How Obama Administration Covered Up Swine Flu Pandemic?

It baffles the mind whether it’s willful blindness or anterograde amnesia but while drawing parallels with coronavirus outbreak, mainstream media appears to vividly recall Spanish flu of 1918 from a century ago and doesn’t seem to have an inkling about a much more pertinent example of H1N1 swine flu pandemic in 2009-10, even though it shared a lot of common characteristics with COVID-19 pandemic.

Although official statistics are much lower, according to subsequent peer-reviewed studies [1], H1N1 swine flu outbreak of 2009 infected 700 million to 1.4 billion people world-wide and caused 1,50,000 to 5,75,000 fatalities only in the first year of the outbreak in 2009.

Cumulative number of fatalities in subsequent years could be well above a million of which hundreds of thousands of deaths could have occurred in the worst affected countries, the US, Mexico and Brazil, though unreported because extensive testing wasn’t done at the time of the outbreak.

Even though vaccine was invented in 2010, the H1N1 virus was eventually defeated, particularly in the developing world, by natural immunity and not be medical remedies. WHO reclassified it as “variant of seasonal flu” and the dreaded designation “pandemic” was removed in August 2010.

The reason why corporate media and international health organizations shirked their responsibility to create public awareness on the H1N1 swine flu pandemic in the US, Mexico and Brazil was due to the fact that the US economy was going through economic recession that began in 2008 and lasted into 2009, whereas the swine flu epidemic began in March 2009 and lasted into 2010.

Extensive media coverage of the outbreak could have further exacerbated the recession, which it did in part, but thankfully no sweeping lockdowns or quarantine measures were enforced then. Mainstream news outlets were hushed up from reporting on the H1N1 epidemic by then newly elected Obama administration, and self-censorship from a decade ago appears to have restrained corporate media from mentioning the name of swine flu pandemic even now.

Whether it’s swine flu of 2009 or coronavirus outbreak of today, pandemics are like a deluge that can be managed to minimize the damage but cannot be contained. All it takes is a small crack in the embankment for the force of nature to unleash its fury and eliminate all obstacles coming in its way.

When the epidemic is surging exponentially, the contagion infects millions of people within the short span of several months, of which only a minuscule fraction exhibits symptoms and is diagnosed with the infection, while the rest are asymptomatic and go unnoticed. But they develop resistance against re-infection, thus contributing to achieving herd immunity.

Had political correctness been the remedy, designating coronavirus outbreak as seasonal flu would solve the dilemma, as WHO reclassified swine flu pandemic as common cold in August 2010 and gave the international economy breathing space in the aftermath of 2008-9 global recession.

Technically, a patient tested positive for HIV virus isn’t said to be suffering from AIDS. AIDS is the severe form of the infection when dormant HIV virus becomes active, begins replicating and starts causing harm to the body tissues and organs. Similarly, a patient tested positive for SARS-CoV-2 isn’t actually suffering from COVID-19, unless the patient develops symptoms of severe acute respiratory syndrome.

Treatment and hospitalization is only needed for severe cases of COVID-19, and asymptomatic and mild cases of SARS-CoV-2 infection simply have to be quarantined for a couple of weeks either at homes or at quarantine centers until their natural immunity overcomes the virus so they don’t pose a risk of spreading infection among communities.

Periodically, epidemics come and go. They are defeated by body’s natural immune system and don’t need treatment. Certain contagions, like Ebola with case fatality ratio of 90%, require preventive measures, such as quarantines and lockdowns, but the rest, like H1N1 swine flu, H5N1 bird flu and SARS-CoV-2 causing COVID-19 with infection fatality ratio of less than 0.2%, are treated like common cold that causes tens of thousands deaths every year in the US alone. Common cold influenza spreads across the world in yearly outbreaks, resulting in about three to five million cases of severe illness and about 290,000 to 650,000 deaths.

Even though the infection fatality rate of H1N1 swine flu was lower, at 0.02%, compared to COVID-19’s 0.2%, if the total number of cases in the calculation is reduced from 1.4 billion to a few hundred million and the actual number of fatalities caused by swine flu in 2009-10 is accurately calculated, then H1N1’s infection fatality rate would probably be comparable to COVID-19’s fatality rate. Infection fatality rate of COVID-19 could even be less than 0.1% once the outbreak subsides and accurate number of infections and fatalities are correctly known.

Even the most accurate COVID-19 test RT-PCR only has an accuracy level of 50-60%, especially in asymptomatic individuals or if the virus has penetrated deep into respiratory tract. Reverse transcription polymerase chain reaction, RT-PCR (viral testing), is considered the gold standard of diagnosis for COVID-19 and other viruses. Although it has high sensitivity and specificity in a laboratory setting, chances of finding virus in specimens are: 90% in Bronchoalveolar lavage fluid, 70% in sputum and 50-60% in nasal swabs, though used most frequently.

If extensive sero-epidemiological studies are done, it would be found out that actual prevalence of SARS-CoV-2 is much higher than 25 million reported infections, perhaps comparable to H1N1 swine flu’s 700 million to 1.4 billion world-wide infections.

At the peak of the outbreak in March and April, Italian doctors reported the actual number of cases could be as high as 6,50,000, particularly in the worst-hit Lombardy and Milan regions, though total cases in Italy until August are still reported to be only 2,67,000.

Similarly, Iranian epidemiologist Ehsan Mostafavi recently said: “About 15 million Iranians may have experienced being infected with this virus since the outbreak began.” That amounts to 1 in 5 Iranians or 20% of Iran’s population.

