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Dear Neighbors on this Globe,
We hope a lot of you will, somehow, get a chance to read this. You need to read this, or have someone read it to you. We hope someone will translate this into all of the languages spoken throughout your region, so that even more people can read this. You will not like or enjoy reading this, so perhaps our hope is futile. Nevertheless, you still need to read this, and think about it.
Your region of the world is now a bottomless well of misery, anger, violence, vengeance, poverty, oppression, stagnation, and sorrow. Perhaps today, Middle Eastern reader, you personally do not experience this. Perhaps you are a well-to-do family in a city currently untouched by violence, and you tell yourself that it will not, cannot, happen to you. Perhaps you have the economic resources to escape missiles and rockets (given time to do so,) not to mention plenty of guarded barricades to keep out suicide bombers. But whether you will admit it or not, you too are at risk of violence, and the chances are far better than even that you are already touched by hate, anger, and a rage you feel righteous justification in focusing on ‘them.’
You don’t need us to tell you the conditions of your daily life. The fear. The denial of hope. The corrosive fury that feels so empowering but leaves you so empty. You don’t need us to tell you about the larger sociopolitical miseries of your street, your people, your country, your neighbors, your region. That’s not what we’re here to talk about.
It rends many of us with pain to tell you this, but here is the ugly truth you need to know: The rest of the world, even your ‘allies’ will never permit you to achieve a victory. We will never let you win. And you cannot win without us, because if you look like you are winning, we will strengthen your enemies, or we will lessen our help to you, and stand back and tacitly encourage someone else to strengthen your enemies.
It is in our nations’ geopolitical interests, you see, to keep you from winning, even while we profess friendship for you, understanding and sympathy for your aims, and disgust with your enemies. As individual people, we may wish for your victory, support you fervently, and demand that our governments help you. You can pour money and effort into eliciting such support, into lobbying us and our governments, and you know what? It doesn’t make any difference! You are wasting your money. We would have helped you, or refrained from helping your enemies, anyways, to keep the weird equilibrium of violent chaos in your region intact.
But the money you spend trying to buy influence and support is at least money that is not available to make explosives or bullets, so please don’t stop trying. We will continue to encourage you with an elaborate kabuki show of UN resolutions and carefully-calculated domestic allocations of aid and carefully-worded statements from our leaders that mean nothing, in the end, except more of the same. It all comes down to the same thing in the end: We can’t let you win. There is too much on the line, including our own security, geopolitical stability, and access to critical resources.
Millenia of history illustrate your region’s strategic role in the world even before humanity discovered the multitudinous uses of fossilized liquid carbon. The Mediterranean region is the meeting place of the world’s geopolitical power blocs and trade routes. It is the navel of the western world and the gateway to the eastern world. No one power, or client of one power, can be permitted to hold absolute sway over any substantial part thereof.
The best you can ever hope for (and it could be a very good best indeed,) is a region of many smaller self-governing powers with a variety of alignments and alliances who live at cautious peace with one another and maintain a level of guarded economic cooperation that promotes a modest prosperity for all. Such a configuration could avoid the coming water crises and protect you all from too harsh an exploitation by the world’s larger power blocs. We wouldn’t mind if this happened, we could live with it. Some of us would even be quite happy about it. But we don’t see it happening, since any efforts on our part to help it happen inevitably only continue the vicious status quo that keeps most of you poor and hopeless, some of you fearful and greedy, and all of you rageful.
So we continue ‘keeping the playing field level.’ Every time one party scores a goal and takes the lead, we will strengthen the other parties to enable them to keep up. We will ensure that you all have the means to kill one another, make each other homeless, disrupt one anothers’ economic activities, selectively oppress the most disempowered groups to fan the hatred, give ample media coverage to the rhetoric of incitement and play the game of meaningless diplomacy to string you along. But we’ll never, ever let you win.
Your only hope is to stop relying on us. If you can find a way to do that, to begin talking among yourselves without reference to us and our support, recognizing that all you really have is the real estate and the resources you stand upon, squat upon, fight and kill and die over, and come up with your own plans for dealing with that reality, you might have a chance.
Of course, we wish you well. But none of us are holding our breaths.
sadly,
The Citizens of the Rest of the World
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