WORLD AFFAIRS: What we really mean to say

“When I use a word,” says Humpty Dumpty in Alice in Wonderland, “it means just what I choose it to mean.”

If he does not mince his words, this is how a Western lexicographer should define the real meanings of some common terms.

Aid
The West can no longer afford to give away money. The days when wheat could be given absolutely free under US PL (Public Law) 80 are gone. Same is true about grants. So, aid now does not mean grants. It is sim­ply a euphemism for loans. Not even on soft terms, like three per cent interest, no payment for 10 years under a grace period and total payable over 30 or 40 years. We get a good laugh when a poor country’s government proudly tells its people that it has managed to get so many millions of dollars in “aid.”

Arab-Israeli peace process
Hamas was becoming a real threat and intifada could not be sup­pressed despite the use of all possible brute force. So, we persuaded Israel to make a deal with Arafat, who was in reality always our own man on the spot. Israel too realized that its young generation did not have the stomach to fight a war. So, we arranged a deal through PEACEFUL NEGOTIATIONS (q.v.) that will give autonomy to Palestinians (that too in a process spread over years, if not decades) in return for providing an arms-free buffer zone to deter any Arab adventurers, the recognition of borders and a huge next-door market for Israeli products. A great beneficiary of the deal will be the US, which will then be able to save billions of dollars that it has to give as aid to Israel every year.

Arms race
Peace is not good for our war factories (euphemistically called “defense in­dustry”). So, we encourage frequent bushfires among the poor countries (or increase ten­sions that may cause them). It helps us sell weap­ons to both sides. If they don’t have the money, we gladly give them loans. (It also makes our hold on them stronger.) If, however, one side starts buy­ing arms from our rivals, we call it “an arms race” and do our best to stop it. We don’t mind if the poor countries spend far more money on military hardware than on social welfare. Even making nuclear bombs, provided it is with our permission, is OK and we won’t call it NUCLEAR PROLIF­ERATION (q.v.). After all, spending on things like education will make them less dependent on us. And who will subsidize our war industry?

Child labor
The children of the poor everywhere in the world work to supplement family income. We don’t mind it in our own society. But when the children in poor countries make products that compete against ours, our manufactur­ers howl. So does our labor as the employers lose orders. So, we condemn the poor countries for not looking after their children properly and denying them opportunities for getting education. Then we create hurdles in the im­port of low-cost products from poor countries, even impose total ban. The poor children lose work but also don’t get education. So, what?

Cold War
The Pentagon and the CIA and their counterparts in the former Soviet Union, under a mutual agreement, had a good time for several decades after the Second World War. Deceiving their respective govern­ments and people into believing the prospects of imminent doom, they got control over huge resources in the name of defense. They even fabricated es­timates of the en­emy’s strength to create panic.
The good times are coming again. The cold war will soon be resumed not only against a nationalist Russia but also between the US and China. Now it will be a war between “democracy” and “authoritarianism.”

Democracy
There are as many variations of democracy as there are governments. In its best form, democracy prevailed in the ancient civilizations of Asia and Africa but we seldom even mention it. We in the West had to fight hard and long for it and succeeded only recently in our history. It is the best form of government for us but not for the countries whom we want to subjugate and exploit. But the poor of the world too clamor for democracy. So, we install a group of lackeys in the garb of democracy. They do our bidding willingly, even obsequiously. The paraphernalia and rituals, including periodic elec­tions, are the same as we have. The difference is that the people really have no choice. If they are fed up with the exploitation, corruption and criminal activities of one set of rulers, we arrange to bring in another group, with the same attitudes and behavior. If things get too hot, we ask the generals to march in for a cooling period. Since no ruler has his roots in the people, he is there only by our leave. If a really popular leader emerges and tries to go against our interests, he meets some kind of fatal accident and goes below ground. True democracy comes with universal education and prosperity and we see to it that the poor countries never have them.

Developing countries
We used to call them “poor” when most of them were our colonies. After becoming independent (only legally and technically, that is), they de­veloped sensibilities. On their objection, we coined the term of “developing” for them and “developed” for ourselves.
For convenience in reference, some years ago we divided the world into three groups, viz., First (rich western countries), Second (all Commu­nists) and Third (the rest). The third class nations were happy in the naive belief that we had given them status equal to ours! We had merely adopted a more important sounding euphemism in place of “developing countries.” After the Soviet Union broke up and most Communist regimes in Europe fell one after the other like cards (and the remaining started talking of market econ­omy), the “Second World” ceased to exist. We hated the idea of calling the wretched poor countries as “the Second World,” (or second to us). So, we reverted to calling them “developing countries.” Developing as markets for us, that is.

