Cold War to Icy War

http://www.readwhere.com/read/c/6596527
Teotonio R. de Souza
The Hindu mythology presents to us Narada in Matsya Purana as a model devotee of
Lord Vishnu. He wished to understand the secret of Vishnus Maya, and his wish was
granted. He was asked to enter a lake and emerged from it as Sushila, a lovely young
woman, daughter of the king of Varanasi. She was given in marriage to the son of the
king of Vidarbha.
Sushila experienced all the pleasures of life. Her husband had replaced his father on
the throne. They had children and grandchildren. However, one day there arose a
conflict between her husband-king and her father-king. In the bloody war that ensued
all her dear males killed each other.
Filled with grief, Sushila visited the battle-field and ordered a pyre on which the
corpses of her dead dear ones were laid. She lit the pyre herself and joined the flames.
All of a sudden the fire died, the pyre turned itself into a lake and Sushila came out of
it as Narada, assisted by Vishnus guiding hand.
The Hindu mythology has other versions of Maya. They all convey the futility of the
collective dreams of humanity: Dreams of wealth, power and pleasures that end up
devoured by themselves, but only to be replaced by fresh dreams that will have the
same fate. It is a lure of imagined happiness, egged on by the progress of knowledge
and new technologies, that sustains every new generation of humankind and makes
them victims of ongoing cycles of war and peace.
The human kind experienced this process since the pre-historic glaciations, the socalled ice ages, till the more recent age of Enlightenment and technological-industrialpolitical revolutions, proclamations of the Rights of the Man and the Citizen. This
march of human history has been poisoned by nationalism, as the Indian sage
Gurudev, the first Asian nobel for literature described in his novel The Home and the
World (1915), and more forthrightly in his collected essays on Nationalism (1917),
published after his visits to various countries and their parliaments as invited guest.
To quote from Nationalism, When this organization of politics and commerce, whose
other name is the Nation, becomes all powerful at the cost of the harmony of the
higher social life, then it is an evil day for humanity. (p.23) He concluded the essays
with a poem The sunset of the century, wherein he refers to The last sun of the
century sets amidst the bloodred clouds of the West and the whirlwind of hatred. The
naked passion of self-love of Nations, in its drunken delirium of greed, in dancing to
the clash of steel and the howling verses of vengeance. (p. 157).
Europe infected the rest of the world with its model of nationalism through its colonial
and imperial politics, extending its feudal conflicts and its reverse of enlightened
liberalism to the rest of humanity it set out to civilize. The civilizers could not conceal
their greed and rivalry behind the missionary activities they all sought to promote as a

cheaper strategy of domination and loot with divine blessings. After many campaigns
of pacification of peaceful populations in the occupied territories, the western
powers got to each others necks during the two World Wars, dragging the rest of
world into gruesome violence and misery.
In the march of progressive self-delusion the World Wars ended with creation of
international organizations, such as the League of Nations and the United Nations,
aimed at resolving the future conflicts through diplomacy. These were projects
managed by those who retained the power to dictate and keep the defeated and less
favoured peoples subdued. Hence, their effective functioning was doubtful from the
start, and their short duration guaranteed. It is not surprising if we read opinions
reminding that UN is aged 70 and qualifies for retirement.
At the core of the human development is the instinct, raised to rationality as a more
sophisticated and glorified version of ability to cheat the neighbour to promote ones
own welfare. The prevailing phase of the modern capitalism has fine-tuned this ability
with democratic politics and control of media networks to dissimulate its strategies.
Mohamed Elbaradei, the retired nuclear watch-dog and Nobel for Peace in 2005,
published The Age of Deception, conveying his knowledge of hidden truth behind the
reality of recent international conflicts, particularly since the invention of WMD by the
G.W. Bush regime in Saddams Iraq.
Since then there have been brave American whistle blowers who have laid bare the
neoliberal culture of their governments invading privacy of their own citizens and of
other world leaders to ensure home security. Nothing seems to be sacred before these
self-serving goals, including FMD (=Financial Mass Destruction) through manipulation
of banking services and rating agencies, which since 2008 have reportedly killed 15
million worldwide and left nearly 75 million people in grave economic distress.
The strategy of provoking and promoting Springs, Orange and Pink revolutions seems
to have boomeranged on every occasion, giving rise to the so-called terrorist
organizations, which have become ever harder for the terrorist states to control. If
terrorism means violating international law, the dominant western powers have
probably done better than Putins Russia. The looming icy war may be a prelude to the
sunset of Kaliyuga and take us to a fresh kalpa of glaciations and stone age.
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