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Pastures of plenty must always be free

By Op Rana (China Daily)
Updated: 2008-07-04 07:41

Today is the Fourth of July, the day of the red and white and blue, the 231st anniversary of the Declaration of Independence of the United States of America. It's also a day to ponder what the US stands for in these times of political and environmental turmoil.

The US for long, and rightly so, was known as the land of plenty. But with the passage of time and many an event later it acquired another tag, that of a big bully. What unfortunately the rest of the world has been seeing in recent times is more of the latter.

The way the world has evolved, or has been made to evolve, after World War II has a lot to do with that image. History is proof of why and how the world is different for different people. The rest of the world has shockingly accepted the paradigms, lock, stock and barrel, set forth for by the Western part of our planet - from social, political and economic development to novel ways of destroying the environment.

Dissenting voices have been labeled anti-democracy and anti-development .

Till World War II, the British, Spanish, Portuguese, Dutch and the French, and to a lesser extent the Belgians and Germans were ruling over almost half the world. Millions of people were killed defending their land or trying to win it back from the colonizers.

Many a civilization and culture was lost in the pages of history. (The US itself is one big such example, though it broke away from the British in 1776 and succeeded in establishing its own way of life.) But what the colonial subjects got and learned in return is perhaps a greater loss to the human race as a whole.

The world is still losing its resources and environment, and losing them very fast, because we are happy paying just lip service to their conservation. Planet earth would have been a much better and safer place to live in had we heeded the warnings of the dissenting voices, many of who happened to be experts in their field or really cared for the human race.

We can still do that. And this where the US comes in. Even American scientists and other experts say the country is still a land of plenty in terms of alternative energy. There have been reports to suggest the country can generate enough renewable (wind and solar, not biofuel) energy to satisfy a large part of its need. But if that happens where do the oil multinationals go?

Till such time as multinationals stop dictating the world's economic, and even political, policies the only way we can think of overcoming the global energy crisis is to pressure the oil-producing countries to pump out more crude. But that's immediate solution to a long-term problem.

As by far the most developed country, the US has an exemplary role to play. For starters, it should let the rest of the world see the real face of democracy by letting its people decide its policies. If it is ready to listen to the voice of the majority of its people, it should withdraw its troops from Iraq, and stop its so-called war on terror in that country.

Afghanistan may be another proposition, but in both these countries what we are seeing is the destruction of artefacts of two of the world's greatest ancient civilizations. Many artefacts and historical records of the Mesopotamian - Sumerian, Babylonian and Assyrian - civilization have been looted or vandalized after the US-led invasion of Iraq. And present-day Afghanistan is home to many of the sites of what is today known as Indian, or Indus Valley, civilization, and they face the threat of being bombed into oblivion even before being properly excavated and studied.

The choice is with the US. But is the land of plenty ready to remove its big-bully tag?

The author is a senior editor of China Daily

(China Daily 07/04/2008 page9)