P Kharel

What was prescribed for foreign shores and beyond in the post-World War II 75 years threatens to test the prescribers for a foretaste of how it could conflagrate in the days ahead. Angry protestors stormed the Capitol building in Washington last Wednesday. Will it be an isolated incident or does it echo early grumblings of deep-seated resentment against existing disparities and inequalities in Western society? Mobs assaulted the Capitol, where the Congress chambers are also housed, to prevent the formal certification of the November presidential election outcome that confirms Joe Biden’s win. Research surveys suggest that 75 per cent of Republican voters still believe victory was stolen from incumbent President Donald Trump.
For the only super power, it could not have happened at a worse time, embarrassing and tormenting as the event signifies. Amid daily discussions by academics on the gradual decline of democracy, the International Monetary Fund has just announced China will acquire the prized spot for the world’s No. 1 economy by 2028. To no morale-lifting development for the US and its close allies, Russian President Vladimir Putin is set to be at the helm of his country’s state affairs into the 2030s, bolstered also by legal guarantees offering him and his family immunity from investigations for the rest of their lives.

Choking complacency
As long as things got managed, complacency infected the American leadership, oblivious of the discrepancies and anomalies that have creating deafening disquiet just beneath the façade of normalcy. In the past, whenever public fury erupted, looting of shops and vandalising of private as well as public property got triggered. The January 6 nightmare claiming at least five lives brandished street power on the rampage ravaging an institution many Americans revere. Vandalism stinks everywhere. The rich and the big are no exceptions.
The US aggressively asserts a special status, the veto power at the United Nations, invades Iraq on grossly false pretexts and causes one of the worst tragedies of the century, contributes to Libya’s Muammar Gaddafi’s brutal ouster, vainly tries toppling Syrian President Bashar al-Assad, turns a blind eye to the military coup in Egypt by Abdel Fattah al-Sisi and subsequent stifling political landscape. At Washington’s behest, some 50 countries rebuff Venezuela’s President Nicolas Maduro and accord recognition to opposition leader Juan Guaido who declared from the streets himself as the country’s president.
Thanks to most of the world continuing to deal with Maduro, whose position is consolidated because of the Sino-Russian support, Guaido recently chose to live in exile, ostensibly because of fear for his life. In Honduras, the US government was responsible for the country’s latest military coup. Had the kind of raid Washington’s Capitol suffered last week occurred in Russia, China or even India, the wise West would have come up with different sets of interpretations justifying its causes and warning of consequences. The prompt and stringent lockdown order in China a year ago to cope with the COVID-19 spread was dubbed by the Western press as drastic and draconian. The same vanguard of society shook off the description when similar clampdowns were introduced in their European first cousins.
Today, the table seems to be finally revolving and beginning to strike fear in societies described as the most successful, most democratic and the best governed. These countries are accused of nursing superiority complex and promoting motivated polarisation and discord in the name of universal values and humanitarian considerations in places perceived as ideological opponents or less than civilised.
The ideological West dismisses persistent critics as jingoists, as if the entire world should think and believe what the West does is the best for all of humanity. Rudyard Kipling notoriously espoused such thought through his literary work and assertion of the “white man’s burden”. As late as the 1960s, France, which prides itself as the home of the formal call for “equality, liberty and fraternity” during the 1789 Revolution, was extremely reluctant to dispense with its colonial possessions in Indo-China and Africa even years after WW II.
In practice, economic power precedes all values in the so-called liberal democracies. The 19th century Opium wars against China, the Gun Boat diplomacy to Japan and the installation of the Shah as the emperor in Iran constitute some of the examples supporting this conclusion. The Al Jazeera television channel office buildings were bombed by US forces to register Washington’s anger against the news outlet that did not do American bidding.

War pursuit
In connection with the 2003 Gulf War, one million-strong rally marched on the streets of London telling the Tony Blair government at 10 Downing Street “Don’t attack Iraq”. Yet the voice was flagrantly ignored to enforce lies as an expedient pretext to attack the Saddam Hussein regime. As expected by the vast and sane world, no banned weapons were excavated. The reconfirmation provoked millions of British people to call Blair a “war criminal”.
Big powers have been covertly or overtly a regular cause of globalisation of war. The US need to justify the Pentagon’s gargantuan existence is a major reason behind this. In the process, individual decency is sidelined to fuel corporate power and that the status quo prescribed by the major powers remains the best for all while the rich get richer and the poor spend their entire life struggling for two square meals.
The crimes inflicted on Vietnam, the killings of “up to” one million leftists in Indonesia and the horrendous conditions in Libya -- far worse off than during the Gaddafi dictatorship decades -- stare at a world either aggressively pursuing narrow agendas for undue influence or wretchedly passive to call the spade a spade. Afghanistan is another instance of a nation reduced to the battle ground for big power politics since the winter of 1979.
When the jar of sins wells up to the brim, the day of reckoning dawns. An awakening is round the corner saying no to any super oligarch state. Coalition blocks might try to fill the vacuum with their narrow considerations but not without stiff resistance. Eating your cake and having it too, is an old saying circulating robustly in the very countries that invoked it against others but not themselves.
In Nepal, we say: Sin howls from the roof sooner or later.

(Professor Kharel specialises in political communication.)