Who is right & who is wrong? What defines right from wrong? Who defines the rules? And who defies them? Is it always the oppressor who makes the rules? Do the oppressed always have to follow the dogma of the oppressor? What makes the oppressor always right? Is it effective use of sheer might or the guile of tactful diplomacy or the masterful use of fear of the unknown?
Now the right no longer seems right. It has consumed one half of the world with fear & the other with hatred. Fear of persecution, fear of isolation, fear of negation, fear of sanctions & even fear of impending war is used in the garb of defending right. Does right really need to be defended? Isn’t justice supposed to be universal? Then why is justice always unilateral? And talk about hatred, there’s no end to it, religious jingoism, racism, ethnocentrism, contemptuous scornful disdain of one another’s class, religion, creed and infinite other forms. What kind of terrible spite has struck mankind to have possibly driven it to this cynical level of contempt & spite toward itself?
Iraq for example is a classic case of neo imperialistic policies gone wrong. What happens when you try to enforce your supposedly infallible presumptuous dogma upon an entire nation while tearing apart its entire basic fabric of humanity & civil life? What ends up as a result is a nation teething with spite, hatred & arson, not just for the West but also for itself. Where hate & strife have torn down every shard of humanity and converted an entire nation into an abject destitute. Where not a single day passes without carnage & gore, killing tens if not hundreds every single day. Where hapless children live in fear of bombs than hunger. Where former comrades have turned mortal foes, seething with rage for one another’s blood. Even US with all its touted military might, shrewd diplomacy, wealth & technology has been confounded. What happens when you gush down your own selfish ideology down an innocent victim’s throat to satisfy your own seedy desires? Well they turn into puke if they’re not palatable. Only in this case, the puke turned out to be a sea of sanguine blood sprouting from a quagmire of sectarianism & violence. The war for oil has only resulted in the reddening of the soil both for US & for Iraq. Have they not learnt from Vietnam, that a free man’s spirit can never be unjustly suppressed to obey the dictates of a disparate foreign ideology?
And what has it all resulted in. The west has been sowing the seeds of its own self destruction. Iraq has led to Lebanon & then Israel has only helped fester the old wounds and feed the Arab’s malice to the west, each fueling the other’s spite. The effect has cascaded & is so severely entwined like a chicken and egg, that neither one wants to step back seeing it as an acknowledgement of shameful defeat. The pangs for vengeance breathe so strong in this entire region that groups of nations have set upon themselves the task of making an entire country disappear from the face of the earth. And who is the terrorist now, the persecutor becomes the persecuted? With Uncle Sam turning a Nelson’s eye to everything that Israel does, even abetting its war by funding it partly, fuels all the more the burning torch of hatred into a conflagration of hate. A conflagration so colossal can result that unless the whole world stops & gives a serious thought about pursuing peace & harmony, the world will surely be at a war. Not swords but nuclear missiles, chemical & biological weapons & electronic warfare will surely bring us to the brink of “End of Days”. Then we would need another Adam & Eve to recreate humanity. I pray I would not be in this part of the world by then. Hope better sense prevails upon all the Arabs, the West & the rest of the world. Who knows what the next target could be? May be your own backyard, courtyard, car, train, flight, child, or you. Wake up.
