Changing the World Order
We’ll have to change the rules.
Ever since Bernie Sanders’ Presidential primary run and the election of AOC and her fellow “squad” members, I’ve identified myself as a Progressive, politically.
Quite a turn from my early days, but right now, I just want you to know where I stand, and that’s where other Progressives are, by and large.
While Wikipedia has a different definition of Progressivism, per se, I equate it with Social Liberalism, as Wikipedia defines it:
Social liberalism[a] (German: Sozialliberalismus, Spanish: socioliberalismo, Dutch: Sociaalliberalisme) is a political philosophy and variety of liberalism that endorses social justice, social services, a mixed economy, and the expansion of civil and political rights, as opposed to classical liberalism which supports unregulated laissez faire capitalism with very few government services.
While I am in general in support of all that, it misses what is to me a critical part of the equation of how Progressives in the US want to improve things — how to regulate human governance in general. Yes, we fully support democracy. But what we miss is that to fully and completely improve our lives, what we need is to improve the lives of ALL humanity.
Yup, tall order, ain’t it? But if we hope to end war and violent political strife, and end the illegal drug and arms trades, we cannot ignore this. We can’t because it is all of that which makes so many humans miserable. Not to mention the ones they kill.
So, what do we do? First, a bit of history.
Western nations first looked at this issue kind of sideways, but started in the early 20th century. On 10 January, 1920, the League of Nations was founded by the Paris Peace Conference that ended the First World War. It lasted until 20 April, 1946 when superceded by the United Nations. Given that the Second World War came in between the two dates kind of shows how poorly that organization was utilized by the International Community, doesn’t it?
As for that successor group, the UN, it can’t claim to have done any better, with the Korean War, the Vietnam War, and I just don’t have the time or inclination to detail all the other wars that we’ve suffered through in the subsequent 78 years, or the uncountable deaths and injuries caused by those conflicts.
I won’t even bother to mention the economic suffering and damage done to the world’s economy as well.
As others have asked countless times, when does it stop? More importantly, how does it stop? What can the world community do to bring all this international strife to a halt once and for all?
The UN has made progress, don’t let my negativity mislead you. It does give a place for countries to work out issues between them, and the major powers do have some leverage to pressure some of the smaller but greedy nations from attacking neighbors over territory. It has made the idea of conquest by force illegal, by settling international borders as permanent, requiring negotiations between nations to settle disagreements or to purchase land from a neighboring country. Yes, that’s progress.
However, that kind of pressure doesn't work against the major powers — look at, oh, let’s say, (I don’t wanna pick on anyone, really I don’t) I know!
Russia! (yeah, I know, bad joke.)
As a major power, Russia has been screwing the world around for decades, attempting to push its so-called “socialist” ideas into the rest of the world, many times by force, but at one remove, through proxies. Of course, since the 90’s, that “socialism” thing is gone in favor of oligarchy.
But boy howdy, those Russian oligarchs sure are greedy. I won’t go into the details, most of you are familiar with that anyway, but the example stands.
Russia has been “interefering” with many countries internal affairs for decades, (and yes, China isn’t innocent of this, either) and most recently, they’ve been busy as a huge hive of bees fucking around with the United States’ political affairs like never before.
But of course, their crowning “glory” is Ukraine. I know we’re used to all kinds of proxy wars, and since they take place in small out of the way countries full of minorities, the white westerners like us don’t see them as mattering much. Which, of course, is pitiful, but I digress. I mention that because those small out of the way countries may not, to us, “matter”, but they provide Russia (and China) fodder to create social and economic messes around the world to further their own expansionist ideas, and also training grounds for their special opps people to learn how to screw around with the big boys. Us, and Europe.
But in Ukraine, Russia has openly and deliberately overstepped that red line the UN set — the settling of International borders, which Russian signed an agreement with Ukraine over some years ago. So, not only are they violating International Law, but violating a treaty they signed with Ukraine. Also a violation of International law.
Yes, NATO and other world powers have stepped up and condemned Russia for that and are helping Ukraine fight. But besides a failed attempt by the Security Council (because of a Russian veto) to elevate that condemnation, what can the UN do?
Well, if it had any, well, let’s use the word “courage” instead of the low brow word I was thinking of, yes, courage, they’d have used the rules of the UN to toss Russia off the SC and move to counter them militarily.
But they don’t, so they won’t.
Kind of an aside here.
I’ve been frustrated for decades over the world’s reactions to Russia. A large part of that is because Russia has been over-estimated for most of the period after WWII when it comes to military capability. You’ll notice that Russia never did what the West was afraid of — invade Europe. Did you ever wonder why they didn’t?
I’m no expert. I wasn’t an expert military analyst. I wasn’t in intelligence services. But common sense tells you a lot. Ask yourself, why did Russia successfully invade Germany after destroying the German invasion of Russia?
Simple answer — they did because the Western nations provided a vast majority of the military equipment and ammunition they used to do that. A small minority of their equipment and logistics came from inside Russia, in part because Germany destroyed a lot of their industrial capability, and what they didn’t, the Russians had to move — which stopped production until they could set up safely elsewhere. In the meantime, they kept fighting using OUR donated equipment and supplies.
After WWII ended, that stopped. It took them decades to just recover, and in the meantime, they were terrified that the West would invade them! Never forget — the Russian mindset, at the top, has always been one of conquest. Either you conquered your neighbors, or they’d do it to you. Believe, me, the leadership of the USSR knew damn well they didn’t have what it took, but they perfected the art of coverup and deception. Well enough that they managed to turn the table of fear so that the West thought the real danger was an invasion of Europe by them!
