Tribal Entitlements

When the Cold War faded into bleak memory and the world looked forward to a new beginning with no more conflict, either physical or psychological, between countries whose values and orientations differed, we thought we stood on the cusp of an entirely new era. Where nations could have the relief of investing in social programs rather than military programs.

When the military could be gradually allowed to fade away, because it would no longer be required for self defence, let alone any other purposes.

How naive. How careless, to forget, even momentarily, the propensity of human nature to be attracted to conflict. Our human inability to get along with one another, to trust, to carve out acceptance, not rejection, to allow each the other to go their own way. It just wouldn't happen.

The human creature is so guided by its intrinsic nature toward suspicion and fear and anger. Our clan is superior to the other, our values to be admired, theirs degraded. They threaten, we respond; we threaten, they respond. It took awhile, but nations of the world began to re-build their fragmented and desiccated militaries.

If it's one thing that nations seem to approve of, particularly those that are guided by psychopaths and whose poverty is such that their populations cannot be properly fed, it is a military build-up representing the latest in technological hardware geared to warfare. Cities can crumble from decay, and people starve in the streets, but funding is always available for munitions.

The decently enlightened, advanced technological countries of the world are hard put to keep astride of the military arsenals of the tin-pot dictators, the war-mongering, tribally exclusionary countries of the world who threaten global stability and the welfare of their own cowering populations.

So, in the interests of attempting to broker peace the economic powerhouses of the world re-build their militaries and send them abroad to intervene in conflicts, to persuade warring entities to put down their arms. In the process of that persuasion, they become themselves embroiled in bombing recalcitrant, backward powers for whom the reason of diplomatic overtures are useless.

The perceived need to save beset and oppressed populations from their dictators and fundamentalist theocratic masters draws the peace-makers into long drawn-out conflicts for which they will never be morally prepared nor fully comfortable with, for this is not what they had envisioned.

And now that Canada has been involved in Afghanistan for the last decade, after its involvement in Kosovo, after its peace-keeping stints with the United Nations (think Rwanda, Somalia), and its current involvement in Libya, all for the purpose of attempting to save human lives while wasting human lives, we are in the business of beefing up our military hardware, and expanding ourselves to bases overseas for easier deployment should the calls come in the future, as they most certainly will.

There are no escapes to non-involvement and separation of one country from the affairs of all others. Neutrality becomes wishful thinking because it simply is not possible to be neutral about atrocities committed in the cause of tribal entitlements.