History offers many lessons
SOME readers who happen to be my friends ask why I appear to have a penchant for writing on political or international issues from a primarily historical and supranational perspective, as opposed to focusing on more contemporary, “catchy,” even domestic angle (be it from a Philippine or Malaysian perspec there are at least two reasons which have compelled me to do so.
“historically” or “supranationally” has to do perhaps with what is called force of habit. Since a very young age (according to some old family friends, even during kindergarten as I was immodestly considered a precocious child), I have been reading newspapers and magazines. It was then the late 1970s and throughout the 1980s. The United States which led the Western camp and the Soviet Union which headed the Eastern camp were engrossed in the Cold War.
The Cold War, as the name suggests, was not really a “hot” kind of war between the two superpowers, as that would almost necessarily imply the “hottest” kind of war taking place, namely the two rivals showering each other with tens of thousands of nuclear missiles, guaranteed to be able to annihilate the earth (and not only each other) several dozens times over. It was precisely this kind of macabrely named “mutually assured destruction” that has prevented the two superpowers from physically going at each other’s in a “cold” sort of war.
But it didn’t mean there was no real War camps. Both the US and the Soviet Union became intertwined with what has come to be called “proxy wars”. The US has its staunchest allies in the primarily Western European countries that have come together under the umbrella of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization, while the Soviet Union grouped its closest Eastern European allies under the Warsaw Pact. But both camps also have many other “proxies” in other parts of the world, the most prominent of which being the Middle East and North Africa, where nationalistic Pan-Arabism somehow fused with socialist leanings and thus a pro-Soviet stance on the parts of many revolutionary movements and a few governments (Libya under Col. Muamar Gadhafi being probably the most prominent), while the US propped up a few wealthy but autocratic regimes such as the Shah’s Iran and (ironically rival) Saddam Hussein’s Iraq.
And there are many other pro-Soviet guerilla and terrorist forces in the rest of Africa, Central and South America and even Japan in the form of the Japanese Red Army (JRA). All these pro-Soviet revolutionary movements had a sense of international camaraderie among themselves, often coming to each other’s aid in the name of supposed internationalism. And their revolutionary struggles sometimes “spilled over” to other countries as well. The JRA, for example, has committed despicable acts of terrorism, including kidnapping and hijacking in both Malaysia and the Philippines, all in the name of securing the release of their erstwhile comrades across half the globe in the Middle East who were interned by pro-American regimes.
As an avid reader in those days, you could not help but notice how interna your own country and society, usually in a negative manner. And the same sort of crashing home early last year to many of us. For Kim Jong Nam, the eldest brother of the current North Korean leader, was conspicuously murdered in broad daylight at a Kuala Lumpur airport, in what must have been the culmination of domestic political struggles back home. How could we then not pay attention to how foreign and international development of events affect us up close and personal?
The second reason as to why I usually write more “historically” or “supranationally” is a related one, namely my tried and tested observation that historical lessons are often universally applicable on the one hand, but not well learned and therefore often repeated on the other. What appears to be the pinnacle of a harmonious and prosperous society today could devastate itself overnight and be turned into a living nightmare for many. The aforementioned Shah’s Iran was a time of modernist transformation for the country, with some of the most luxurious branded shops lining the streets of Teheran, the capital. What happened after the Iranian Revolution was of course also plain for all to see. Similarly, neighboring Afghanistan was also on its way to modernization with education opportunities for both boys and girls, when the Soviet invasion took place, and the Talibans theocratized it decades later.
And there is no lack of such contemporary examples of countries with similarly twisted fates. My home state of Sabah is often compared to the Indian Ocean island country of Maldives when it comes to sea-bound tourism. I have more than a few friends who have visited Maldives who brag to me about the superiority of Maldivian tourism as compared to Sabah. But look at what happened just last week in the Maldives. In what can best be characterized as a “counter-coup” (as the former Pakistani strongman Gen. Parvez Musharraf termed his own grab for power), the Maldivian president arrested supreme court justices and a former president who is his own half-brother, ostensibly to forestall an impending impeachment that was to remove him from power, and the situation is still dire and developing.
As supranational happenings often hit our own shores, and as such lessons, though universally applicable, are often not well learned, it falls upon me to reiterate it in some of my writing, hopefully to raise some awareness in the region for the good of all.