Coronavirus may have infected ten times more Americans than reported, according to a report [2] by Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC). Thus, the actual number of infections in the US as well as Europe could be ten to twenty times higher than the official statistics, which is enough for the viral infection to reach endemic steady state and for the population to develop herd immunity against the contagion.

An extensive study [3] in Spain shows 5% population has developed antibodies, which means number of infections is ten times higher than reported 4,40,000 cases. People in urban areas have up to 10% prevalence of antibodies.

Though widely believed to have originated in Wuhan in January, the exact date and place of origin of SARS-CoV-2 are also doubtful. A Spanish research team found [4] traces of the virus in a March 2019 sewage sample whereas the outbreak began in the Chinese city of Wuhan in January 2020. In fact, several Chinese diplomats recently cast doubts over the widely accepted theory that the flu virus mutated by consuming bats in wet markets of China.

Coronavirus outbreak is fundamentally the failing of highly commercialized medical science. Billions of dollars are invested in Big Pharma. But for what purpose, to make skin care products and aphrodisiacs, for performing needless cosmetic surgeries; and hundreds of billions are spent on manufacturing state-of-the-art weapon system as deterrence against adversaries. Yet no preparations were made for dealing with a contingency as catastrophic as a pandemic. That’s criminal negligence, and we have nobody to blame but the capitalist social order and commercialization of essential public services.

Even though corporate media promptly declared Trump’s “drug of choice” antimalarial chloroquine for treating a viral infection to be a hoax, its own prescriptions fared no better than placebos. For instance, dexamethasone would be as effective against coronavirus infections as it is in treating arthritis. Competent orthopedics seldom prescribe it because it’s a steroidal drug having more adverse effects than therapeutic ones. Apparently, the manufacturers of remdesivir and dexamethasone in Big Pharma paid millions of dollars bribes to the mainstream media to market the drugs, which in turn is inclined to sensationalize any news story pertaining to COVID-19.

The only remedy that has proved effective in treating COVID-19 thus far has been convalescent plasma therapy. Plasma therapy works on the principle that antibodies contained in the blood of previously infected person would provide resistance against infection through transfusion of convalescent plasma into a COVID-19 patient’s circulatory system.

Thus, it basically works on the same principle that vaccination does, though plasma therapy would be classified as therapeutic vaccine instead of more common prophylactic ones for treating widespread epidemics. A word of caution, though, it should only be used in severe cases of COVID-19 as prescribed by physicians. Because the treatment is still in experimental stages and antibodies could prove potentially harmful in patients with mild symptoms of the disease.

Globally, the leading causes of 56 million deaths every year are: 15 million deaths from heart diseases and strokes; 5 million from lung diseases; 2 million from dementias; 1.5 million from diabetes; over a million each from diarrhea, tuberculosis and AIDS; and 1.5 million deaths in road traffic accidents. In comparison, coronavirus pandemic has claimed less than a million lives thus far but is getting undue media coverage due to politicization of the pandemic debate.

Footnotes:

[1] H1N1 swine flu caused 1,50,000 to 5,75,000 fatalities:

https://www.cdc.gov/flu/spotlights/pandemic-global-estimates.htm

[2] Coronavirus may have infected 10 times more Americans than reported, CDC says:

https://www.reuters.com/article/us-health-coronavirus-usa-cases-idUSKBN23W2PU

[3] An extensive study in Spain shows 5% population has developed antibodies:

https://edition.cnn.com/2020/07/06/health/spain-coronavirus-antibody-study-lancet-intl/index.html

[4] A Spanish research team found traces of the virus in a March 2019 sewage sample:

https://www.reuters.com/article/us-health-coronavirus-spain-science-idUSKBN23X2HQ

CIA was Aiding Jihadists before Soviets Invaded Afghanistan

Ronald Reagan and Younas Khalis.

Originally, there were four parties involved in the Afghan conflict which are mainly responsible for the debacle in the Af-Pak region. Firstly, the former Soviet Union which invaded Afghanistan in December 1979. Secondly, Pakistan’s security agencies which nurtured the Afghan so-called “mujahideen” (freedom fighters) on the behest of Washington.

Thirdly, Saudi Arabia and the rest of oil-rich Gulf states which generously funded the jihadists to promote their Wahhabi-Salafi ideology. And last but not the least, the Western capitals which funded, provided weapons and internationally legitimized the erstwhile ‘freedom fighters’ to use them against a competing ideology, global communism, which posed a threat to the Western corporate interests all over the world.

Regarding the objectives of the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan in December 1979, the then American envoy to Kabul, Adolph “Spike” Dubs, was assassinated on 14 Feb 1979, the same day that Iranian revolutionaries stormed the US embassy in Tehran.

According to recently declassified documents [1] of the White House, CIA and State Department as reported by Tim Weiner for The Washington Post, the CIA was aiding Afghan jihadists before the Soviets invaded in 1979. The then American President Jimmy Carter signed the CIA directive to arm the Afghan jihadists in July 1979, whereas the former Soviet Union invaded Afghanistan in December the same year.

That the CIA was arming the Afghan jihadists six months before the Soviets invaded Afghanistan has been proven by the State Department’s declassified documents and admitted by The Washington Post, which is owned by Jeff Bezos, the owner of Amazon. The Washington Post has a history of working in close collaboration with the CIA as Bezos won a $600 million contract [2] in 2013 to host the CIA’s database on the Amazon’s web-hosting service.

