Random Thoughts
A History of International
Relations:
Power & Hypocrisy
There is an old
Indian adage that could be used as the formula for international
relations. It states that the elephant has two types of teeth. The tusks
are for show and intimidation and the rest are functional for grinding
nutrients for survival. The earliest use of hypocritical propaganda are
the monuments and records of the battle at Qadesh between Rameses, the
Second and the Hittites in the latter part of the second millennium BCE.
The battle was really a draw and peace was signed with the wedding of a
Hittite princess to the Egyptian pharaoh. Yet Rameses inscribed an
exaggerated and inaccurate account of triumph, all over Egypt.
Incidentally the British poet Shelley wrote a beautiful and sarcastic poem
titled Ozymandias, mocking the penchant to build glorious monuments,
without nary a criticism of the much cruder British Stonehenge or
contemporary British architectural monuments. The key ancient document
from fifth century BCE to substantiate my thesis is Thucydides Melian
dialogue between the envoys of Athens and the island of Melos at the
beginning of the Peloponnesian War, that led to the destruction and defeat
of Athens at the hands of Sparta and its allies. Athens gave an ultimatum
to Melos, an ally of Sparta to submit, change sides and pay tribute or be
destroyed. The Melians promised neutrality and peaceful co-existence by
appealing to reason, conscience, justice and long-term benefits. Dialogue
excerpts follow with my comments in parentheses.
Athenian– We
both know that into the discussion of human affairs, the question of
justice only enters when there is equal power to enforce it, and that the
powerful exact what they can, and the weak grant what they must.
(The golden
rule of do unto others as you would have them do unto you is for weaklings)
Melian– Since you set aside justice and invite us to speak of expediency,
in our judgment it is certainly expedient that you should respect a
principle which is for the common good. To every man when in peril, a
reasonable claim should be accounted, a claim of right, and that any plea
which he is disposed to urge, even if failing of point a little, should
help his cause. Your interest in this principle is quite as great as ours,
inasmuch you, if you fall, will incur the heaviest vengeance, and will be
the most terrible example to mankind.
Athenian -– The fall of our empire, if it should fall, is not an event to
which we look forward with dismay. This is a (unlikely) danger which you
may leave to us. We will now endeavor to show that we have come in the
interests of our empire, and that in what we are about to say we are only
seeking the preservation of your city. For we want to make you ours with
the least trouble to ourselves, and it is the interests of both of us that
you should not be destroyed.
(This is
imperial hubris. The Mongols followed a policy of demanding surrender in
return for amnesty and threatened death to all, if the city resisted)
Melian— It may be your interest to be our masters, but how can it be ours
to be your slaves?
Athenian– To you the gain will be that by submission you will avoid the
worst and we shall all be richer for your preservation.
(In America,
the native Indians resisted and were decimated and the Africans put up
with slavery and survived in greater proportion. Of course the natives had
a sense of belonging and a sense of right of ownership, while the Africans
were more disoriented and in a strange land)
Melian– But must we be your enemies? Will you not receive us as friends if
we are neutral and remain at peace with you?
Athenian– No. Your enmity is not half as mischievous as your friendship;
for the one is in the eyes of our subjects an argument of our power, the
other of our weakness.
(Either you
are with us or against us and any concession to you will be perceived as
weakness by those whom we currently intimidate or those whom in the future
we may wish to intimidate; for perception is reality. Thus non-aligned
India was shafted)
Melian– Are your subjects really unable to distinguish between states in
which you have no concern and those which are chiefly your colonies and in
some cases have revolted and been subdued?
Athenian– They think that states like yours are left free because they are
able to defend themselves and we do not attack them because we dare not.
Your subjection will give us an increase of security as well as an
extension of empire. We are masters of the sea (and air in a current
case) and you are islanders, and insignificant islanders too, and must
not be allowed to escape us.
(This is why
India became a declared nuclear power and Iran and North Korea are
developing missiles and nuclear weapons)
Melian– Do you not recognize another danger? Since you drive us from the
plea of justice and press upon us your doctrine of expediency, we must
show you what is for our interest and if it be for yours also, may hope to
convince you. Will you not be making enemies of all who are now neutrals?
When they see how you are treating us, they expect you to someday turn
against them. Are you not strengthening the enemies you already have and
bringing upon you others who would never dream of being your enemies at
all?
Athenian– We do not consider our really dangerous enemies to be any of the
peoples secure in their freedom who may defer indefinitely any measures of
precaution which they take against us (Europe and Japan) but islanders
like you under no control and all who may be already irritated by the
necessity of submission to our empire. (Axis of evil). These are our real
enemies, for they are reckless and most likely to bring themselves as well
as us into a danger which they cannot but foresee.
(We know
that illegitimate non-democratic governments like Morocco, Egypt, Algeria,
Jordan, Saudi Arabia and Pakistan are an abomination, but they have
accepted vassal status and pay tribute and homage. It is Iraq, Iran and
North Korea that need democracy. It is wrong for Syria to occupy Lebanon
especially during elections, but it is alright for America to chastise it
while occupying Iraq and holding elections during occupation. This is an
example of hypocrisy)
Melian– If you and your subjects will brave all this risk, you to preserve
your empire and they to be quit of it, how base and cowardly would it be
in us who retain our freedom, not to do and suffer anything rather than be
your slaves?
Athenian– Not so, if you reflect calmly. You are not fighting against
equals to whom you cannot yield without disgrace, but you are taking
counsel whether or not you shall resist overwhelming force. The question
is not one of honor but of prudence.