Environmental pollution
The Western civilization believes in ruthless exploitation, whether of human beings or of the natural resources. While industrializing, we never cared what we were doing to our environment. When we had gone too far, the realization dawned among our people that pollution must be stopped and strict laws were passed by our legislatures. To obey the laws, our industries had to adopt very expensive methods that raised their production costs enormously. Now they find it still more difficult to compete with their coun­terparts in the poor countries. So, to reduce the cost advantage, we are forc­ing the governments of poor countries to enforce strict anti-pollution laws. We do know that their pollution is only a fraction of ours but our real con­cern is not to help them make their environment cleaner but to reduce their advantage in production costs.

Human rights
The ordinary people elsewhere in the world have more or less the same human rights as in our countries but we make it an issue only in case of the poor countries. If a small community, such as Ahmadis, Baha’is, even Christians, gets into trouble with the majority while serving our objectives, we raise a noise on its behalf. Similarly, we talk of poor human rights in a country (e.g., China) when it does not meet our demands. Since we control the world media, we severely damage a country’s image if it doesn’t bow be­fore us. However, we can ignore the issue in higher interests. For example, the requirement of an annual Presidential clearance for continuing the status of most-favored nation in trade with the US was immediately withdrawn af­ter China agreed to persuade North Korea to sign an agreement on NUCLEAR PROLIFERATION (q.v.).

Intellectual property
Now that the poor have started becoming a little less poor and produc­ing many consumer items on their own, we have devised another method to extract more money out of them in the name of protecting intellectual prop­erty. We have huge resources for R&D and make all the inventions and dis­coveries. Our own markets are large enough not only to recover all our costs but also give good profits. We can easily afford to let the poor countries make their own life a little easier by using our patented and copyrighted material without charge. We must, at least as a token compensation for our exploitation of their resources for centuries. But our businessmen are so greedy that they don’t want to lose even a single penny, if they can help it. They know that their prices, say of books, cassettes and computer software, are way beyond the purchasing power of readers and users in the poor countries. But they refuse to make any con­cessions. And under their pres­sure, we force the poor countries to succumb to our demands for “protecting our intellectual properties.” We do not allow them even to replicate our agri­cultural seeds without paying us royalty.

Islamic fundamentalism
The trouble with the Muslims is that they refuse to change their relig­ious beliefs to suit our objectives. (We turned ours out of shape long ago to meet our selfish desires.) We could live even with that if it did not hinder our political and economic aims. But the Muslims consider their religion as the ultimate guide for human beings and superior to all others and are deter­mined to follow it in all fields of life. We have made some headway in per­suading the selfish among them to follow our ways in the name of liberalism and moderation. To put them in better light, we started calling the others as “Islamic fundamentalists.” We thought it was a subtle and yet apparently innocuous appellation but there has been a loud howling everywhere against it. So, our experts of semantics have come up with a substitute: “Islamists.” Let us see how it fares.

Liberalization of trade
Our economies are stagnating, with little prospects for much growth in the near future. So, we have used World Trade Organization (formerly Gen­eral Agreement on Trade and Tariff) to open the previously protected mar­kets of poor countries. We have forced them not only to open the gates but also reduce the import duties to absolutely minimum levels (which we can easily neutralize through under-invoicing and dumping). When a country complains of lack of foreign exchange, we promptly arrange loans through IMF or our own financial institutions to finance its bigger imports. On the other hand, we know how to restrict such imports from the poor countries that affect our own people.

New information order
News media is the most effective weapon to win over the hearts and minds of the people. So, we are paying great attention to its use. All popu­lar satellite channels for news (BBC, CNN) and entertainment (STAR, ZEE) are owned or controlled by us. So are the international news agencies like Reuters, Associated Press of America and Agence France Presse. We are forcing the poor countries to allow our hired hands to start private radio and television networks so that the state networks lose both their monopoly and their influence. At the same time, we persuade the state-run channels to relax or even abandon their values and standards and follow our agenda in the name of “competition” against the private channels for audience and adver­tising. Then there are our multinationals controlling multimedia, especially audio, video and computer games.
Though foreign ownership of print media is not legally allowed, we have no difficulty in controlling the newspapers and magazines, even book publishers, through their obsequious owners and subservient employees. (We also get excellent intelligence through them on everything under the sun as they have no difficulty in snooping around among their own people.) Whatever we want and in whatever manner gets splashed all over. We de­termine what is news and what should be entertainment. We even decide what the people in poor countries should think.