Fact of the matter, however, is that the nexus between the CIA, Pakistan’s security agencies and the Gulf states to train and arm the Afghan jihadists against the former Soviet Union was formed several years earlier.

During the late 1970s, Pakistan’s then-Prime Minister Zulfikar Ali Bhutto began aiding the Afghan Islamists against Sardar Daud’s government, who had toppled his first cousin King Zahir Shah in a palace coup in 1973 and had proclaimed himself the president of Afghanistan.

Sardar Daud was a Pashtun nationalist and laid claim to Pakistan’s northwestern Pashtun-majority province. Pakistan’s security establishment was wary of his irredentist claims and used Islamists to weaken his rule in Afghanistan. He was eventually assassinated in 1978 as a result of the Saur Revolution led by the Afghan communists.

Pakistan’s support to the Islamists with the Saudi petro-dollars and Washington’s blessings, however, kindled the fires of Islamic insurgencies in the entire region comprising Afghanistan, Pakistan and the Soviet Central Asian States.

The former Soviet Union was wary that its 40 million Muslims were susceptible to radicalism, because Islamic radicalism was infiltrating across the border into the Central Asian States from Afghanistan. Therefore, the Soviet Union invaded Afghanistan in December 1979 in support of the Afghan communists to forestall the likelihood of Islamic insurgencies spreading to the Central Asian States bordering Afghanistan.

Even the American President Donald Trump recently admitted [3]: “The reason Russia invaded Afghanistan was because terrorists were going into Russia; they were right to be there.” Incidentally, Trump also implied the reason why Soviet Union collapsed was due to the economic burden of the Soviet-Afghan War, as he was making a point about the withdrawal of American forces from Syria and Afghanistan.

Notwithstanding, in the Soviet-Afghan War between the global capitalist and global communist blocs, Saudi Arabia and the rest of Gulf’s petro-monarchies took the side of the global capitalist bloc because the former Soviet Union and Central Asian states produce more energy and consume less. Thus, the Soviet-led bloc was a net exporter of energy whereas the Western capitalist bloc was a net importer.

It suited the economic interests of the oil-rich Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC) countries to maintain and strengthen a supplier-consumer relationship with the Western capitalist bloc. Now, the BRICS countries are equally hungry for the Middle East’s energy, but it’s a recent development. During the Cold War, an alliance with the industrialized Western nations suited the economic interests of the Gulf countries.

Why did Pakistan choose to join this unholy alliance against the global Left? In order to understand this, we need to take a cursory look at the history of Pakistan. During the British colonial rule before the independence of the subcontinent in 1947, Pakistan’s leadership used to have a patron-client relationship with the British imperialists.

The Indian leadership also used to have that relationship with the British imperialists, but in the case of Pakistan, there was an additional aggravating factor involved: the numerical weakness of the Indian Muslims and their consequent dependence on the British imperialists against the permanent numerical majority of the Hindus.

It’s not that the Hindu leaders were not afflicted with the colonial mentality, but in the case of Pakistani leaders, the myth of invincibility and infallibility of the West was cherished even more. That’s why Pakistan’s first Prime Minister Liaquat Ali Khan declined the request of a state visit from the former Soviet Union and went on a state visit to Washington instead.

It wasn’t just the colonial mentality of Pakistan’s leaders but certain geopolitical considerations also played into their thinking for forming a strategic alliance with the Western bloc. Immediately after the independence, India annexed the Muslim-majority state of Kashmir in violation of the agreed-upon Partition Principle that allocated the Muslim-majority provinces of the British India to Pakistan and the Hindu-majority regions to India.

Then in the 1950s, India took advantage of the Kashmiri territory, as the riverheads of Pakistani rivers are located in Kashmir, and diverted the waters of Pakistani rivers to irrigate India’s western provinces. The whole of Bahawalpur region in southern Punjab turned barren overnight and the agricultural economy of the nascent state of Pakistan suffered a tremendous blow.

With the involvement of the World Bank and the Tennessee Valley Authority of the US, Pakistan and India signed the Indus Waters Treaty in 1960, which allocated exclusive rights for the use of three eastern rivers to India, and some rights such as the right to build hydroelectric projects over the western Pakistani rivers, Jhelum and Chenab, as well.

All these incidents and Pakistan’s relative weakness vis-à-vis India made it even more dependent on the Western military and developmental aid. That’s why it joined the Washington-led, anti-communist SEATO and CENTO alliances in the region during the 1950s.

So much so that when an American U-2 spy plane was shot down in May 1960 by the Soviet Air Defense Forces while performing photographic aerial reconnaissance deep into Soviet territory, Pakistan’s then-President Ayub Khan openly acknowledged that the spy plane had flown from the American airbase in Pakistan’s northwestern metropolis, Peshawar.

When Pakistan had forged such a close alliance with Washington, it became impossible for it to stay neutral when the former Soviet Union invaded Afghanistan in 1979. Regarding the motives of the belligerents involved, the Americans wanted to take revenge for their defeat at the hands of communists in Vietnam, the Gulf countries had forged close economic ties with the Western bloc and Pakistan was dependent on the Western military aid, hence it didn’t have a choice but to toe Washington’s policy in Afghanistan.

In the end, the Soviet-Afghan War proved to be a “bear trap” and the former Soviet Union was eventually defeated and was subsequently dissolved in December 1991. It did not collapse because of the Afghan Jihad but that was an important factor contributing to the dissolution of the Soviet Union.