Better protection than building an army, wouldn’t you say? Damned effective, for sure, because they’re still doing it!
Look, two years ago, Russia invaded Ukraine. Everybody, and I do mean everybody, thought, just as Putin apparently did, that Ukraine would fold in days. Five, if I remember right. Hmm, I might be bad at math, but two years seems a damn far cry from five days, wouldn't you say?
Talking about math, let’s do some more, just to torture me for a bit.
Before that invasion two years ago, the figures Russia had provided the world for the numbers of their military was around one million men under arms.
Now, from the guys who post a lot of fascinating information about that war, the last figures I remember regarding Russian casualties is about 400,000+. They’ve also noted that Russia claims to have some 500,000 troops inside Ukraine. Now, I know I’m a damn poor mathematician, but my calculator tells me that leaves 100,000 troops. Yeah, I know, they conscripted a bunch, too, so let’s give them another, say, 300,000 just for grins.
So, after two years of war in Ukraine, after at least two call-ups, just in personnel, outside of Ukraine, they’ve got around 400,000 troops. How many of those are really border guards? They do have the second longest border by a pretty good chunk, I think, and being as paranoid as they are, I’m betting that even their northern borders that don’t even have countries on the other side are guarded. How many troops does it take to guard that much border? Which by the way, is 22,407 kilometers (13,923 mi) in total length. Especially since they do fortify their land borders much more heavily, especially facing Europe, I believe.
My point here is this. Just like after World War Two, the world is making a major overestimation of Russia’s capabilities. Come on, if after two years, they’ve failed to defeat Ukraine, and lost that many soldiers, and virtually every tank and military vehicle they had before they invaded, just what makes anyone think they could even dream of invading Europe?
Crap, people, Poland alone could kick their ass, and if they drove one tank across the border into Finland, those Finns would be in Moscow before Putin could find his suitcase! Ok, maybe that last was a bit of an exaggeration, but not by much.
So, given that Russia is this big paper tiger, what do we do? Do we need to do anything?
My answer to this is a definitive yes. Yes, we do.
I use Russia as the example because it illustrates the mindset of the world perfectly. As a country with the traditional and historical mindset of conquest, it presents the quintessential threat that has always made the world be wracked with violence and pain. Even when unable to actually invade someone, they have to make everyone fear them, and see them as a threat. and to do that, they screw around with anyone they can.
But what does the world do? They fall for it. Every time.
The United Nations was a good start, but it’s been hobbled by one “truth” everyone agreed to in the beginning.
The “truth” of national sovereignty. The idea that every country has the right — the absolute right — to govern itself and conduct its internal affairs as it wishes to. Now, for decades, I’ve believed that and backed it fully.
But I’ve come to realize that I’m like those poor conservative folks who think that their freedom of speech is absolute, when the Supreme Court has told us time and time again that it isn’t. You may be protected from government stopping your speech, but you aren’t immune from the consequences of that speech. Plus, the government can make laws that prevent you from speaking in a lot of circumstances to protect society from bad speech.
Just like the International Community needs to make rules establishing limits to national sovereignty.
As a Progressive, as I noted above, I believe that people, as individuals and as groups, have the right to live their lives in positive ways, and to help one another. Part of that is the ability to use the authority that The People as a group in a nation have to allow a government to rule over them, and to do so as the US Constitution says, to provide for the General Welfare, etc.
When a nation is taken over by an Authoritarian political party, that stops that cold. It steals that authority and uses it against The People. There are countries like Russia (China is one, also) in which the people there have never had that opportunity to choose. Both countries’ leaderships have the belief that they have the right to expand their spheres of influence by less than peaceful means. China has been much more circumspect, but you don’t think they’ve built the world’s largest army just to get their name in Wikipedia or the Guinness Book of World Records, do ya?
Again, countries with that kind of paranoia are just waiting around for the opportunity to expand, and to do so without asking.
No, it’s time for the world community to act. The UN needs to be restructured, and the rules changed.
There’s nothing wrong with national sovereignty, but it should have limits. The world should have the ability to step in and force countries to run using democracy. Democracy should be the standard for national governance. Authoritarianism should be outlawed, since it is a danger to both the citizenship of the country it takes over and to its neighbors.
The UN’s rules should have some basics as to how elections can be conducted to prevent Russian style elections that are basically fixed. The specifics of how democracies run can be varied, yes — Parliamentary style, US style, and I’m sure there are others, but as long as they exhibit the ability to protect the rights of their citizens to basically control their government, all should be good.
Why? because as I noted, Authoritarian style governments ALWAYS become a danger to the world community. They disrupt economies, hamper trade and international travel, incite revolution and strife in other countries, and I’m sure any of you can find other things they do I’m missing, besides the obvious one of international warfare.
That must stop. It’s really great that the world is working towards ending warfare. But we’ve been at it for a hundred and four years now. How much longer before we finally admit the obvious? Before we see that too much of the world’s GDP is being sucked into a military sector that should not need to exist?
If the experience of the United States of the past eight years isn’t enough to convince you that Authoritarianism is bad shit, I feel sorry for you, because it has nailed it for me. I always saw it as bad, yes, but it is clearer than ever today that it has a bleed-over affect on the entire world that we should, as a community, see, understand, and work to end.
This CAN be done, and if we want to hand our descendants a peaceful world, it must be done.
Spread the word.