Non-governmental organizations (NGOs)
We need Trojan horses in the poor countries to subvert their religion, culture and society. So, we get (very easily) highly suitable lackeys, who work for us very diligently. In return, we throw them crumbs, which become huge sums for them due to very low exchange values of their currencies. We develop new concepts and introduce new slogans and the NGOs go out of their way to spread them. We also get very valuable intelligence through the research that we assign the NGOs to do from time to time. It helps in formu­lating our strategies and policies. The NGOs also keep the intellectuals from doing any work that may be genuinely useful for their society. Thus the NGOs prepare the ground for our domination over all important sections of their own countries and help us in our manipulations for our objec­tives.

Nuclear proliferation
Nuclear bombs gave us a huge advantage as we could cow down rest of the world whenever we wished. The Big Four of 1940s (U.S., U.K., France, Soviet Union) got them in quick succes­sion and then we put a ban. (China too blasted its way into the club very much against our wishes but we decided to live with it.) Later, we helped some of our henchmen (Israel, South Africa, India) to have the capability clandestinely as we wanted them to seek regional hegemony. But we just cannot tolerate any state getting nuclear capability if there is even a remote possibility of its being used to obstruct our world order. We will not hesitate in destroying a country (Iraq), putting sanctions against it (Libya, Iran) or bumping off its leaders (first Bhutto and then Zia ul Haq) for trying to be­come a nuclear power.

Peaceful negotiations
There are far too many disputes in the world and we have neither in­terest in solving all of them, nor have the stomach for it. If a dispute is be­tween countries that have equal importance for us, we do intervene and im­pose a solution through the UN. If, however, one of them is more important for us and is also in the wrong, we suggest direct peaceful negotiations be­tween them. In reality, it is a way to let the big bully have its way as far as practically possible. We used it successfully for the ARAB-ISRAEL PEACE PROCESS (q.v.) and for a truce between Bosnian Muslims and the Serbs. Now we are trying it between India and Pakistan on Kashmir. We fervently hope India gets what it wants and yet “settle” the dispute.

Population planning
Our population is stagnant or even falling while that of the poor countries is increasing. It means trouble for us. If the poor countries become better off, they will have much more productive labor, and at very low cost too, turning the migration of our manufacturers towards them into a stam­pede. (There is already chronic unemployment at a large scale in the West.) If the poor get worse off, they will create such instability all over that our entire world order, even our prosperity, will be shattered. And if, in sheer desperation, the wretched masses start marching on us, all our armies will not be able to stop them from overrunning our lands. So, it is in our vital in­terest that the poor countries stop any increase in their population. We are giving them aid (genuine type) very generously and subverting their religious sensibilities (particularly of the Muslims and the Roman Catholics). We are especially worried about a population increase in the Muslim World.

Privatization
We have adopted a clever way of getting control over the basic in­fra­structure (like telecommunications) and other public sector industries indus­tries of the poor countries. We pressurize them into paving way for our take-over at dirt cheap prices and, at the same time, be­fool their own people into believing that we have been kind enough to “invest” in their economies. We know how to push aside the local competi­tors by giving bigger bribes to relevant bureaucrats (and that too untraceable through foreign accounts). We prefer to buy profitably units. Or we may play in the stock exchange, make huge profits through manipulations, take our money and run.

World Trade Organization
To improve our sluggish and stagnant economies, we need to enter new markets. The emerging economies can provide a good opportunity but they have been often heavily protected. So, we have transformed General Agreement on Trade and Tariff (GATT) into a new organization and, at the same time, forced them to adopt an agreement under which they will be compelled to open their doors to our imports. While abolishing restrictions on imports, they will also have to reduce the duties to the minimum in the name of LIBERALIZATION OF TRADE (q.v.). As for their exports to us, well, we know enough tricks to restrict them if it hurts our interests.
Originally written in 1996. Slightly revised in January 2006.