Quote:
Originally posted by skywalker:
I tend to think that even in the poorest of countries there are people in power, who have riches and they exploit their own people.
Mark
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Very true. There are. However, it is worth noting that many such rulers, often as a result of colonisation, have been educated in the western model (often at elite schools) and have absorbed many of our western values (not least the materialism that is driving some to sell chunks of the World Trade Centre to make a profit.)
The West teaches that status is obtained though wealth, and what it can buy. Instead of looking to what their people and their countries need, many of these rulers are funding the most luxury of western lifestyles at the expense of their people.
They are also spending money they don't have and getting their countries into debt to fund arms spending, rather than feeding their people. (DISGUSTING OF THOSE LEADERS TO BUY THOSE WEAPONS, DISGUSTING OF COUNTRIES SUCH AS AMERICA AND BRITAIN TO SELL THEM. How arms dealers can sell to countries where people have no food to eat sickens me. I'd like to lock them in a hospital ward with wounded children, covered in flies, who have no food to eat. Children who've had their limbs blown away. Spend a week listening to their cries, and watch them dying, and then see how you feel like going back and selling f*cking arms. Stupid, blind arsehole bastards. And I'd put the country's leaders and arms buyers right in there with them.
In a professional capacity, I have actually met some of the 'flunkeys' that circle around such rulers, during visits to the West. I can assure you they deny themselves nothing. It is obscene when billions are going hungry.
But no more obscene, perhaps, that we in the West should live in the way we do, whilst those same billions are starving. Rather than considering ourselves exclusively British, or American, or Chinese or Polish, it would be great if we could see ourselves as global citizens, each having a responsibility of care towards the other.
The idea of the nation state is a wonderful one in many ways, and one that I would be reluctant to see disappear (although globalisation, will, almost inevitably, erode most cultural differences sooner or later, and the Western model will reign unchecked), however, the patriotism that results from nation states is, in some ways, a problem. (I'm not talking about American patriotism here, I'm talking patriotism full stop. Everybody's patriotism!)
Patriotism leads to talk of 'them' and 'us', in other words, as 'like us, part of us' and 'other than us, different than us'. Traditionally, it has always been allowed to hate those that are 'other'. (See the history of colonisation!)
To hate or despise another human being because he/she has a different religion, a different skin colour, thinks differently, - this is the perhaps the saddest and most useless thing that we human beings do to each other.
And yet these hatreds exist across the world, for reasons which are, generally speaking, totally arbitary. Such hatreds, almost without exception, (in the West also) are encouraged by country leaders as being a great vote puller. (Witness Milosovic, who built his whole political career on stirring racial hatreds between the citizens of his country. The Middle East does it, big time, America does it, Britian does it, Australia does it, China does it... need I go on? We all do it. Except for enlighted and aware individuals of whom, fortunately, there are many in the world of today. Not enough, though, not yet.)
The world is full of people, human beings, who if they only could realise it, have everything in common. Our families, including our children. The need to feed ourselves, clothe ourselves, keep warm, or cool. The need to love and be loved. And yet, the way our world currently works, both commerce (including the arms industry) and politics thrive on fostering the differences between people, and turning them into blazing hatred. Each weapon sold ends up as a GNP stat. Each human being killed, - no, that doesn't appear on any negative balance sheet. Economics doesn't measure human lives lost. (Or environmental resources lost, for that matter...)
We don't need to live like this, in fear and terror. But until we start to value human life over profit, until we learn to love rather than fear, until we begin to see ourselves as members of a planet wide community, rather than competitors and rivals for diminishing resources, then I rather think fear and terror are going to be somewhere on the agenda.
For many, they have been for generations. That's rather more than just sad, wouldn't you say?
(Sorry, I've made one or two points more than I started off intending to here, seem to have answered a couple of posts in one!)
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[This message has been edited by Silver Cheetah (edited 09-15-2001).]
[This message has been edited by Silver Cheetah (edited 09-15-2001).]