Regardless, more than twenty years before the declassification of the State Department documents as mentioned in the aforementioned Washington Post report, in the 1998 interview [4] to the alternative news outlet The Counter Punch Magazine, former National Security Advisor to President Jimmy Carter, Zbigniew Brzezinski, confessed that the president signed the directive to provide secret aid to the Afghan jihadists in July 1979, whereas the Soviet Army invaded Afghanistan six months later in December 1979.

Here is a poignant excerpt from the interview: The interviewer puts the question: “And neither do you regret having supported the Islamic jihadists, having given arms and advice to future terrorists?” Brzezinski replies: “What is most important to the history of the world? The Taliban or the collapse of the Soviet empire? Some stirred-up Moslems or the liberation of Central Europe and the end of the Cold War?”

Despite the crass insensitivity, one must give credit to Zbigniew Brzezinski that at least he had the courage to speak the unembellished truth. It’s worth noting, however, that the aforementioned interview was recorded in 1998. After the 9/11 terror attack, no Western policymaker can now dare to be as blunt and forthright as Brzezinski.

Kashmir’s Savior and the Frontier’s Gandhi

There are only two illustrious South Asian leaders who never went to jail during their otherwise stellar political careers. One was the founder of Pakistan, Jinnah, and the other a crusader against corruption who has been given the sobriquet ‘Pakistan Khan’ by his cultist followers. Perceptive readers are already well aware of the reason why nobody can dare to arrest the latter, even if he lays a four-month-long siege to the paramount institutions of state and stops the state machinery from functioning.

Regarding the allegation levelled against Jinnah by Orientalist historians that he was an imperialist collaborator, it is so preposterous that it would be a waste of time trying to dispel the ludicrous accusation. Instead, I would implore the readers to allow me the liberty to scribble a tongue-in-cheek rant here.

It’s an incontestable fact that Jinnah, Iqbal and Sir Syed were imperialist collaborators who fell prey to the divide-and-rule policy of the British Raj. There were only two progressive Muslim leaders who joined forces with Mahatma Gandhi’s socialist and anti-imperialist Congress against the tyranny of the Raj. One was Sheikh Abdullah of Kashmir and the other was Abdul Ghaffar Khan (Bacha Khan) of Pashtunistan.

After the partition of British India, Sheikh Abdullah worked hand in glove with Pundit Nehru to make Muslim-majority Kashmir a part of secular Indian utopia. The Muslims of Kashmir trusted the charismatic messiah with their lives and the latter met their expectations by conniving with the Congress’ pundits. Today Kashmir is thriving and prospering under the suzerainty of India and the dynamic leadership of Sheikh Abdullah’s descendants, Farooq Abdullah and Omar Abdullah, the true representatives of Kashmiri Muslims.

Had it been up to the visionary and tactful Bacha Khan, he too would have made sure to make Pashtunistan a colony of India. However, a plebiscite was held on the eve of independence in the erstwhile North West Frontier Province; and regrettably, the gullible Pashtuns of the doomed province overwhelmingly voted to become part of an Islamist and reactionary Pakistan.

Let me clarify here that I am not against Bacha Khan and his Red Shirts, ‘Khudai Khidmatgar,’ movement, as such. It was a laudable achievement that he politically mobilised the Pashtuns for independence and enfranchisement. But I have doubts about his political acumen. From his bearing, he appeared like a simpleton who was given to whims and personal attachments. But the people that he was dealing with, Gandhi, Nehru and Patel, were shrewd politicians.

The astute leadership of Congress wheedled and coaxed Bacha Khan and Sheikh Abdullah to form a political alliance with the thinly veiled Hindu nationalist Congress against the interests of Pashtun and Kashmiri Muslims, whom the aforementioned leaders respectively represented. And the way I see it, it had less to do with any political convergence of ideas; rather, it was more about their personal bonding with the shrewd leadership of Congress.

Jinnah was a brash and forthright statesman who used to treat his party workers and associates as subordinates. And Pashtuns, as we all know, are given to ‘Pashtunwali’ (honour), courtesy and other such trappings of symbolic respect. Gandhi and Nehru struck a chord there with feigned cordiality and ensnared two leading Muslim luminaries of freedom struggle, hence striking a political marriage of convenience between the Congress and the Pashtun and Kashmiri nationalists.

In the end, Sheikh Abdullah legitimised the Indian occupation of Kashmir by becoming its first chief minister, though he was later imprisoned by none other than his good old friend, Pundit Nehru. But when Pakistan and, more importantly, the Kashmiri Muslims needed his leadership and guidance the most, he backstabbed them simply because of his personal friendship with Jawaharlal Nehru.

More to the point, in the British Indian context, the divide-and-rule policy originally meant that imperialists used this strategy to sow the seeds of dissension and communal hatred to prolong their tyrannical rule in India. However, some Indian historians later came up with the fancy notion that the colonial powers lent their support to the idea of creation of Pakistan in order to use the latter as a bulwark against communist influence in the region; this latter conspiracy theory is farthest from truth.

Firstly, the British imperialists took immense pride in creating a unified and cohesive British Indian army, and it’s a historical fact that the latter organisation was vehemently opposed to the division of the British Indian armed forces. It simply defies common sense that if the colonial power was apprehensive of the expanding influence of Soviet Union in the region; in that case, it would have preferred to leave behind a unified and strong India army, rather than two divided armies at loggerheads with each other.

Secondly, although Pakistan joined the Washington-led and anti-communist SEATO and CENTO alliances in the 1950s and it also fought America’s Jihad in Afghanistan against the Soviet Union during the 1980s, but we must bear in mind that there were actually two power-centres of communism during the Cold War, i.e. the Soviet Bolshevism and the Chinese Maoism.

