On Politics, Profit And Principles

‘It is not power that corrupts but fear. Fear of losing power corrupts those who wield it and fear of the scourge of power corrupts those who are subject to it.’

THIS is not Hannah Arendt on the ‘human condition’ but Aung San Suu Kyi, although Arendt presaged the dilemmas of the twenty-first century in her 1958 publication which Kyi captures so well in that quote. Suu Kyi, a Nobel laureate, is the jailed opposition leader in Myanmar (Burma).My piece today is both ambitious and eclectic because I would like to write about the ‘state of the world’. It’s organised around the ‘big five’ – politics, power, principles, profit and poverty. These are the issues that are currently defining our world and they are dialectical in nature.There has been a lot of noise recently about the crisis of the world economy, about environmental protection and about the proliferation of nuclear weapons. In my view these are not the most urgent issue of our time. First on capitalism, I don’t see a crisis of the system but its long overdue failure. It is a dying system that needs replacement with something else. How that other system would look and function is beyond the scope of this column.And on the environment, I have to turn to my former teacher at the American University in Cairo, John Rodenbeck, who advanced the notion of the ‘cosmic fallacy’. By that he meant that we humans think we have the capacity to destroy nature whereas the reality is that nature will destroy us. What we do in the name of the environment is because of our fear of the unpredictable nature of nature. And as the legendary scholar, Noam Chomsky, would say humans only have about 100 years more to live before we are extinct just like the dinosaur.Then enters the United Nations forever pre-occupied with the nuclear ambitions of both Iran and North Korea as if these were the most pressing issue now. But this is understandable because the five ‘official nuclear countries’ – USA, Russia, UK, France and China are members of the Security Council which holds the UN hostage and uses it when needed. The irony is that these five countries are the ones that have been fighting wars in recent years (i.e. the US destroying Iraq and Afghanistan) and yet the UN sees no problem them having those weapons or the nuclear programmes of India, Pakistan and Israel.The problem facing the world now is what Arendt calls the ‘human condition’. The ability of human beings to do the most horrible and terrifying things to others. And this is happening in what is supposed to be a brave new century that initially promised progress, democratic equality and equity and individual freedom. All these, I’m afraid, are far from being realised in many countries. Poverty is on the increase worldwide despite all the talk about poverty reduction, alleviation or elimination because those in power have appropriated economic resources for themselves leaving only the crumbs for the majority. This has been aided by the profit motif – the engine of capitalism. We have jettisoned moral principles because of self-interest – itself the lowest human denominator. Listen to the reasons given by the South African Government when it denied the Dalai Lama a visa to attend a peace conference in that country. A SA spokesman said if the Dalai Lama attends, ‘then the focus would shift away from the World Cup’ and also ‘SA has gained much from its trading with China’. The World Cup is seen as a milk cow for SA and the region. We forget that the Dalai Lama has been living in exile for the last 50 years because of China political repression in Tibet. So we have put profit and the ‘politics of the belly’ before moral principles. There are other cases where the international community (UN) has been less than robust in averting human suffering. The cases of Myanmar where Suu Kyi has been under house arrest for years just because her party won an election, then the continuing Israeli occupation of Palestine, the ongoing tragedy in Sudan’s Darfur region and Sri Lanka and the repression of the Kurds mainly in Turkey. The leader of the Kurdistan Workers Party (PKK), Abdullah Ocalan, for example, is now languishing in a Turkish jail since 1998 when he was captured in Kenya. Even Robben Island doesn’t come close to Imrali Island, in terms of its isolation, where Ocalan is jailed as the lone prisoner there but guarded by about 1 000 soldiers. Nelson Mandela openly supports the Kurdish struggle. And both Desmond Tutu and FW De Klerk have openly spoken against Chinese repression – China is the paymaster of African leaders. So many countries are happy to maintain diplomatic and business ties with all these politically repressive regimes. And don’t forget that Namibia has its own share of political prisoners as does Zimbabwe. So, it has not been the best of times for many around the globe. Briefly, that’s the state of the world.