Living in interesting times

“There is an ancient Chinese curse that says, “May you live in interesting times,” which was told to me by an elderly dope fiend on a rainy night in Hong Kong near the end of the war in Vietnam.”                                                                         Hunter S Thompson – Kingdom of Fear

There is some dispute as to whether the Chinese curse quoted above by Thompson is, in fact, Chinese at all. I have also heard it described as a Chinese proverb. All told, given the nature of the interesting times we live in, I feel that curse is a more accurate way to describe the phrase.
Just a few weeks ago, we had economic crises internationally, with Ireland as its extremist poster child, two ultimately silent wars in Iraq and Afghanistan with increasing body counts and long smouldering resentment stretching from the Middle East to Pakistan.
These situations, combined with the myriad others continuing apace under the radar of international news coverage made our times interesting enough to satisfy anybody’s desire in that direction.
Despite this fact, we have been plunged further into the depths of the interesting by the terrible natural disasters in Japan, with all the accompanying threat of nuclear meltdown, and a fresh war in North Africa.
Colonel Gaddafi has long been a bugbear of the West. In recent years he has morphed, mostly through the overtures of Tony Blair, into something of a benevolent villain. As a devotee of amassing arms and weaponry, the oil-enriched Colonel proved a valued customer to British arms dealers.
Perhaps Blair should have been more tuned in to the actual intentions of the dictator, exemplified by his handlers’ advice regarding drinking the camel milk offered by his host.
Journalist Andrew Rawnsley documents their meeting in The End of the Party, “Blair had been warned that Gaddafi would probably offer him camel milk. He was told not to touch the stuff, which was notorious for causing flatulence. That was why Gaddafi would offer it.”
Interesting that when a man who considered himself one of the champions of freedom and democracy in the world visited the ‘Mad Dog’ of the Arab world his host merely sought to embarrass him by inducing bouts of uncontrollable flatulence.
This said, Blair did manage to get Gaddafi to stand down in terms of his desire to acquire weapons of mass destruction.
While this was certainly a positive thing, it is instructive to note just how ubiquitous Gaddafi has been in geopolitics in the last 30 years. He has, in a sense, been a pantomime villain who morphed in recent years into a friend in the same exaggerated form. While the other “friend” of the West in the region, Hosni Mubarak, stepped down without a fight after the recent uprising, Gaddafi, like Thatcher, is not for turning.
The industrialist Henry Ford was quite prophetic in his description of modern war. “We ought not to forget that wars are a purely manufactured evil and are made according to a very definite technique. A campaign for war is made upon as definite lines as a campaign for any other purpose.”
He continues regarding the building of animosity between the people’s of nations and concludes, “All you need for this are a few agents with some cleverness and no conscience and a press whose interest is locked up with the interests that will be benefited by war.
“The “overt act” will soon appear. It is no trick at all to get an “overt act” once you work the hatred of two nations up to the proper pitch.”  
It is still unclear to me what the “overt act” has been in the case of Gaddafi but in any case, the United Nations has deemed him to be on the wrong end of Security Council action. The nation of Libya is being bombed now in support of the rebels.
Another “overt act” around the same time caught my attention but I have not seen it garner much coverage in the international media. On March 18, forces loyal to opposition candidate Alassane Ouattara in the Ivory Coast, who has refused to accept the results of last November’s presidential election, launched a massive attack on unarmed civilians in the capital city of Abidjan.
According to Amnesty International’s workers on the ground at least 20 people were killed and around 60 were injured. This is not the first incident of this kind in the conflict in Ivory Coast and yet it is difficult to imagine French, American and British army resources, with the backing of the UN taking action to ensure the safety of the people of that nation.
Speaking about the current situation in Ivory Coast Amnesty International’s Africa deputy director, Veronique Aubert said, “Under international law, security forces should use only such force as is proportionate to the objective. To launch an attack of this kind that kills and injures a large number of people who are not posing an immediate threat is completely unacceptable.”
I am not justifying intervention by international forces across boarders on a regular basis but these two examples exemplify the serious inconsistency in the field of international power relations.
Clearly Libya is of greater strategic interest to the international community than a small, fractious country in West Africa, but this does not justify the rating of lives in the North African state as more important or more worthy of intervening to save than those of their continental counterparts.
This kind of open hypocrisy on the part of the West has negated any moral justification on their part in intervening on their own behalf or in the name of the United Nations. The expressions of disquiet on the parts of the Chinese and the Russians only add to the confusion around the problem.
In these interesting times we are witnessing destruction, both natural and manmade, on a massive scale. Perhaps it is a greater thing to live in less interesting times but maybe when the threat is less obvious, it is more difficult to counteract. Ireland’s role in the European project, although undermined by our slurping up of neo-liberal capitalism and the ensuing financial disaster, remains to be carved out. Ireland has an opportunity to be a voice for peace and justice, our newly elected leaders in these interesting times should remember this.