When I first read about the WW1, it was to me, from another age when the human beings that roamed the Earth must have been different.
When I read about the WWII, I wondered how human society could allow itself endure such barbarity, so soon after it’s precursor war. This time I was bold enough to opine that the human being’s alleged sophistication was a hoax.
Then I studied further and encountered the United Nations Organization, built to help prevent the recurrence of such wanton destruction and carnage. I was enamored, thrilled then shattered.
I fell in love with the initiative because it vindicated, or so it seemed, the aspirations that ought to be human.
Because I had shorn my pubescent naivety and grown wiser, I knew, despite my hopes, there were bound to be miscreants and that the UN system will help keep them and their devious designs in check, so I was thrilled.
Then the hour of enlightenment came, when I realized that the gatekeepers themselves were the first to run afoul the consensus. Furthermore, the muscle which would prove necessary to keep irreverents in check, was an oversight or an impracticality and so it wasn’t provided for. And that’s why the wisp of optimism that I had caught, vanished . And I, shattered.
After that “anti-eureka” moment, my belief in the magnanimity of the human person was sporadically assuaged by individual acts by random leaders and thus came to perish, my hope that we human beings were capable of reasoning.
When the Balkan Conflict served it’s time and exited the television screen, there was a brief lull What followed were sprinklings of violent conflict but none anywhere near the scale and stupidity of the earlier campaigns. The world joined me in my fatigue cum euphoria; fatigue at the degradation of the human person and euphoric at the prospect of a world at peace at last.
In that interlude, unfortunately, the world sat by while legitimate self-determination efforts were brutally stamped out and their protagonists vilified and treated as villains.
Fast forward came Syria, which should have woken us but alas, our leaders reduced it to a contest of egos, the Syrian people the fodder for one of humanity’s most miserable and most infamous inactions. Syrians were dispersed all over the world and nearly never received the welcome that they so deserved.
Libya happened and as usual we sat by while a once boisterous economy was dismembered by egomaniacal considerations. What has survived that episode is a loose coalition of fiefdoms struggling to be a nation.
Sudan broke in two and even the halves are halving, and we are on the sidelines as usual.
Then Putin commenced his imperial project and………the rest we are bearing witness to.
When will we learn?
The Honourrebel Siriguboy
THE RAMBLINGS OF THE FORGOTTEN SEER. 