Almost three years after the
9/11 attacks, there is every indication that our world is now more
insecure than it has ever been. Anti-Western extremists willing to use
violence are more numerous and more committed than ever. They have been
given justification in their belief that at least some Western leaders
harbour overt and hostile ethnic and religious bias, put ideology above
reason in their decision-making, and have imperialistic and economic
motivations, rather than humanitarian and peacemaking ones, for their
constant, trigger-happy war-mongering.
If
these extremists wanted to create massive fear, huge economic loss and
large numbers of civilian casualties, there are lots of ways to do it,
and the bumbling, anti-democratic Homeland Security forces would be
helpless to prevent them. These extremists
could release bioweapons up smokestacks in North Korea, which, like
today's Chinese pollution, would carry across the Pacific to North
America, and its source would be untraceable. Such weapons would be
quite easy, according to the experts, for anyone with an appropriate
university education to cook up, and tons of them
have been missing and unaccounted for since the fall of the Soviet
Union. Or the extremists could recruit
American radical groups to use conventional weapons to bomb dams,
pipelines, refineries, convention
and transportation centres and key points in the power grid, or poison
the water supply or the food supply (at any of a dozen points in the
supply chain). Or they could recruit Americans to become pilots and
have
them crash planes into nuclear power plants, some of which are directly
beneath flightpaths and wouldn't require any telltale diversion.
So a large number of people (say, a billion
or so, and thanks to Bush their numbers swell every day) have motive.
method and opportunity to attack the West, but they don't. Why not?
The neocons can't fathom the answer to this question, and would like us
to believe it's new Western security measures and vigilance that have
prevented more and larger-scale attacks outside the Mideast. But the
evidence of the continuing and stunning incompetence of Western
intelligence, which has yet to solve conclusively any of the previous
attacks, and which is obviously unprepared for new ones, suggests that
isn't the answer. The real answer is a lot simpler, and if you read the
articles by reporters in the third world that quote what the locals
have to say about us, and use a little bit of imagination, you
understand that the answer to this question is the same as the answer
to the other two questions we keep asking: Why do they hate us? and What do they want? The answer to all three questions is: We just want the West to go away and leave us alone.
Imagine the Earth was in a tenuous
war with an alien race of vastly superior military might, which had put
settlements of its own strange and frightening peoples on Earth as a
show of strength. And imagine that through an act of astonishing
stealth we had been able to blow up one of the aliens' invading
spaceships, and that they retaliated by blowing up an entire
arbitrarily selected country on Earth, because they couldn't figure out
where our strike came from. And that they threatened to blow up more
countries if we didn't turn over the perpetrators of our strike on
them.
Now suppose we had the opportunity
to blow up another of their spaceships, or maybe two or three, but not
enough to make a significant dint in their armada. Would we do it? Of
course not. We know that the retaliation would be devastating. We
would sit tight, hassle the local settlers and hope they got
discouraged and went home. We would just want these brutal aliens to go
away and leave us alone.
OK, now suppose further that the
alien leader broadcasts speeches to his settlers and armies on Earth
that glorify an endless war of shock and awe against all those on Earth
that oppose the alien invasion, and that claim that the people of Earth
who resist the invasion 'hate freedom' and are 'evil'. And that
everywhere you go on Earth you see more and more signs of alien
expansion -- signs in the alien language, alien occupation forces,
mines and factories owned by the aliens. How would you feel? Even if
they killed the one Earth politician you hated more than any other, would
you welcome them as liberators, or fear them to the very bottom of your
soul?
Now imagine you're one of the
aliens, and you're trying to decide what to do next. You've invested a
fortune in new, unpopular, aggravating security measures to try to
prevent the next stealth attack on your armada out in Space, and that's
hampering your ability to conduct operations on Earth to protect your
settlements there. A lot of your fellow aliens are suggesting the Earth
invasion was a mistake, but you have a lot at stake -- thousands of
your fellow aliens have already died, the military action is
bankrupting the alien empire, and your armada can't even make it home
unless they mine all the rocket fuel on Earth, and that will take time.