(This is the
rationale for the Neocon Project for the New American Century, Bush’s new
pre-emptive doctrine, Ballistic Missile Defence, weaponization of space
and huge military spending with open avowal of not letting any other
country obtain military parity with America to avoid the prior situation
of a standoff with the Soviet Union on the basis of Mutually Assured
Destruction)
Melian– If we yield now all is over; but if we fight there is hope that we
may stand upright.
Athenian– Hope is a good comforter in the hour of danger, and when men
have something else to depend upon, although hurtful, she is not ruinous.
But when her spendthrift nature has induced men to stake their all, they
see her as she is in the moment of their fall, and not till then. While
the knowledge of her might enable them to be ware of her, she never fails.
You are weak and a single turn of the scale might be your ruin. Do not you
be thus deluded. Avoid the error of which so many are guilty, who might
still be saved by natural means but when visible grounds of confidence
forsake them have recourse to the invisible, to prophecies and oracles and
the like, which ruin men by the hopes they inspire in them.
(A warning
to India to avoid astrology and Pakistan to avoid adventurism)
Melian– We do not despair of fortune. We hope to stand high in the favor
of heaven, because we are righteous and you against whom we contend are
unrighteous. (American misconception of good and evil and god is on our
side. A trait widely prevalent in India on the basis of the Mahabharata,
Koran or Bible)
Athenian– As for gods, we expect to have quite as much their favor as you.
We are not doing or claiming anything which goes beyond common opinion
about divine or men’s desires about human things. For of the gods we
believe and of men we know, that by a law of their nature wherever they
can rule, they will. This law was not made by us and we are not the first
who acted on it. We did but inherit it and shall bequeath it to all time.
We know that you and all mankind, if you were as strong as we are, would
do as we do.
(Jews who
suffered the Holocaust now do the same to Palestinians. Lord Keynes said,
"In the long run we are all dead", Hobbes emphasized the need for a
controlling Leviathan- king and god- to counter the individual attitude
of, "It is better that the whole world be destroyed rather than I lose my
little finger". It is fear and a desire for justice from an inequitable
life that led human beings to invent god and an afterlife with heaven and
hell. Darwin’s evolution and his loss of faith in a supreme deity was
based on a wasp of the family Ichneumonidae, that deposits a single egg in
the tail end of a living caterpillar paralyzed by its sting. The egg
matures into an embryo that eats its way forward into the living paralyzed
caterpillar consuming its brain last, to keep it alive just prior to
emerging from the remains of the caterpillar’s carcass, as an adult wasp)
The Melians
resisted and lost. They were killed or enslaved. Athens got its
comeuppance later and was defeated and destroyed by Sparta. As Mao said,
"Power grows out of the barrel of a gun", but also out of wealth both
personal or national. The Romans used their military strength to build an
empire as did the Persians under Cyrus and Arabs under Islam. The European
empires of Spain, Portugal, France and Britain shamelessly and unjustly
exploited native Americans, Africans and Asians under the guise of
spreading Christianity and the white man’s civilizing burden. Asia had
earlier civilization and more decent religion predating colonization for
millennia. It was the inability to accept the origin of the European
language and civilization roots from Asia that has propagated the myth of
Greek origins for Western Civilization. Plato (documenting ideas of
Socrates), Aristotle and Thucydides were three great thinkers of Greece
and all date after 500 BCE. It is true that Euclid, Archimedes and
Eristothanes works are in Greek but so are the writings of Raman and
Ramanujan in English. That doesn’t make them Englishmen. The sculpture of
Greece while superb was learnt from Cyprus which got it from Egypt.
Readers may wish to read the two volume work "Black Athena". In the
process of empire building genocide was committed by the British in
America and Australia, by the Germans in Southwest Africa and Europe, by
the Spanish in Central and South America, by the Portuguese and Belgians
in Africa. Slave trade was carried out by most of these European countries
and hypocrisy brazenly practiced by the founding fathers of America by
allowing slavery while proclaiming the Declaration of Independence. I
realize that retrospective moral analysis can be unfair but American
slavery is undefendable by any rational or moral means, in view of the
Declaration of Independence. The same patterns of might is right led to
the betrayal of the Arabs and Iran with unnatural boundaries and
persistent strife in the Middle East, South Asia and Africa due to
British, French, Belgian and Portuguese colonial strategies. The current
hegemon follows the same aggressive militaristic policy. The important new
development is that the Athenians were not hypocritical.
Hypocrisy, the newer strategy worked up to the 1960s, but with greater
political and historical consciousness has led to disbelief, irritation
and aggressive hostility and become self-defeating. It also has an
unintended consequence that many leaders especially of limited
intelligence and knowledge believe their own lies and even have delusions
of grandeur with paranoid ideation, leading to a state of mind comparable
to that of general paralysis of the insane. Fortunately for mankind
empires self-destruct. Rome fell because of the greed of the power elite
that destroyed the middle class artisans by taking away their livelihood
by cheap and exotic imports of goods from the peripheral less developed
parts of the empire. The disenchantment of the legion recruits and the
relentless assaults of the so-called barbarians from Germany were added
causes. Spain fell because of similar impoverishment of the artisans and
the inflation caused by gold and silver from South and Central America.
The British Empire collapsed due to debt from fighting the Germans to keep
them from becoming a great power. Thus "sic transit gloria mundi"
and history repeats itself, which perspicacious Thucydides predicted
first.
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