Interesting opinion from:
dawn.com
A leading Pakistani newspaper.
Moralistic righteousness
By Omar Kureishi
OSCAR WILDE would have approved of spin-doctoring. He believed that anyone who called a spade a spade should be made to use one. Thus in the present semantic jugglery, an enemy is a "strategic adversary" and not an enemy and spying is surveillance and not spying.
There was time in history when power was pursued for its own sake and countries went to war without any "values" and moral pretences. Even World War I was proceeding with customary savagery until Woodrow Wilson introduced the element of saving the world for democracy. Since then it has been downhill. The struggle for power has become a battle for minds and hearts. The weapons are lies, lies and more damn lies.
As I write this, there is a stand-off between the United States and China over a spy plane and its 24-member crew which landed at Hainan Island after being involved in a collision with a Chinese fighter aircraft. Both sides are crying foul.
The Americans are insisting that the spy plane, loaded with sophisticated technology was flying over international waters and was buzzed by Chinese fighter aircraft, one of which went down and the pilot is presumed to have died. On its own, this might have been an honest navigational error though it raises the intriguing question why a spy plane was carrying out surveillance so close to Chinese waters and which can hardly be considered a friendly act.
And suddenly, we find an international crisis with both sides flexing their muscles. As an editorial in this newspaper said: "An ominous sense of deja vu hung over the world this week, as the Chinese and the US engaged in a war of words with distinct cold war overtones." Prior to this incident, there was the expulsion of Russian diplomats from Washington DC and tit-for-tat reaction from Moscow.
With George Bush Jr's administration newly installed (it's slightly more than 100 days old) there is reason to fear that the hardliners of the ilk of Reagan and George Bush Sr's days may be back in business. I saw some of the talk-shows on American television channels and there was the familiar table thumping and closed fist waving, recalling lines from Mathew Arnold's poem Dover Beach... "And we are here as on a darkling plain/Swept with confused alarms of struggle and flight/Where ignorant armies clash by night."I have not yet read Professor Noam Chomsky's book A new generation draws the line: Kosovo, East Timor and the standards of the West. Only excerpts from it. The book examines the new era in international affairs when American policy has supported military intervention in states under the cloak of moralistic righteousness.
This new order envisages "enlightened states" as against "restrictive old rulers" and they have a carte blanche to use force when they believe it to be just. He quotes from the lead article in Foreign Affairs, written by a legal scholar, who justifies this intervention with a saintly glow: "The enlightened states, freed at last from the shackles of restrictive old rulers and archaic concepts of world order may now use force when they believe it to be just, obeying modern notions of justice that they fashion they discipline the defiant, the indolent and the miscreants, the disorderly elements of the world, with a nobility of purpose so evident that it requires no evidence."
Who decides the membership of the "enlightened states?" Obviously the western world led by the United States. Thus the world is to be policed by vigilantes. How did the "non-enlightened" world react? In the South Summit of G-77 in April 2000 in Havana, they issued the Declaration of the South Summit declaring that "we reject the so-called 'right of humanitarian intervention' along with other forms of coercion that the Summit also sees as traditional imperialism in a new guise, including the specific forms of corporate-led international integration called 'Globalization' in western Ideology." This G-77 meeting was attended by countries that accounted for 80 per cent of the world's population.
I am hoping that the present stand-off on Hainan Island will have ended by the time this column appears in print. But will we be able to breathe more easily? That we have not had a World War-111 has been a matter of luck rather than any show of reserve or wisdom. This does not mean that terrible crimes have not been committed and there have been no wars.
What has been a voided has been a nuclear war. There is no guarantee that the world's luck will hold. We must also not forget that the business of war is business. There is money to be made in war. Defence contractors and arms dealers must be smacking their lips in anticipation of more sales and demands for bigger and better weapons with which to kill men, women and children, most of whom would not know the difference between Hainan Island and Coney Island.
What surprises me is that people have not been able to see through moralistic righteousness. At least, the comic strip character Hagar the Horrible is more honest. |