So what do you do? You dig in for the long haul and secure
the mines and your settlements, and invent a fiction for home
consumption that you're doing it for the Earth peoples' own good. |
What the vast majority of third world people
want from the West is simply our absence --
politically, militarily, economically and culturally -- from their
countries' affairs. They want us to go away and leave them
alone. They aren't even particularly interested in selling their oil
wealth to the West -- the oil nations are currently selling it at a
tiny fraction of what they could get for it if they wanted to be
greedy, but they know the consequences of doing so would be war, and
besides oil wealth has been at best a mixed blessing for the countries
that have it, and at worst a curse that perverts the rest of their
economies and breeds dependence and lack of diversification. Even in
third world countries suffering under despots, people see us as a mixed
blessing -- chances are it's weaponry we've sold their government that's killing them, and that it's profits from joint ventures between our
corporations and their government that have financed the genocide, so
we shouldn't be surprised when they doubt our motivations as
'liberators'. And if they've read about Rwanda, they also doubt our
capability to help them.
Obviously, the multinational
corporations that own a lot of property or employ a lot of slave labour
in the third world, and which are making large profits from these
operations, would be the big losers if we all just packed up and left
-- sold off all our interests, as Canada successfully pressured our
corporations to do in Sudan a year ago, and simply withdrew. Should we
-- politically, militarily, economically and culturally -- withdraw
from the entire third world, and leave them alone to solve their own
problems?
Whatever your political stripe, your answer to this question is
probably 'no', or at least a qualified 'no'. If you're a conservative
you might see such withdrawal as an act of cowardice, isolationism and
economic madness, damaging to all countries concerned. If you're a
liberal you might see it as an abrogation of responsibility to clean up
the mess we created, or of our humanitarian duty as citizens of Earth.
In either case you might see it as politically reckless.
But
no matter your reason for answering 'no', you must understand that your
answer is not what the majority in the third world wants. If you don't
believe this, reread the four shaded paragraphs above and appreciate
that our culture is so foreign, so alien,
so threatening to the third world that if they had a choice, they'd
forego all the benefits of cultural and economic exchange with the West
to avoid what, to them, are its overwhelming costs. We should have the
courage, and the imagination, to respect that. Tribal cultures, and
communities in nature, respect cultural diversity and don't interfere
with neighbouring communities' property or practices (to do so invites
war, which is almost always won by the defenders). We have copied this
concept, which we now call sovereignty,
from these natural cultures. But in our modern Crusade for cultural
homogeneity, we have lost our respect for it, because we can no longer
imagine how the loss of sovereignty feels to a people suddenly invaded
by an alien people.
We pay lip service to sovereignty in the UN
and other international bodies and international agreements. But we
only talk about it when it is abused by dictators and despots who hide
behind it to perpetrate atrocities. When another nation's culture
broadly supports something we abhor, like subjugation of women
(Afghanistan, still) or laws we consider barbaric (Nigeria) or child
labour (Thailand) or slavery (the US until the 1860s), or capital
punishment (the US today), it is hard for those of us in more
'enlightened' countries to resist the temptation to charge in and tell
the majority their culture is wrong and must change. But if we respect
sovereignty we must resist
that temptation. Just as Americans finally learned the error of their
ways about slavery, and will one day learn the error of their ways
about capital punishment, the Afghanis and the Nigerians and the Thais
will eventually come to realize the social unacceptability of their
practices, in their own time and on their own terms. It is not our
place to change their culture coercively, and if we try to impose
change on them it will just provoke resistance and set back the process
further.
So this is a paean to sovereignty -- for the right of cultures to seek
their own path forward, clumsily and slowly, to own and manage their
own resources, make their own strange laws -- and to tell alien
invaders to go away and leave them alone.
|
MADE IN CANADA
trust your
instincts 
