Random Thoughts
The Final Emancipation
The way evolution works is to create a bond between parent and child, even to the detriment of the parent's existence. A bird feigns disability to lure a predator away from its progeny to assure their survival, even at the cost of its own life. This apparently good trait provides a perversion in the case of a cuckoo, which lays its eggs in the nest of other birds, which nurture the young of the cuckoo to the detriment of their own, which the earlier hatching cuckoo young, dislodge from the nest and the slaves of instincts, the parents keep on feeding the young of the cuckoo, even though they have grown bigger than the fooled parents. Thus the final emancipation in the history of the parents, the last willing serfs, is their awakening of consciousness to declare their independence from their instincts. This is where we are in the last stages of the history of Europe.
The pre-Islamic history of Iran has a great myth of Rostam and Sohrab, which stands as an antithesis of the Indian myth of the Shakuntala and tells a story of the tragedy of every father, immortalized in English literature by the epic poem of Matthew Arnold. Europe currently is on the horns of a similar dilemma. Every parent hopes and prays that the progeny will outshine and eclipse the achievements of the parent and this is the basis of kin selection and genetic altruism, which philosophers and ethicists are blind or impervious to. USA, the wunderkind is the perfect example of the juvenile Leviathan, that by size and might, now bullies its parents in a way that they resent and tolerate out of fear of abandonment. They carp and vituperate without taking the decisive step of chastising the enfant terrible, as it runs amok in its adolescent tantrums. Paul Kennedy's thesis hits the nail on the head, when it states that great powers continue their hegemony upto their demise, which occurs when their military budgets exceed their economic wherewithal. There is the need of a rival lurking in the wings, as the Hittites and Assyrians were for Egypt, the barbarian Germanic tribes for Rome, Islam for the Byzantium and France, Germany and America for Britain from the late eighteenth century to the present.
Neither the unsure loving parent, nor the assertive, selfish youth are right and both need to draw clear lines in the sand, which are the limits of transgression beyond tolerance. Let us take the policies for West and Central Asia. First, Islam is a spent force, antiquated, anachronistic and misogynistic, completely inconsistent with the modern era because of its orthodoxy and appeal to non-thinking non-intellectual retards, even more so than other religions. Yet America supports The kleptocratic Saudi regime for economic reasons. Israel, a democracy for Jewish people is like Plato's Republic built on the shoulders of slaves, viz., the Arabs. It was imposed on the Arabs by a guilty Europe, essentially anti-semitic, only awakened to decency when it is far removed and completely unwilling to tolerate a multi-ethnic state closer to home. Europe is the ultimate racist society, unwilling to do its own menial chores and willing to import the poor and darker peoples for such work, but unwilling to grant them equal status. America though slightly less racist has the malady of delusions of grandeur, which inadvertently compel it to mouth platitudes, which it does not believe in, but are so high sounding and noble, that it is hoisted by its own petard to float above the denizens of the rest of the world, unwittingly and unintentionally and even unwillingly by the constraints of its serendipitous high pronouncements. As Justice Higginbotham said, the founding fathers, who were racists or connivers of racism, in their delusions of grandeur had to commit on paper that all men are created equal. They could have been more circumspect and honest by stating that all white men are created equal, but in their injudicious aspiration to fame and place in posterity, they committed a folly, which has been the savior of the other races and inadvertently the pride of a republic, they never intended. This is what led to the civil war and Lyndon Johnson's legislative triumphs. Similarly, their amendment meant for the freedom of religion of all brands of Christianity, which is what they intended and never truly practiced in the early days of the republic, has allowed equal status for every Kooky cult, which was never their intention.
The newest problem and the change in philosophy that intellectual midgets, who have disgraced the Presidency for much of the Republic bring, is a loss of even the vision and aspiration for grandeur and thus they make their peace with a kingdom like Saudi Arabia, which is the epidemy of intolerance and oppression in speech and religion and treats women as objects of desire or domination. I must give credit to Dublya, that he has thrown off the "chador" of high ideals under which TR and FDR masqueraded and stated openly by reneging on the Kyoto protocol and other treaties that he is a defender of the profligate way of life of America and its hegemony on earth. I am no enemy of USA and love it only second to my knee-jerk irrational love of India, whose policies and politicians I abhor more than those of the US. I, however know, as a has been delinquent that we all need controls and the largest numbers of fibers from the cerebral neo-cortex are inhibitory. This is why, I appeal to Europe, the only power capable of restraining USA to be a counterpoise to America and channel the immense power and energy of this newly emerging behemoth along benign banks. As Napoleon said to his mother Leticia, "Don't you die on me, for then there will be no one left with any authority over me". Will the Europeans step upto the plate and emancipate themselves to serve their role as a counterbalance, since Russia has struck out" is all that a noveau Yankee, who is in love with America, but still believes that restraint is the shining corona of ego, can say.
17-Feb-2002
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Gaurang Bhatt, MD
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