If the intention of the colonial powers was to use Pakistan as a bulwark against communist influence in the region, then how come Pakistan established such cordial relations with the communist China during the 1960s that it voted in favour of China’s membership into the United Nations in 1971, and Zulfikar Ali Bhutto played a pivotal role in arranging Richard Nixon’s visit to China in 1972.

Fact of the matter is that both India and Pakistan had good relations with the Western powers during the Cold War. However, India had friendly ties with Soviet Union and adversarial relations with China, while Pakistan had adversarial relations with Soviet Union and friendly ties with China. The relations of India and Pakistan with the communist powers were based more on their national interests than on ideological lines.

The relatively modern Indian historians who came up with this fancy conspiracy theory have actually retrospectively applied the theory to the historical chain of events: that is, they conceived the theory after Pakistan joined the anti-communist alliances and after it played the role of Washington’s client state during the Soviet-Afghan Jihad. At the time of independence movement in 1940s, neither the Hindus nor the Muslims knew anything about the aftermath of their respective freedom struggles.

Is Strasbourg Attack a False Flag to Thwart Yellow Vests?

On Tuesday evening, a brazen terror attack occurred in the French city of Strasbourg, claiming three lives and injuring a dozen, six of whom are said to be in critical condition. The suspect was known to police as an Islamic extremist and has been identified as 29-year-old Cherif Chekatt.

The suspected shooter evaded capture from a police dragnet and is still on the run, prompting fears of a follow-up attack. The suspect was shot and injured by soldiers guarding the Christmas market in Strasbourg, but escaped in a hijacked taxi.

Cherif Chekatt is said to be on a watch-list of around 26,000 people, of whom 10,000 are believed to have been radicalized. He had previously served prison sentences in France and Germany for common law offences and fought twice with security forces.

It’s worth noting that although the Western powers are ostensibly fighting a war against terrorism, they had worked hand-in-glove with the Islamic jihadists from 2011 to 2014 to topple the hostile regimes of Qaddafi in Libya and Bashar al-Assad in Syria.

In line with their foreign policy, Britain, France and Germany gave a free hand to the Islamic jihadists and their patrons based in those countries to wage proxy wars against the governments in Libya and Syria. France was particularly vulnerable because it has a large Muslim diaspora from its former North African colonies.

The seven-year-long conflict in Syria that gave birth to scores of militant groups, including the Islamic State, and after the conflict spilled across the border into neighboring Iraq in early 2014 was directly responsible for the spate of Islamic State-inspired terror attacks in Europe from 2015 to 2017.

Since the beginning of the Syrian conflict in August 2011 to June 2014, when the Islamic State overran Mosul and Anbar in Iraq, an informal pact existed between the Western powers, their regional Sunni allies and jihadists of the Middle East against the Shi’a Iranian axis. In accordance with the pact, militants were trained and armed in the training camps located in the border regions of Turkey and Jordan to battle the Syrian government.

This arrangement of an informal pact between the Western powers and the jihadists of the Middle East against the Iranian axis worked well up to August 2014, when the Obama administration made a volte-face on its previous regime change policy in Syria and began conducting air strikes against one group of Sunni militants battling the Syrian government, the Islamic State, after the latter overstepped its mandate in Syria and overran Mosul and Anbar in Iraq from where the US had withdrawn its troops only a couple of years ago in December 2011.

After this reversal of policy in Syria by the Western powers and the subsequent Russian military intervention on the side of the Syrian government in September 2015, the momentum of jihadists’ expansion in Syria and Iraq stalled, and they felt that their Western patrons had committed a treachery against the Sunni jihadists’ cause, that’s why they were infuriated and rose up in arms to exact revenge for this betrayal.

If we look at the chain of events, the timing of the spate of terror attacks against the West was critical: the Islamic State overran Mosul in June 2014, the Western powers began conducting air strikes against the Islamic State’s targets in Iraq and Syria in August 2014, and after a lull of almost a decade since the Madrid and London bombings in 2004 and 2005, respectively, the first such incident of terrorism occurred on the Western soil at the offices of Charlie Hebdo in January 2015, and then the Islamic State carried out the audacious November 2015 Paris attacks, the March 2016 Brussels bombings, the June 2016 truck-ramming incident in Nice, and three horrific terror attacks took place in the United Kingdom within a span of less than three months in 2017, and after that the Islamic State carried out the Barcelona attack in August 2017.

More to the point, the dilemma that the jihadists and their regional backers faced in Syria was quite unique: in the wake of the Ghouta chemical weapons attacks in Damascus in August 2013, the stage was all set for yet another no-fly zone and “humanitarian intervention” a la Qaddafi’s Libya; the war hounds were waiting for a finishing blow and then-Turkish foreign minister, Ahmet Davutoglu, and the former Saudi intelligence chief, Bandar bin Sultan, were shuttling between the Western capitals to lobby for the military intervention. Francois Hollande had already announced his intentions and David Cameron was also onboard.

Here it should be remembered that even during the Libyan intervention, the Obama administration’s policy was a bit ambivalent and France under the leadership of Sarkozy had taken the lead role. In Syria’s case, however, the British parliament forced Cameron to seek a vote for military intervention in the House of Commons before committing the British troops and air force to Syria.

