The art of sowing seeds of division among people, nations, can best be learnt from the colonial-thinking, imperialist West. Be it the Sykes-Picot Agreement, Balfour Declaration, the San Remo Conference in 1920 or the South Asian ‘Independence’ in 1947; recent history is replete with examples how the Europeans (and now the Western bloc) have systemically ‘botched’ geopolitics, convoluting geographies and systematically embedding suspicion by othering integrated communities and societies through media warfare, propaganda and fear mongering; feeding hate and consequently triggering unrest.
While the West, indeed, needs to be censured, held accountable for its massive, opportunistic meddling particularly across the Global South; creating pathways to co-existence and consequently peace requires deep introspection and ownership as well. Lofty ideas in a deliberately instigated polarized world, implanted with hate and bigotry.
Each agreement or declaration of the past century (one can certainly go beyond that as well, but just to contextualize and limit the scope of this piece, we will stick to recent centuries for the time being) has strategically stacked one brick after another in the hegemonic pursuit of power with a carte blanche to disregard the will of the people, orchestrating – by design – local and regional discontent, discord and instability. It has always been about land and resources grab. There is more… It also transpires: monopoly translates into domination, local, regional, global! This is not rocket science and for sure, it is but an open secret. For the desires of the few, millions can be sacrificed!
Orwell said it best: “Always there will be the intoxication of power, constantly increasing and constantly growing subtler. Always, at every moment, there will be the thrill of victory…”
In the South Asian context, there is a devastatingly divisive, polarizing shift in local and regional narratives incited by power hungry pawns playing proxy for the powers that be. Perspectives are manufactured by the Establishment’s allied forces: the hyperventilating, fear-entrenching, palingenetic ultranationalist media machinery, glorifying gorillas in the geo-political midst, thumping their chests with their fists! And this has all but led to a massive socio-political hysteria; resulting in alienation and disintegration. The hate one witnesses is palpable, reason and therefore sanity – it seems – lay burried beneath the rubble of cacophonic friction and strife.
Wars can by design legitimize autocratic authoritarianism as well. Furthermore, wars and conflicts, physical ones, are temporal but indeed possess an immense human cost. There is no denying that and cannot – under any circumstance – be trivialized! But the continuous sycophancy displayed and embedded in the media war machine, the slow and deliberate poisoning of the masses through dis-info and mal-information as well as pernicious messaging is steadily smothering subversion through unrestrained, hyper-toxic uber nationalism and ethnicism. This is an act of war ruthless and insidious. Consequences are far-reaching as it destructs the very essence of humanity. Ensconced in our bubbles and believing in bombastically conjectured rhetoric, we, regardless of our politics, geographies, economies and perspectives, are the casualties of war. For the desires of the few, millions can be sacrificed!
Image by Aurel Cham from Pixabay
