This
week’s exchange of pleasantries between Donald Truup’s America and the mullahs
of Iran brought me almost face-to-face with the possibility of global war for
only the second time I can remember in my long life.
I have to be tentative about making
this claim, because our Western nations appear to have been fighting one war or
another almost continuously over the many decades I can remember, but only once
before had we been called upon to confront such competing threats as Trump and
Iran have exchanged this week.
The only other dangerous occasion I
remember so very clearly came in response to what is now called the Cuban missile crisis, a crisis caused, as we can now
see with the benefit of hindsight, by the impetuosity of Nikita Khrushchev in
deciding to plant nuclear-armed missies in the island of Cuba, which had only
fairly recently declared itself a member of what we thought of as the socialist bloc of anti-western nations.
In those days the world was more
starkly divided than it is now, first between the socialist and capitalist
blocs (represented militarily by the NATO alliance (American-dominated)
and the Warsaw Pact countries (of the Soviet-dominated nations), and
secondly between developed (primarily western, capitalist) nations and developing
(primarily impoverished former colonies),with the Group of 77 forming
an additional group of impoverished nations that were exercised with the
difficult task of winning a fair slice of the trading pie, in those days
totally dominated by the prosperous west.
I believe the Group of 77 still exists although it now is said to have
132 member countries.
These groupings were not mutually
exclusive, but tended to spill over into each other at certain points. This was
particularly so in relation to what was eventually called the non-aligned
bloc, which was inspired originally by Pandit Jawaharlal Nehru, Prime
Minister of India, who had spent his long periods of imprisonment under the
former British rulers in writing several books, on which I have to add in what
they nowadays call full disclosure, that
I feasted as a teenager.
Nehru, along with the soviet-block
rebel, Marshal Josep Broz Tito, of Yugoslavia, combined their immense global
prestige to set in motion the idea of the non-aligned bloc, and they were
helped along by the second most powerful man in the Chinese Communist hierarchy
Chou en Lai, who was in those days the favourite Chinese communist among
western thinkers.
Thee were 24 nations at the 1961
conference of these non-aligned, most of them from Africa, the Middle East and
south-east Asia. They agreed five principles: namely mutual respect for each other's territorial
integrity and sovereignty, mutual non-aggression. non-interference in domestic
affairs, equality and mutual benefit, and peaceful co-existence.
In those days
it was the non-aligned attitudes that most appealed to me. My enthusiasm for
Nehru led me in 1951 to India as a so-called social worker, a trip and a job
for which I was completely unprepared, and in the advancement of which I did
not do anything for India, but certainly received an education about the world
as I mingled and worked briefly with that country’s huddled impoverished
masses.
Ten years
later, in October of 1962, by which time I was established in London with a good
job (make that a miraculously good job) working for The Montreal Star newspaper, I found myself standing in Trafalgar
Square as part of a huge crowd, with my eighteen-month-old son hanging on to my
hand, listening as the eminent philosopher (and also, as Wikipedia reminds me, logician, mathematician, historian, writer,
essayist, social critic, political activist, and Nobel laureate), Bertrand Russell, one of the greatest men of our
age, an old man of
ninety years, who had to be lifted on to the
plinth carefully because he looked as if, were he to be dropped, he would
probably have shattered into pieces, vigorously, in spite of his age, and in a
high-pitched squeaky voice, haranguing the two principals in the Cuban missile
crisis which was hanging in the balance at that very moment, as the Americans
were surrounding the ship carrying the missiles to Cuba. Russell described Khrushchev
and Kennedy as two madmen, and warned of dire consequences if hey did not pull
out of this suicidal demarche. We were left in no doubt by Bertrand Russell,
that the dire consequences in question would be a nuclear apocalypse.
Well, it
turned out that Khrushchev and the brothers Kennedy were open to reason, and
they did negotiate their way out of this grave crisis, which to this day
remains the closest we have ever come to the nuclear disaster that has hung over
all our heads since the Americans took the fateful decision to bomb Hiroshima and
Nagasaki in 1945.
But can we
say the same of the principals in our current crisis? The circumstances are
peculiar, first because of the election to the top job in the United States of
a man temperamentally unsuited to fulfil the task; secondly, his behaviour as
president has been so erratic, so inchoate, so lacking in the balance and
thoughtfulness required of any president, that with the exchange of insults
that followed his impulsive and unnecessary assassination of the leading
soldier in Iran, we onlookers had every reason to fear for the worst. His
threat to blow up 52 Iranian cultural sites put the fear of god into most of
us, and although we do not know anything about what happened after the Iranians
replied moderately to the assassination, we could only hope that as the world’s
foremost bully he would react as all bullies do, that when confronted they tend
to retreat, especially if the person they are bullying has the wherewithal to
hurt them.
So, today
we are in this odd position in which the Iranians are saying the Ameircans backed
down while Trump, a man who never admits to a failure, boasts that he has taken the moderate course.
But think
of it fellows: the fate of the world lies between the fanatic mullahs of Iran,
and the narcissistic boastful egotistical Donald Trump.
Who
wouldn’t be worried? .Would you be worried, archie? No, boss, wot the hell, wot the hell, toujours gai, toujours gai.
Not!
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