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Modern civilisation is slipping fast into a humanitarian crisis. With the Western powers led first by the United Kingdom and then the United States of America demonstrably since the World War II, sowing the seeds of discords in Asia, Africa and Latin America for exploitation when those would germinate to become full-blown bloody confrontations, the world cannot but struggle to be at peace with itself. Their overt and covert attempts and operations to destabilise governments and society on foreign soils have only allowed them to maintain a strong hold on the resources they used to plunder during the colonial time.
While Western governments have for long maintained a veil of diplomacy and sophistication to advance their interests, this time Donald Trump has resorted to an unpretentious blatant aggression in promoting self-interests. Well, his predecessors did so like smiling assailants, this crazy man in the White House has the honesty to call spade a spade. The only difference is that apart from some select allies like Israel, both friends and foes are finding themselves at the receiving end. On that count, at least people across the world know what they are expecting from America, the most dominant global player. First, the US president imposed a freeze on US aid and of late has gone ahead with the termination of supports including emergency food aid.
The World Food Programme (WFP) which has so long relied heavily on American aid has admitted that the latest move to cut emergency food aid to 14 countries is like pronouncement of 'death sentence' for millions of hungry and starving people in those countries. Already struggling with a 40 per cent drop in its overall funding for this year, the WFP has been forced to slash per capita food allowance for refugees across the globe. Now if the Trump administration's latest directive is put into effect, not only displaced people and refugees on account of wars and strife but also people falling victim to natural disasters cannot count on the UN agency's support like before.
History, though, suggests that the Western powers are responsible for wars, genocides, internecine strife and political destabilisation of not just countries but of entire regions. Sudan, Yemen and Syria in the Middle East and Angola, Somalia, Ethiopia in Africa have been bearing the brunt of the vicious political agenda the Western world led by its big brother America have been pursuing. Trump may have followed a reverse course of isolationism but not quite. In case of Palestine, Trump is more hawkish than his predecessor. But here is a place where an artificial state, Israel was carved out of the Palestinians' homeland in the middle of the past century, only 56 years ago, and now the impostor state, with the backing of America, has been killing the native inhabitants like vermin. Trump's aggressive policy has not only evaporated any hope of a permanent ceasefire for acceding Palestine's independence but also threatens wiping out the Palestinians from Gaza strips and some parts of the West Bank.
The crime of the Palestinians is that they did not leave their homeland to become refugees like the Rohingya, the Angolans, the Sudanese, the Yemenis, the Syrians and the Lebanese. As a freedom-loving people, they are paying a heavy price---heavier than other peoples. Now they are refugees on their own soil because of a lack of food, clean drinking water, sanitation and hygiene. The sinister programme is being carried out by Netanyahu with the US providing the killing machines on the one hand, and stopping food aid to the starving population there, on the other. Shame to the civilisation that can allow this barbarity to happen and persist!
Near home, the theatre of civil war in Myanmar too is a legacy of toxic international politics that has indirectly made Bangladesh a victim of social, economic and environmental depredation. This country itself had its fiery baptism in 1971 and also suffered the dismemberment in 1947. It has a surfeit of its problems ranging from political destabilisation to economic haemorrhage to social instability and decline. Its achievements on the economic front against all odds have been appreciable but for the unequal distribution of wealth with the privileged, corrupt and crafty having their cakes and eating those too.
Right at the moment the country is trying its best to come out of its economic morass, Trump's tariff war threatens to further deteriorate the situation. The political future largely depends on its economic stability. But the area that defies any cure is the recent decline in people's mental poise and the simmering rage that flares up with the slightest provocation or just made to do so with ulterior motives. Intolerance and mob mentality have crossed all limits to mark a general trend beyond cure.
Some segments are trying to assume the role of moral guardians by spreading canards. Encouraged, the anti-social elements are now on the prowl for all kinds of unearned and immoral exploits with girls, including babies, and women becoming the prime victims. Making economic recovery possible may be challenging but it is attainable. But when society falls into chaos and lawlessness undermines mainstream and peaceful politics, a country unwittingly hands its sovereignty over to alien powers under the garb of commercial exploitation and bilateral or multilateral treaty on resource exploration and development undertakings. The vandalism resorted to by some protesters from the processions held to demonstrate solidarity with Palestine and protest continued aggression on the Palestinians smacks of sinister attempts to further destabilise society. This is how subversive agents are used to expedite neo-colonial economic agenda as against the direct invasion of countries like Iraq and Afghanistan.