Taking cue from the British parliament, the US Congress also compelled Obama to seek approval before another ill-conceived military intervention; and since both the administrations lacked the requisite majority in their respective parliaments and the public opinion was also fiercely against another Middle Eastern war, therefore Obama and Cameron dropped their plans of enforcing a no-fly zone over Syria.

In the end, France was left alone as the only Western power still in favor of intervention; at that point, however, the seasoned Russian foreign minister, Sergei Lavrov, staged a diplomatic coup by announcing that the Syrian regime was willing to ship its chemical weapons stockpiles out of Syria and subsequently the issue was amicably resolved.

Turkey, Jordan and the Gulf Arab states, the main beneficiaries of the Sunni Jihad against the Shi’a-led government in Syria, however, had lost a golden opportunity to deal a fatal blow to their regional rivals.

To add insult to the injury, the Islamic State, one of the numerous Sunni Arab militant outfits fighting in Syria, overstepped its mandate in Syria and overran Mosul and Anbar in Iraq in 2014, from where the US troops had withdrawn only a couple of years ago in December 2011.

Additionally, when the graphic images and videos of Islamic State’s executions surfaced on the internet, the Western powers were left with no other choice but to adopt some countermeasures to show that they were still sincere in pursuing their dubious “war on terror” policy; at the same time, however, they assured their Turkish, Jordanian and Gulf Arab allies that despite fighting a war against the maverick jihadist outfit, the Islamic State, the Western policy of training and arming the so-called “moderate” Syrian militants will continue apace and that Bashar al-Assad’s days were numbered, one way or the other.

Moreover, declaring the war against the Islamic State in August 2014 served another purpose too: in order to commit the US Air Force to Syria and Iraq, the Obama administration needed the approval of the US Congress which was not available, as I have already mentioned, but by declaring a war against the Islamic State, which is a designated terrorist organization, the Obama administration availed itself of the war on terror provisions in the US laws and thus circumvented the US Congress.

But then Russia threw a spanner in the works of NATO and its Gulf Arab allies in September 2015 by its surreptitious military buildup in Latakia that was executed with an element of surprise unheard of since General Rommel, the Desert Fox. And now Turkey, Jordan, the Gulf Arab states and their jihadist proxies in Syria find themselves at the receiving end in the Syrian conflict.

Keeping this background of the quagmire created by the Western powers in Syria and Iraq to appease their regional allies, Israel and the Gulf states, in mind, it becomes amply clear that the Western powers are not sincere in pursuing their dubious war on terror policy as they have worked hand-in-glove with the Islamic jihadists in the Middle East.

Then how is it possible that a terror attack has occurred in Strasbourg when the Yellow Vests demonstrations have taken France by storm, which are demanding reduction in fuel tax, the reintroduction of wealth tax on large businesses, the raising of the minimum wage, and the resignation of the former investment banker and current President of France, Emmanuel Macron.

The only beneficiary of the Strasbourg shooting, it appears, is none other than the French government itself, because after the incident, the government would now put restrictions on freedom of assembly and all kinds of political demonstrations.

Thus it is quite likely that the French deep state might have instigated one of jihadists on its payroll to carry out the Strasbourg atrocity to break the momentum of the Yellow Vests protests, which have posed the single biggest threat to the elitist Macron administration since coming to power last year.

Neocolonialism and the myth of sovereignty

It’s an evident fact that the neocolonial powers are ruled by behemoth corporations whose wealth is measured in hundreds of billions of dollars, far more than the total GDP of many developing nations. The status of these multinational corporations as dominant players in national and international politics gets official imprimatur when the Western governments endorse the congressional lobbying practice of the so-called ‘special interest’ groups, which is a euphemism for business interests.

Since the Western governments are nothing but the mouthpieces of their business interests on international political and economic forums, therefore any national or international entity which hinders or opposes the agenda of corporate interests is either coerced into accepting their demands or gets sidelined.

In 2013, the Manmohan Singh’s government of India had certain objections to further opening up to the Western businesses. The Business Roundtable, which is an informal congregation of major US businesses and which together holds a net wealth of $6 trillion, held a meeting with the representatives of the Indian government and literally coerced the latter into accepting unfair demands of the Western corporations.

The developing economies, like India and Pakistan, are always hungry for foreign direct investment (FDI) to grow further, and this investment mostly comes from the Western corporations. When the Business Roundtables or the Paris-based International Chamber of Commerce (ICC) form pressure groups and engage in ‘collective bargaining’ activities, the nascent and fragile developing economies don’t have a choice but to toe their line.

State sovereignty, that sovereign nation states are at liberty to pursue independent policies, especially economic and trade policies, is a myth. Just like the ruling elites of the developing countries who have a stranglehold and monopoly over domestic politics; similarly, the neocolonial powers and their so-called ‘multinational’ corporations control international politics and the global economic order.

Any state which dares to transgress becomes an international pariah like Castro’s Cuba, Chavez’s Venezuela and Mugabe’s Zimbabwe; or more recently, Iran which was cut off from the global economic system from 2006 to 2015, because of its supposed nuclear ambitions. Good for Iran that it has one of the largest oil and gas resources, otherwise it would have been insolvent by now. Such is the power of global financial system, especially the banking sector, and the significance of petro-dollar because the global oil transactions are pegged in the US dollars all over the world, and all the major oil bourses are also located in the Western financial districts.

The crippling ‘third party’ economic sanctions on Iran from 2006 to 2015 have brought to the fore the enormous power that the Western financial institutions and the petro-dollar as a global reserve currency wields over the global financial system. It bears mentioning that the Iranian nuclear negotiations were as much about Iran’s nuclear program as they were about its ballistic missile program, which is an equally dangerous conventional threat to the Gulf’s petro-monarchies just across the Persian Gulf.

