular TV show, Farrah’s shadow was long and her stride bold. I didn’t have that iconic poster of hers, but her face itself was iconic–it was the imprimatur of a changing generation, the symbol of a shifting trend and perhaps the face of the 70s, 80s and even 90s.

Indeed, hers was the first face of an actress I remembered from my childhood, which is surprising because I grew up in the 90s. Maybe I saw her in reruns of Charlie’s Angels–I don’t remember–but both my parents were already remembering her with nostalgia and esteem by the 90s.

Public memory was more divided on another celebrity whose death delayed this obituary. Michael Jackson, the King of Pop, who died yesterday at the age of 50, was also a larger-than-life figure. To some, he was an unparalleled genius but to people in my immediate vicinity, it was a matter of secondary importance.

This summer, I am living and mentoring a dorm of highschool sophomores and juniors, who broke the news of MJ’s death to me. It was one of those “you know where you were when…” occasions. I checked online but no major network (CNN, BBC, NYT) has called it yet. Several gossip sites were already proclaiming his death, but it wasn’t on wikipedia yet. That didn’t prevent the highschoolers from ‘celebrating’ his death with his songs. Gathering from their words, Michael Jackson with his almost extraterrestrial transformation, his fantasy Neverland ranch, his molestation charges, his eccentricities was merely a caricature, a bete noir we all love to hate.

Then, there is the older generation. I am not talking about those born in 70s and 80s, to whom Jackson was the voice of the generation as much as Farrah Fawcett was its face. I am talking about even older generation–that of our parents, to whom Michael Jackson was an usurper–the usurper of that ‘rightful’ iconicity occupied by Sinatra, Elvis, and the Beatles. Sandwiched between these two generations, I personally showed very little liking for Michael Jackson’s music; when I reached the music-listening stage, his once unique cords and choreographies were already trite.

Inside the Actors Studio, James Lipton asks ten questions complied by the French philosopher Berhnard Pivot to every guest. The last question is, “If Heaven exists, what would you like to hear God say when you arrive at the Pearly Gates?” Neither Farrah or Jackson appeared on the show, but both would be glad to hear ‘You did make a difference’ from the lips of the Almighty. That is what a lot of people were saying this morning, and afterall, Vox Populi, Vox Dei.

One and all, bag and baggage

“Let the Turks now carry away their abuses, in the only possible manner, namely, by carrying off themselves. Their Zaptiehs and their Mudirs, their Blmhashis and Yuzbashis, their Kaimakams and their Pashas, one and all, bag and baggage, shall, I hope, clear out from the province that they have desolated and profaned. This thorough riddance, this most blessed deliverance, is the only reparation we can make to those heaps and heaps of dead, the violated purity alike of matron and of maiden and of child; to the civilization which has been affronted and shamed; to the laws of God, or, if you like, of Allah; to the moral sense of mankind at large.”

The words that still reverberate was first penned by the British Primeminister William E. Gladstone, in his pamphlet, “Bulgarian Horrors and the Question of the East” (1876). The issue and rhetoric can still easily be substituted for the current Georgian crisis. Russians, one and all, bag and baggage, shall clear out from the province that they have desolated and profaned.

See: http://www.sos-georgia.net/ for the in-depth look at the conflict and sign a petition at http://new.petitiononline.com/557799/petition.html

Colonialism, redefined

The term ‘colonialism’ has seen varying and gerrymandering definitions, no doubt as a result of a widespread smear campaign by those who fear effective governance. The term comes from the word ‘colony’, the enclaves the pioneers establish in the newfound lands for social, political or economical reasons. Before the Christian zeal entered the scene in the period between 1880s and the First World War, those colonies operated for solely economical gains.

Not unlike the mass exodus from the Third World to Europe and America today, the Europeans of the nascent days of colonialism saw their “manifest destiny” in the lands across the seas. Most crew members of early explorers and mercantile fleets don’t even know how to swim. To people like those, we owe success stories like America and Canada.

