Reflections on the cusp: Will the wars give way to peace, will the untold misery of the people around the world ever end, will there be a new dawn?
History, with apologies to T.S. Eliot has many savage passages, and bloodied corridors. This is hardly surprising.
As Erich Fromm states in
The Anatomy of Human Destructiveness, “Man’s history is a record of extraordinary destructiveness and cruelty and human aggression, it seems, far surpasses that of man’s animal ancestors, and man is in contrast to most animals, a real killer.”
The present juncture at the cusp of a departing 2022 and 2023 at the threshold, is not the most violent of the year-end transitions the world has seen. In recent history, the year-endings during the 1914-18 and 1939-45 world wars were drenched in blood. One can cite many other examples, particularly at the regional and local levels. Consider the plight of Ukraine’s population, freezing at sub-zero temperatures with the energy grids supplying power to their heating systems knocked out by Russian missiles and Iranian drones used by the Russian forces. Nor can one overlook the plight of hundreds and thousands of inhabitants in vast tracts of the country writhing under the iron heel of the Russian forces of occupation.Consider also the plight of the people of Afghanistan oppressed by the Taliban’s obscurantist policies and sadistic practices, which have confined women to perennial house arrest and deprived both men and women of the most basic human rights. Nor can one ignore the situation in Myanmar where a criminal junta seeks to buttress its faltering hold on power through mass murder, artillery fire, air strikes, torture, and large-scale arrests and imprisonment of civilians.
Besides, 2023 comes under the shadow of two disturbing questions. Will the Ukraine war turn into one between Russia and NATO, an apprehension that NATO’s secretary-general, Jens Stoltenberg, has recently expressed in public? Will a war between Russia and NATO become a nuclear conflict, which may even mean the end of the world as we know it? While the chances of a nuclear Armageddon are still slim, a conventional war between Russia and NATO can hardly be ruled out.Other lines of conflict include India’s border/line of actual control with China. Will the latter’s belligerence, as reflected in its initiation of border skirmishes, lead to war between the two countries? Will China invade Taiwan and will the US intervene on Taipei’s side in the ensuing war? None of the situations discussed above may, of course, materialize. Apprehension of one or all of them happening, however, is not conducive to a feeling of tranquility and well-being.There have been moments when the world has retreated from the brink of mass slaughter, perhaps the most remembered of which was the crisis of October 1962, when the issue of the positioning of Soviet nuclear-tipped missiles in Cuba brought Moscow and Washington DC dangerously close to a nuclear conflict. It was the awareness of the devastating consequences that would follow, and the wisdom of Nikita Khrushchev, then Soviet Union’s de-facto ruler, and John Kennedy, the US president, that saved the day.
The Cuban missile crisis was both a terrifying stand-alone incident and a part of the cold war, the entire period of which the world spent under the shadow of a nuclear conflict that never came about. This is understandable. In its collectivity, the world reflects the survival instinct that prevents most people from doing what can kill or seriously harm them. Thus, the use of poison gas, which caused untold suffering to troops during World War I, was completely banned by the Geneva Protocol of 1925. It has occasionally been used since then but never on a scale seen during World War I.
Russia has consistently opposed, and the NATO countries have not signed, the Treaty on the Prohibition of nuclear weapons, adopted by the UN General Assembly, which came into force on January 22, 2021. A nuclear conflict, however, is extremely unlikely. It will follow when the compulsion of sheer
political and physical survival drives the head of a nuclear-armed government to order the pressing of the trigger,
and those tasked to do
so, obey the order, knowing full well that it would spell the end of the world along with their families. Such a scenario is highly unlikely but cannot be ruled out as things stand now.
Can the Ukraine war push Vladimir Putin into a position in which he feels compelled to order a nuclear strike? Will those around him obey his order? There is no clear answer to either at the moment, as there is none to the question of how long the people of Afghanistan and Myanmar will suffer their terrible fates. Forces of freedom, justice, and morality have prevailed only when they have coincided with the material interests of dominant world power.
The Greek historian Thucydides (460-400 BC) said in his History of the Peloponnesian War, “Right, as the world goes, is only in question between equals in power, while the strong do what they can and the weak suffer what they must.” This holds true on December 31, 2022, as it did on the last days of all years till now. It will continue to hold true as long as swords are not beaten into plowshares, the chances of which happening are remote at the moment.
(The author is Consulting Editor, The Pioneer. The views expressed are personal)