Despite the sanctions being unfair, Iran felt the heat so much that it remained engaged in negotiations throughout the nearly decade-long period of sanctions, and the issue was finally settled in the form of the Iran nuclear deal in April 2015. However, such was the crippling effect of those ‘third party’ sanctions on the Iranian economy that had it not been for Iran’s enormous oil and gas reserves, and some Russian, Chinese and Turkish help in illicitly buying Iranian oil, it could have defaulted due to those sanctions.

Regarding the exploitative neocolonial system and the stranglehold of the Western financial services sector on the global economy, in April 2016, the Saudi foreign minister threatened [1] that the Saudi kingdom would sell up to $750 billion in treasury securities and other assets if the US Congress passed a bill that would allow the Saudi government to be held responsible for any role in the September 11, 2001 terror attacks.

It’s worth noting that $750 billion is only the Saudi investment in the US, if we add its investment in the Western Europe, and the investments of oil-rich UAE, Kuwait and Qatar in the Western economies, the sum total would amount to trillions of dollars of Gulf’s investment in North America and Western Europe. Similarly, according to a July 2014 New York Post report [2], the Chinese entrepreneurs had deposited $1.4 trillion in the Western banks between 2002 to 2014, and the Russian oligarchs were the runner-ups with $800 billion of deposits.

Moreover, in order to bring home the significance of the Persian Gulf’s oil where 28,000 US troops have currently been stationed in their numerous leased military bases and aircraft-carriers, here are a few rough stats from the OPEC data: Saudi Arabia has the world’s largest proven petroleum reserves of 266 billion barrels and its daily crude oil production exceeds 10 million barrels; Iran and Iraq each has 150 billion barrels reserves and have the capacity to produce 5 million barrels per day each; while UAE and Kuwait each has 100 billion barrels reserves and they produce 3 million barrels per day each; thus, all the littoral states of the Persian Gulf together hold more than half of world’s 1500 billion barrels of proven petroleum reserves.

Finally, regarding the Western defence production industry’s sales of arms to the Gulf Arab States, a report [3] authored by William Hartung of the US-based Centre for International Policy found that the Obama administration had offered Saudi Arabia more than $115 billion in weapons, military equipment and training during its eight years tenure. Similarly, during its first international visit to Saudi Arabia in May last year, the Trump administration signed arms deals worth $110 billion, and over 10 years, total sales could reach $350 billion.

Imran Khan’s Naya Pakistan ‘Revolution’

Imran Khan with Prince Charles.

The predicament of Imran Khan’s fanboys has been somewhat like the pubescent girl who falls head over heels in love with a promiscuous playboy; and when her family and friends try to knock some sense into her by telling her that your sweetheart is cheating on you, instead of heeding to their well-meaning advice, she thinks they are jealous of her love life.

No wonder playboys like John F. Kennedy and Imran Khan turn out to be popular and revered leaders because they understand the elementary psychology of the masses. The puerile multitude doesn’t understand that grown-up politics is about following democratic principles and institution-building rather than putting the destiny of one’s nation in the hands of cavalier messiahs.

In order to assess the prospects of Imran Khan’s Pakistan Tehreek-e-Insaf (PTI) as a political institution, we need to study its composition. With the benefit of hindsight, it seems the worst decision Nawaz Sharif took in his political career after returning from exile in November 2007 was his refusal to accept Musharraf-allied Pakistan Muslim League-Quaid (PML-Q) defectors back into the folds of Pakistan Muslim League-Nawaz (PML-N). After that show of moral uprightness in the essentially unprincipled realpolitik, the PML-Q turncoats joined PTI in droves and gave birth to a third nation-wide political force in Pakistan after PML-N and Pakistan People’s Party (PPP).

If we take a cursory look at the PTI’s membership, it is a hotchpotch of electable politicians from various political parties, but most of all from the former stalwarts of the PML-Q. Here is a list of a few names who were previously the acolytes of Musharraf and are now the ‘untainted’ leaders of PTI which has launched a nation-wide crusade against corruption in Pakistan: Jahangir Tareen, a billionaire businessman who was formerly a minister in Musharraf’s cabinet; Khurshid Mehmood Qasuri, who was Musharraf’s foreign minister; Sheikh Rasheed, although he is not officially a PTI leader but he has become closer to Imran Khan than any other leader except Imran Khan’s virtual sidekick, Jahangir Tareen; and Shah Mehmood Qureshi, a former stalwart of Pakistan People’s Party who served as a foreign minister during the Zardari administration until he was forced to resign after the Raymond Davis affair in 2011, to name a few.

Allow me to scribble a tongue-in-cheek rant here on Imran Khan’s ‘Naya Pakistan Revolution’: This struggle for revolution isn’t the first of its kind in Pakistan and it won’t be the last. The first such revolution took place back in 1953 against the unjust status quo of Liaquat Ali Khan and Khawaja Nazimuddin’s Muslim League. The revolutionary heroes of yore, Ghulam Muhammad, Iskander Mirza and Ayub Khan, laid the foundations of the dictatorship of proletariat in Pakistan. The first such dictatorship of proletariat lasted from 1958 to 1971, and its outcome was the massacre of hundreds of thousands of Bengalis and the separation of East Pakistan.