Through trading posts, these societies and colonies enjoyed good relations with the indigenous population. In Canada, for instance, the French and the Natives coexisted in a harmony that James Fenimore Cooper (and Hollywood) could not even dream of. In India, the early English merchants adapted and even intermarried into the native society. To this day, the global business success in places like Macau, Hongkong, Singapore and Shanghai owe their thanks to eclectic brand of talent and diversity that these empires brought together.

What today’s world doesn’t seem to understand is how these commercial ‘colonies’ became political entities and subordinate nations. However, colonialism was never political until the newcomers like Germany and Italy politicalized it in the first half of the 20th century. The British Empire was assembled “in an absence of mind”, and even the most imperialistic of all British Prime Ministers, Viscount Palmerston, hated the notion of having the political responsibility for the colonies.
By the 18th and 19th centuries, the colonies have become both a trend and a necessity. People also like to blame the colonialism for human exploitation. Widespread industrial revolution created by increasingly mercantile empires may have contributed to slavery, but slavers and privateers were individual brigands who operated without any approval from any Chancellery of Europe. In addition, British Royal Navy was almost singlehandedly responsible for abolishing slave trafficking and piracy in African and in the Caribbean. Naval ships patrolled the English Channel to prevent the slave ships from being built.

Sensationalism and rewriting history also contributed to typecasting colonialism and the age of progress as the forces of evil. Pirates, rapists, thieves, brigands and racketeers became the wronged heroes in literature, and on screen. On the contrary, the empires were forces of good. Jean Houdin in North Africa was exposing the fraudulent ways of native ‘witchdoctors’ and ‘magicians’. Ritual killings (thugee), wife burnings (suttee) and triads were being suppressed by the British in the Orient. Bloodthirsty native rulers like Kings of Dahomey, who offered frequent sacrificial murders and selling his captured prisoners to slavers, were gone. The rule of law, jurisprudence, education and sanitation were introduced to the areas which languished under absolute rulers.

In short, it was these much reviled empires, not some native Robin Hood or Joan of Arc that delivered the greater portion of the world’s population from oppression and inhumane rituals. It may not be so self-evident in retrospect, but the mere fact that the British were able to administer their rule of law to a subcontinent of 250 million people with their Indian Civil Service of a few thousand stood as the testament to the popularity and the efficacy of the imperial government.

Opium Wars

Instead of its other success stories, the opium wars with China were what people chose to remember in relation to Britain’s imperial policy in the Orient. It is written that the First Opium War (1840) as the result of Britain’s militaristic attempts to import the drug into a nation governed by an emperor who wanted to stamp out the opium addition. It sounds like a concise and authoritative summary for history texts but the truth is more complex.

In addition to the facts that India had grown opium and ten million addicts in China had been using it long before the British arrived, the Chinese Emperor’s attempt to curb the trade is less humanitarian than xenophobic. He was simply trying to monopolize the trade and levy taxes to fill his government’s coffers. The Emperor’s envoys demanded not the destruction but only handing over of the opium chests. Originally the foreign merchants in Canton (which was xenophobic China’s only foreign trading post) complied, but when the Chinese forces took all foreigners in Canton hostage.

Equally controversial was the Second Opium War and its aftermath (1864). The British forces under Lord Elgin burnt down the Summer Palace outside Peking, an act which is today condemned as barbaric. However, it was more symbolic than malicious. The Middle Kingdom in those days was not unlike today’s North Korea, which believes in its superiority over the Western powers. Only the destruction of such a symbol would have prevented another war. And it actually did.

Not many people know about the looting and burning of the Peking Summer Palace, but opium, on the other hand, has left a blemish on the history of imperial conquest. In all fairness, opium was the placebo of Europe at this time. Five in six Englishmen consume it; the doctors prescribed it for hysteria, aches, travel-sickness, toothache, neuralgia, influenza, cholera, hay-fever, ulcers and insomnia. The Prince Regent’s doctors prescribed it as a hangover cure; Samuel Taylor Coleridge wrote Kubla Khan on it; Berloiz ate it to write ‘symphonie fantastique’.

