The whole world in a state of chassis

This column comes with a health warning. It will be a bit heavy for some of you and if it is as hard to read as it is to write then we could all be in trouble. In recent times, I have been pondering some of the great conundrums of this world we live in. Where we live here in Ireland and as part of the EU with, of course, our friends across the pond, we like to style ourselves as the West or the Free World. It is a bit of propaganda that underpins and promotes the notion that democracy and especially liberal democracies are the only proper way to run the world and so “we” dictate terms to the rest of the world and particularly to Russia and China.

It’s fair to say that we are doing OK here. In a materialistic sense, we would probably score an eight out of ten. On social justice, we could score perhaps a six out of ten, on humanitarianism, perhaps five out of ten, on the distribution of wealth, perhaps two out of ten and on climate action, maybe one out of ten - though that could yet prove to be generous.

While we glorify democracy as a success story, across the world there are nations and countries, many of whom are committed to democracy as a system of government who do not see the same benefits as the West enjoys. How can this be? Exploitation is one part of the answer. Since the dawn of time, the strong have exploited the weak. Countries with considerable resources, even to this day, are at the mercy of those with even more commercial clout.

Russia, China and India are strong enough to stand on their own two feet. They have the resources and particularly in the case of China, the manpower. They don’t have to bow to the West, they don’t have to request any favours. They can see for themselves how best they can plan to expand so that their economies remain in a position to compete. They are doing, perhaps on a different scale and at a different pace, what the West has been doing for the best part of a century.

Captain Boyle in O’Casey’s Juno and the Paycock put it succinctly, "the whole world is in a state of chassis". And that sums up where we are now. War is raging in Ukraine, Gaza, the Sudan and to a lesser extent in quite a number of countries (Haiti, Yemen, Lebanon comes to mind) around the world. And apart from Ukraine nobody seems to care, nobody from this wonderful world of democracy is prepared to take an initiative to defuse this powder keg.

So what’s the problem? Why is Ukraine so special? Why does the West invest billions of dollars to assist Zelensky? It would be fine if the billions were going into rebuilding the country but most of the money is invested on bombs, ammunitions and the accoutrements of war. The main beneficiaries of this spending are the arms manufacturers in the US, the UK, France, Germany, The Netherlands and even Ireland. 

The same is true of the arms industries in Russia and China. The arms manufacturers have a vested interest in war. It would be interesting to learn who has a vested interest in arms manufacturing. We hear much about corruption in practically every country where an election takes place and so the question is could the arms industry be free of corruption?

Could democracy be corrupt? Now there’s an interesting question. Even if it is not corrupt, it is hardly a concept we can proudly support. Is Putin’s 80% vote in Russia any less corrupt or requiring of scrutiny than what we witnessed following the last US Presidential election? No disrespect to either of the current putative candidates in the US presidential race but surely the people of the US deserve better.

Could there be a bigger problem? It takes millions of dollars (a billion!) to contest the Presidential election in the US. Capitalism is the means whereby most of this money is raised. Can any corruption be linked to these donors, many of whom contribute inordinate amounts of money to these campaigns? Capitalism separates the very wealthy from the very poor and capitalism continues to guarantee inequality between the people and countries. George Bernard Shaw, himself a pacifist and opposed to the arms industry, posed the question in his play Major Barbara - what price salvation now? If he was around today he might rephrase the question: what price Capitalism now?

Freedom of speech 

Some months back, Sabina Higgins, the wife of our esteemed President, Michael D Higgins, had the temerity to suggest, in a letter to The Irish Times that until such time as President Putin and President Zelensky sat down to talk, the killing and destruction in Ukraine (mostly) and Russia would continue. It was and remains a valid observation. History teaches us that all wars end with some sort of negotiated settlement.

Unsurprisingly, the so-called world powers took no notice of Ms Higgins’s “controversial” suggestion. It was left to the usual suspects here to take aim at her and at the President for not exercising more control over his errant spouse. Her right to freedom of expression was defended by some, but in the main, the commentary was entirely negative - it was not her place, she should not have posted on the Áras website, she overstepped the mark, she failed to point the criminal finger at Putin, she failed to honour Zelensky, etc etc. And, as per usual, the criticisms came from the media, those great defenders of free speech, the politicians and the learned members of the legal profession.

The people, also known as the general public, did not really get engaged or enraged. Their silence could be attributed to the fact that they had more pressing matters on their minds or that they could well have agreed with the view of the President’s wife. We won’t ever know now because the hoi polloi of Irish society consigned a legitimate issue expressed by a woman of some importance to the dustbin, put the lid on it and said there now Ms Higgins, stay in your place. The upshot of this mildly controversial episode is that Ms Higgins has been muzzled.

More recently, Pope Francis, in an interview, gave it as his view that Ukraine and Russia should sit down and work out a negotiated settlement of the war. The Pope of Rome does not have the clout that he once had and in our increasingly secular and irreligious world there are declining numbers who listen to him. Yet, Pope Francis is a man of some stature and his view of things might be as valid as those of Donald Trump, Joe Biden, Rishi Sunak or Emanuel Macron to name just a few of our wonderful world leaders.

Pope Francis does not supply armaments to warring factions so he could be seen as an honest broker where those other world leaders would not. One would have thought that his intervention might have attracted some support but it sank without trace. There was some media commentary around the fact that he referenced the white flag (of surrender?) in his comments. That put an end to any serious consideration of his appeal for a negotiated settlement. The world leaders or the Putins or the Zelenskys won’t be found on the battlefields so there is nobody to plead the case of those who will be asked to make the supreme sacrifice. Nobody there to encourage a settlement.

And of course, if one wished to engage in a little bit of whimsy, one could sympathise with poor auld Netanyahu. There he is with the war in Gaza won, except for the minor matter of rounding up a smattering of Hamas fighters and securing the release of hostages and he is under intense pressure to negotiate a settlement with a defeated enemy. One could understand his frustration if it were not for the fact that 30,000 (and counting) innocents are not alive to support and enjoy a negotiated settlement.