RECONCILIATION AS A POLICY PRINCIPLE

 

(This entry immediately follows the entry Forgetfulness As A Prerequisite Of A Better World, posted on this blog on November 22^nd, 2011.)

Talking about forgetfulness as the best guarantee of leaving past conflicts and grievances behind, there is a different kind of remedy to treat the resentful patient. It is what I may call forced forgetfulness, known to us under the more prosaic term national (or international) reconciliation. We have seen it in practice in South Africa, and more or less in Vietnam and Germany during their respective reconciliations. One of the famous historical examples was of course the policy of national reconciliation in the United States of America, in the aftermath of the Civil War. Despite the numerous problems, faithfully portrayed in Margaret Mitchell’s Gone with the Wind, the policy worked, to America’s great credit.

In terms of international reconciliation, we may quote, as previously noted, the successful reconciliations of Russia and Germany after the Second World War, and of Russia and China after the acrimonious and occasionally violent Sino-Soviet split. There have of course also been numerous reconciliations between colonial powers and their erstwhile colonies, the example of Great Britain and her mutinous American colonies of yore, naturally standing out.

There is a very unfortunate trend in the past two decades and currently, against the dangers of which I happened to warn in one of my articles published by the Marin Independent Journal and carried by Gannett. I made an appeal to George H. W. Bush, who was President at that time, to summon up all American influence to make sure that no matter what, national borders between the states of Europe and elsewhere remain unchanged, and no fragmentation of existing states be allowed, or else, if allowed, the trend will catch fire and threaten a major conflagration. It goes without saying that my advice was never heeded, and when Yugoslavia fell apart, we all know what happened next. The post-World War II national reconciliation under the leadership of Josip Broz Tito was to give way to an incredible outburst of bad blood in a Hobbesian war of all against all…

National and international reconciliation is a key policy principle in troubled national and international affairs, but national fragmentation is its nemesis, and therefore the worst enemy of world peace. There are too many arsonists these days, tragically, who are deliberately set on promoting internecine and neighbor-on-neighbor strife, leaving the critically important global policy of reconciliation primarily in the realm of wishful thinking, to the chagrin of all those who rightly consider world peace the topmost international desideratum, but have been forced to watch helplessly as the world everywhere is bursting in flames of deliberately provoked and maliciously encouraged war.

Today’s ongoing mischief in several nations of the Arab world proves how easy it is to upset the balance of peaceful coexistence both within and among nations. Paradoxically, the dreaded al Qaeda element in these wars is by no means a disruptive, chaos-inviting factor, but, on the contrary, a consolidating factor of sorts, although on the sharply negative side of the issues involved...

 

But the bottom line of all these conflicts is that in larger or smaller ways, wittingly or unwittingly, they are all favoring international extremism, creating a climate of violent revolution, and, in the final analysis, representing an assault on the Western values and the Western way of life, signifying the ultimate world-historical defeat of  precisely those Western supporters of the present destabilization of the Arab world who have recklessly encouraged this mischief in the first place.