Like debates on medicinal marijuana today, the debates on opium growing raged between the British East India Company and the two Houses of Parliament. However, as it will be with the certain South American nations a century later, opium was the sole crop the farmers can build their livelihoods on in South Asia. Also, the profits from its trading enabled the Governor General of India to fund much needed reforms, public works, education and other services in the subcontinent.

Opium growing is redefined as a malignant relic of the colonial times by the governments which like to blame the failures of their half-baked economic policies on the wrongs of distant past. During and after the Cold War, governments and rebel groups in the Golden Triangle and the Golden Crescent regions of Asia (where opium is still copiously grown) profited largely from the trade, making the region unstable and precarious. In a world where good and evil are rigidly defined, these ‘recreational drugs’ fall squarely into the latter category. However, the starving farmers in Indian Behar region or Columbian jungles who have to support a family of twelve couldn’t care less.

Let not history repeat itself

Why we must denounce Russia’s Georgian Incursion

Sometimes—as with Nazi Germany—we try so hard to prevent a conflict that we have to eventually fight a greater, emboldened enemy.

On the eighth day of the eighth month of 2008, the Games of the 29th Olympiad opened in Beijing. Despite being foreshadowed by the Sino-Tibetan Crisis, the 2008 Games are not boycotted by any nation. It would have been an occasion for the entire world to rejoice the Olympic brotherhood, if not for a despicable act of aggression that occurred a few hours earlier in the Caucasus Mountains.

Russian forces invaded the separatist region of South Ossetia in Georgia. In the next few days, the Russians also entered Abkhazia, another Georgian break-away province, as the international community sits and watches. By this time, it is of no use to argue over whose faults caused this international crisis. Regrettably, Georgia has its own share of blame for ignoring the Ossetian and Abkhazian grievances, but it is clear who is David and who is Goliath in this unmatched conflict.
In the UN Security Council, the sitting nations found their hands tied by the impending Russian veto reminiscent of the Cold War days. Not only that, the Cold War-style exchange of acerbic words also descended into the Council Chambers in New York; however, it is a much more dangerous rhetoric from another page of history that eerily reflects the situation.

What Russian Prime Minister (and the Kremlin’s own eminence grise) Mr. Putin wants is the rehabilitation of the former Soviet glory at the expense of its neighbors. The concept almost sounds like something that Adolf Hitler would have proclaimed in one of his fiery and misguided speeches. Hitler deemed the German defeat in the First World War was unjustified while lamenting over the failures of the Kaiserriech and the Weimer Republic; Mr. Putin views the Soviet defeat that the end of the Cold War and the Yeltsin administration that followed as a humiliation of an equal nature.

South Ossetia and Abkhazia will be nothing but the Russian version of Anschluss which Hitler enforced on Austria. After Austria, the Nazi leader’s next target was Czechoslovakia; the Russian Bear’s next move could as well be towards Georgia itself, or towards any of former Soviet states like Ukraine, Moldova or Estonia which it is currently harassing.

As the hapless nations of Central Europe once looked West at Britain and France, everyone in Eastern Europe, and the Caucasus currently is counting on America and her NATO Allies. Perhaps it is the hollow promises of a NATO membership that emboldened Georgia and that forced Russia’s hand. The Western World will be repeating an egregious mistake of history if it let Russia get away with this destruction of everything we have worked so hard to accomplish since the fall of Berlin Wall. A note of caution for well-intentioned mediator President Sarkozy of France: it is not time for appeasement a la Neville Chamberlain or for economic sanctions which Russia government couldn’t care less.

No matter how much words and negotiations are more powerful than actions, sometimes it is necessary to take out our arms when our cherished values are threatened. To defend her long-espoused values of liberty and democracy, the West has little choice but to take out her slingshots once again. Sometimes, the war is the sole effective weapon to teach Goliaths a lesson or two. Russium et Moscua delenda est.

…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.