Unsettling World

9 August 2019

Today’s generation has no idea of what it was to belong to an ideology or a camp. For veterans of the World Wars and Cold War, it remains a painful, wistful reality that post Colonial Era which briefly saw for four decades the Communist versus Capitalist competition, is now witnessing the lack of rigour amongst leading nations, a lack of appetite as it were, to involve themselves in affairs of the world. If one looks at the most influential events of the Post Berlin Wall era, the Twin Towers collapse of 9/11 is what forced American involvement in South Asia, and even that is not the way America involved herself in Asia and Europe after WW II!
It is as if the generations that calmly faced the odds, of being bombed out of existence in Japan, in Europe and those that fought bush wars and freedom struggles were tempered by the proximity of the violence, the in the face nature of the conflicts and the enormity of their ideal, that it sinewed their wings, making them elevate the canopy of humanism and endearment. The entire liberal movement of Europe fast tracked by the arrival of EU and the Euro, was to be misdirected by the drive of the Americans to accommodate erstwhile Warsaw Pact into the NATO. Then the humanitarian crises in North Africa, from Nigeria to Sudan due to insurgencies, the Iraq wars, and finally the insurgency in Syria and ISIS crises, all led to Europe being overwhelmed by an immigration crises.
European liberalism fell prey to its own success of immigration integration, because like a sponge, the physical capacity for absorbing immigrants was soon exhausted and the strains of immigrant presence, was to be used to forecast a bleak future for Europe as a White Christendom by a seminal novel by French author Houellebecq called Submission on 15 September 2015 where the story part reality and part fiction sees an Islamist Party winning the French Presidency in 2022, made many otherwise unconcerned Europeans change their ideological lode toward immigration and as a direct consequence to liberalism.
Like how in India, the posture of Secularism initially meant separation of state from religion, as Nehru epitomised it, by staying away from publicly funded Somnath Temple renovation, by having no celebration in Ram Lila Maidan for Dusshera or Iftar Parties during Ramzan, to equipoise with all religions as it was during Indira Gandhi days, to pandering to religious extremism after that, where the Right Wing Hindutva ideology was able to successfully portray to the masses that secularism meant Muslim appeasement, liberalism too became a word of abuse in Western world.
Actually the loss of human vigour to stand up for its discovered ideals of Rights of Humans and driving ideologies today is evading our attention. It is as if we as a human collective do not want do right by any cause because of our subjective affiliation to that cause. What this has caused is a ‘state of drift’ where our need for being in the right, to be viewed by posterity as working for the greater common good is blunted or denied by the individual leverages of these causes that have ghettoed themselves, inured themselves from our charms and exertions! What realism demands is to understand this artificial state where Islamophobia coexists with little introspection on part of Islam, particularly with Sunni Wahabism and Salafism . We see how Saudi Arabia and Pakistan are immune from Western action for their support and sponsorship and participation in terrorist actions across the globe, how despite identifying the dangers of their brand of Islam in promoting terror, no action has been undertaken to downsize this architecture that operates through madrases and priests! As much as empathy for Semitism coexists with little restraint on part of the State of Israel in its continuing treatment of the Palestine State and how the surrender of West Bank by Jordan has not resulted in any tangible benefit to the Palestinians, nor has the Palestinian West Bank benefited from its peace posture as it has been conveniently clubbed with hardline Hamas on the Gaza! We also are witness to how Uighur is wilting under the Han dominant Chinese pressure, where an entire province is now shut off for extended period of time, the ethnic people of that area being prosecuted, denied religious freedoms and more, and the Western world as well as Islamic Countries are complicit with their silence on it.
It is this window, that has been well appreciated by think tanks of Conservatism in America and Europe, as well as in India. A window that allows a forcible refashioning of the world along fault lines that Huntington described as Clash of Civilisations and its subtext- remaking of the World Order? I get that uncanny feeling that Ultra Conservatism is forcing the issue here, across the globe from India to Africa to China, in ways that are bubbling with its intent, in contexts that is now beginning to emerge, like a self fulling prophecy! The project to extend the dominance of the White Man, and indirectly since post WW era-American, from the pre Industrial era to the post Industrial era is nigh underway.
So as enlightened citizens concede political and social space to entitled citizens, many of those aspirational citizens who were hoping to come on board to a better world will now feel marooned, dumped in their gulags of restrictive imagination, restricted social mobility and distorted economic system, one that will deliver them through a social, moral and economic entrapment that will lead to debt entrapment and decadence!
The world GDP growth, its productive capacity and its ability to supply resources for capricious consumption have all peaked in the last decade. It is not coincidental that Mr Trump came to the American Presidency on a string of dubious circumstances, nor is Mr Modi’s mandate in India, twice affirmed now, of fortuitous circumstances! The world has been ‘gamed’. The linking of isolated events and dots as it were to form the big picture of this conspiracy is still nascent, those diviners can quite clearly see it for what it is.
We will see this Western consolidation and outreach of hegemony struggle against Chinese aspirational growth, and sooner rather than later, the Chinese oligarchy will co-opt the White Conservative movement. That point will leave only vulture capitalists and extortionists operating in other parts of Asia and Africa, India included. The seeds of economic unravelling of the Great Growth Story of South Asia and South East Asia including India have been planted. We will be lucky if by 2024, New Delhi wakes up to this scenario, and if it will have the wherewithal to search inwards for answers…
Like the Titanic the Indian (and other aspirational nations) party is on…a few scouts have seen the icebergs in the darkness!

To be continuedhttp:// https://indiarubbermancom.home.blog/the-unsettling-world-gandhian-view/?frame-nonce=ca8a1bbde2