The Global Village In Peril

We surely are marching backwards into the future. The age of information and wondrous technologies is also the age of senility and moral decrepitude. Where the concept of multilateralism has been seen as an illusive ideal it must now be regarded as an essential tool. It has often been said the US refusal to adopt a genuine multilateralism is based in the fact it has never had to fight and reclaim its homeland. Unlike so many European countries it has never seen its cities flattened by war. Born out of revolution it some how feels it necessary to maintain an unrepentant aggression toward other countries; against enemies, real, manufactured and imagined. What is so ominous about the American lust for war is that it has a huge technological advantage over its enemies, but a critical shortage of foot soldiers ( as was the case in attacking Iraq): Where as the designated enemy is vast in numbers with only primitive weaponry. As we have seen in the WWII bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, the Viet Nam war and most recently in Iraq the US is all too willing to use this technological advantage to ravage the populations of other countries. As it becomes increasingly desparate to maintain this advantage, and its imperial overreach stretched to the breaking point these atrocities may be repeated on a larger scale. What is equally disturbing is that these wars are invariably against other races. Where Western governments are willing to turn a blind eye to the death of a few million Arabs they would never tolerate such a slaughter of Caucasian populations. As US effrontery pushes Russia and China into a new and unprecedented arms race the potential for loss of life becomes staggering and once again the concept of MAD comes to the fore. Every body is armed to the teeth, but to go to war is to risk annihilation. With MAD emerging once more nuclear disarmament again becomes a critical issue, but it will only be achieved once a genuine commitment to multilateralist values is established. The rear-view mirror is also a seemingly unstoppable merry-go-round of human folly. As the unilateralist exercises naked power other countries, especially its allies, must practice denialism as they too are under threat and their willingness to do so only makes a bad situation worse. Too many Western governments are in denial and former British prime minister Tony Blair is the undisputed Neville Chamberlain of this era. Chamberlain, as British Prime Minister from 1937-1940, sought to appease Hitler’s Nazi Germany, but vainly so, Hitler was just as willing to rip up treaties (including a non-aggression pact with Russia) as the unilateralist US is now. In 1939 poet W.H. Auden, at the height of his writing powers, and with WWII imminent, wrote one of his finest poems and arguably one of the best ever written in the English language. It was in memory of his friend and fellow poet W.B.Yeats. After paying tribute he uses the last stanzas of the poem to make reference to the looming outbreak of war: In the nightmare of the dark /All the dogs of Europe bark, And the living nations wait, /Each sequestered in its hate; Intellectual disgrace/Stares from every human face, /And the seas of pity lie, /Locked and frozen in each eye… Now as then the “intellectual disgrace, ” the denialism, the tolerance for unilateralism, is endemic. We are cycling back to war just as we did in the 20th Century. Once again the village elders have failed and only the enormity of the failure remains to be defined. Robert Billyard © 2008

Note: http://www.vivelecanada... http://www.vivelecanada...