14 December 2024
Why are people who are attracted to positions of power inherently unsuited to such positions? Because power corrupts? Or because only the corrupt feel the need to seek power?
And why does it take so long to remove despots from power, particularly the political ones? Because they rule by fear? Or because they surround themselves by people who want to share their power? Or both.
After 25 years as leader of Syria, Bashar al-Assad has been deposed in a swift and unexpected coup and the full horrors of his crimes against the Syrian people are being exposed. He fled to Moscow where he is now living under the protection of Vladimir Putin, which sounds a bit like being under the protection of a rabid hyena.
The rebels are led by the Islamist alliance between Hayat Tahrir al-Sham and an umbrella group of Turkish-backed Syrian militias called the Syrian National Army. HTS was originally allied to al-Qaida but broke away, became an ‘Organization for the Liberation of the Levant’, and is now the single most powerful rebel group in Syria. America has labelled HTS as a terrorist organisation because it’s believed to have executed people for blasphemy and adultery.
The suddenness of the coup has further destabilised the entire Middle East, politically and economically, and many of the people who fled Syria are now watching the news rather than packing their bags to return home.
Iran is introducing new laws that could lead to the execution of women who send videos of themselves unveiled to people outside Iran, or take part in peaceful demonstrations.
In South Korea, the president Yoon Suk Yeol declared martial law, which only lasted for six hours but gave time enough for Kim Jong Un, North Korea’s supreme leader and pot, to condemn Yoon, kettle, as a dictator. Kim’s only redeeming feature is that he provides immediate clarity for people who want to know what ‘squat’ and ‘stout’ mean.
It’s also clearly only a matter of time before Putin is replaced, which will lead to even greater uncertainties in how new alliances might develop. His ill-judged and continuing invasion of Ukraine may help precipitate such a change.
And all the while, China remains a wild card.
Joe Biden has issued more pardons and commuted more sentences this week, more than any other president in recent history, but hasn’t yet included any people serving federal death sentences. Donald Trump has promised to pardon people who took part in the 6 January attack on the US Capitol Building in 2021 when he takes over in January.
The archetypal autocrat Elon Musk, who seems to be lining himself up as the brains behind Trump, appears to be another with synaptic disconnects in his brain – he comes up with some good ideas, like space programmes, then shows just how unpleasant he is, particularly to women. Some gamblers are even making book on whether Musk will become president of America before Nigel Farage will succeed in dividing the Conservative party enough to become the UK’s prime minister at some point.
Somebody, possibly Franklin D Roosevelt, said you can judge a person by the quality of their enemies and a journalist in The Guardian has recently boasted that Musk has described the paper as “the most insufferable newspaper on planet Earth” and “a laboriously vile propaganda machine” (and he’s in charge of X / Twitter!). Why should anyone so powerful express such a strong criticism of a foreign newspaper unless they felt threatened by it, which says a lot both about Musk’s feelings of self-worth and his fear of criticism and The Guardian’s influence internationally?
With all these uncertainties, it would seem prudent for ‘the West’ to gather together in front of blank sheets of paper and look at all the things that might happen, and how they could encourage an outcome that would lead to greater international understanding, acceptance and peace (or at least fewer corpses).
A recent cross-Europe poll of more than 9,000 people in the UK and EU countries, shows that even the Britons who voted for Brexit now appear to support a return to free movement of people between the UK and the EU in exchange for access to the single market. In the UK, more than 50% of ‘leave’ voters said they would now support this.
Brits who still care about concepts like national sovereignty might also like to look at the increasing loss of parliamentary control over the UK’s commercial and state services.
The Czech billionaire Daniel Křetínský is in the process of trying to buy Royal Mail, giving a whole new meaning to the word ‘Royal’. Another Czech, Karel Komárek already owns the National Lottery and many of the major UK energy and water companies are owned by foreign interests.
I also believe that, in one of the myriad activities in which I can’t work up any interest, many of ‘our’ football clubs are owned by foreign plutocrats and some England sides seem to include people who aren’t English. I did even hear a rumour that one English side included a Scot but I might be wrong about this.
Suppose everybody worked together, perhaps starting with non-contentious projects like the recent discovery by scientists at the University of Wuhan of a sponge made of cotton and squid bone that appears to filter out 99.9% of microplastics from various water sources. We already know that even the deep oceanic benthic zones contain evidence of microplastics so let’s develop this filtration power on industrial scales. Then we can work on how to remove all the gunk with which humanity has already littered the planet.
Perhaps we could also stop wasting money on unnecessary research into things like “advanced laser detection technology” which picks up radar signals before these signals pick you up, letting drivers know there’s a speed camera ahead so they can slow down if they’re speeding. Having just seen an accident in a 40-zone involving several vehicles, one of them upside-down, and firemen with tin-openers, I’d support the other misanthropes who reckon the best way to avoid getting busted for speeding is to keep to the speed limit.
Lesser Mutterings 