You’ll find in many languages a variation on the saying which goes as follows: “The truth comes out the mouths of children.” What it means to convey is that we are all endowed at birth with a valuable gift, that of telling he truth and avoid telling what’s false.
But when a child
is reprimanded for doing something that adults find objectionable, the child
will not hesitate to lie, which he’ll do by protesting he did not commit the
act he is accused of committing. It is obvious therefore that the instinct for
self-preservation is stronger in a child than the gift of telling the truth.
Because moral
authority is acquired by telling the truth no matter what consequences will
result from being morally upright, that authority can be lost by telling a
single lie or by repeating it in an effort to embellish it. And so, the
question is this: Can moral authority be regained once it has been squandered?
We may be about
to encounter the answer to that question because a situational windfall was
handed to us not long ago. It happened that a Tweddle Dee and a Tweddle Dum of
the North American political scene, who used to go around preaching the virtues
of respecting the Human Rights of others, proved to have been squandering their
moral authority by doing worse than lie. They went around trampling on the
Human Rights of others like there was no tomorrow.
It happened that
in building on a long tradition of stealing from the talented the ideas that
augment their meager talent, the Tweddle pair tripped themselves this time by
making the move that gave them away. Having the mathematical acumen of a
toddler, they failed to see that 20,000 is 20 times larger than 1,000, which
means 20 times more important. And yet, what the mathematical illiterates did
was rebuke the Government of China for stealing a 1,000 days from the life of
some people while ignoring the 20,000 days they themselves have been stealing
from the life of someone they envy.
As a result of
encountering that the Tweddle pair are more ignorant than they are malicious,
can their slip be forgiven, and their moral authority restored to them out of
pity for their mental deficiency? The answer is that we must not do that
because if we do, we’ll discourage them from working on acquiring the knowledge
that’s necessary for them to stand by the communities they were elected to
serve. It is that 20,000 is bigger than 1,000, and they must have this reality
drummed into their heads before they can rely on any level of authority before
ordering that things be done the way they see fit.
This is not mere
conjecture because the evidence is in to the effect that the people who were
referred to as the Eastern Europeans, are growing restless about their being
drawn into an alliance that turned out to be a lie. They were told that the
Western Alliance stood on the rule of law but found it to be standing on the
principle of getting around the law. They were told this was an alliance that
stood for meritocracy but found it standing on the principle of stealing from
the talented to augment the deficiencies of the untalented and enrich them at
the expense of others. They were told this was an alliance that stood on the
truth but found it to be the mother of all lies.
And while the
restlessness of the newly recruited members, is working itself into a movement
that does not bode well for the future of the Western Alliance, an alternative
Eastern Alliance, made of the previous Third World countries, is coalescing
into a formidable group. It is doing all that’s needed to attract to its side
the disappointed members of the Western Alliance, succeeding slowly but surely
at growing at the expense of the latter. And the latter is visibly reducing from
being all of the Western Alliance to becoming a mere Anglo Alliance comprising
the United States, the United Kingdom, Canada, Australia, and no more.
There was a time
when the NATO Alliance was opposed by the Warsaw Pact Bloc. The situation was
not ideal, but the idea of Mutually Assured Destruction maintained the peace
till the dissolution of that setup. What we have now is an expanding NATO with
a vast appetite, and a warring Russia that keeps gobbling the small countries
surrounding it to deny them to NATO. So the question that we need to ask: Is
there a way to reverse this trend and return the world to the bipolar state it
enjoyed during the Cold War?
The answer is
that we need not return to the status quo ante to feel secure again. What we
can do is impress upon the dwellers of the Anglosphere that if they insist on stretching
their hypocritical wings and exploiting every situation to serve their
interests at the expense of others, their days as a power to be reckoned with
will be numbered.