The second such revolution occurred against the elected dictatorship of Zulfikar Ali Bhutto in 1977 and the revolutionary messiah, Zia-ul-Haq, ruled Pakistan from 1977 to 1988 with an iron hand. After sufficiently consolidating the gains of the revolution in Pakistan, he also exported the revolution throughout the Af-Pak region. The immediate outcome of the revolution was the destabilization of the whole region. It spawned many tadpole revolutionaries whose names we now hear in the news every day, such as the Taliban, the TTP and Lashkar-e-Taiba.

The last such revolution took place against the monopoly capitalism and corrupt cronyism of Benazir Bhutto’s People’s Party and Nawaz Sharif’s Muslim League in 1999. However, unlike the Stalinists of Zia, Musharraf was a Trotskyite. He joined forces with the neo-Trotskyites of the US like Bush, Cheney and Rumsfeld and an internecine struggle ensued which claimed the lives of tens of thousands of Stalinists and Trotskyites in Pakistan alone, not to mention the millions of peasants who were displaced by this conflict in Pakistan’s tribal areas. No offense to the new revolutionaries such as Imran Khan, Jahangir Tareen and Sheikh Rasheed, but you cannot fool all the people all the time.

On a serious note, however, another reason why Imran Khan is desperate now to destabilize the central government is that despite forming the provincial government and ruling Khyber-Pakhtunkhwa (KP) for five years, he has no tangible achievements to show. Criticizing the government from opposition benches and making electoral promises is always easy, but showing visible improvement in the affairs of the province which one administers is a hard sell.

The electoral promises of cracking down on corruption and doing away with ‘thana, patwari’ system might earn him a few brownie points in front of his immature audience, but to treat the malady of corruption, we must first accurately identify the root causes of corruption. Corruption and economy are inter-linked. The governments of prosperous countries can afford to pay adequate salaries to their public servants; and if public servants are paid well, then they don’t have the incentive to be corrupt.

There are two types of corruption: need-based corruption and greed-based corruption. Need-based corruption is the kind of corruption in which a poor police constable, who has a large family to support, earns a meager salary; he then augments his salary by taking bribes to make ends meet. I am not justifying his crime, but only describing the factual position.

After establishing the fact that corruption and economy are inter-linked, we need to ask Imran Khan what is his economic vision to improve Pakistan’s economy, and on what basis does he claim to improve the economy on a nation-wide scale when he failed to make any visible improvement in Khyber-Pakhtunkhwa during the PTI’s five-year rule in the province? All I am trying to say is the magic wand of savior-type messiahs cannot solve our problems overnight; reforming Pakistan would be a long-term process which would need, more than anything, adherence to democratic principles and institution-building.

Finally, Pakistan Muslim League-Nawaz (PML-N) and Pakistan People’s Party (PPP) are the grownup political parties in Pakistan. They learned their lesson from the politics of confrontation during the 1990s that the security establishment employs the Machiavellian divide-and-conquer tactic of hobnobbing with weaker political parties against stronger political forces in order to disrupt the democratic process and maintain the establishment’s stranglehold on its traditional domain, the security and foreign policy of Pakistan. The new entrant in Pakistan’s political landscape, Imran Khan’s PTI, will also learn this lesson after paying the price of colluding with the establishment, but by then, it might be too late.

Was Russian spy poisoned to avert Brexit?

Sergei Skripal and daughter Yulia.

In July 2003, Dr. David Kelly, a British weapons inspector who disclosed to the media that Tony Blair’s government’s dossier on Iraq’s weapons of mass destruction was “sexed up,” was found dead in a public park a mile away from his home.

The inquiry into his death concluded Kelly had committed suicide by slitting his left wrist but the mystery surrounding his death has remained unresolved to date, though the obvious beneficiary of his propitious “suicide” was the British intelligence itself.

More recently, Sergei Skripal, a Russian double agent working for the British foreign intelligence service, and his daughter Yulia were found unconscious on a public bench outside a shopping center in Salisbury on March 4. Eight days later, another Russian exile Nikolai Glushkov was found dead in his London home and the cause of his death has not been ascertained yet.

In the case of Skripal, Theresa May promptly accused Kremlin of attempted assassination. There are a couple of caveats, however. Firstly, though Skripal was a double agent working for MI6, he was released in a spy swap deal in 2010. Had he been a person of importance, Kremlin would not have released him and let him settle in the UK in the first place.

Secondly, British government has concluded that Skripal and his daughter were poisoned with a Moscow-made, military-grade nerve agent, novichok. A question naturally arises why would Kremlin leave a smoking gun evidence behind that would lead prosecutors straight to Moscow when their assassins could have used a gun or a knife to accomplish the task?

Leaving mainstream media’s conspiracy theories aside, these assassination attempts should be viewed in the wider backdrop of the Brexit debate. Both NATO and European Union were conceived during the Cold War to offset the influence of former Soviet Union in Europe. It is not a coincidence that the Soviet Union was dissolved in December 1991 and the Maastricht Treaty that consolidated the European Community and laid the foundations of the European Union was signed in February 1992.

The basic purpose of the EU has been nothing more than to lure the formerly communist states of the Eastern and Central Europe into the folds of the Western capitalist bloc by offering incentives and inducements, particularly in the form of agreements to abolish internal border checks between the EU member states, thus allowing the free movement of labor from the impoverished Eastern Europe to the prosperous countries of the Western Europe.

Reportedly, 79,000 US troops have currently been deployed in Europe out of 275,000 total US troops stationed all over the world, including 47,000 in Germany, 15,000 in Italy and 8,000 in the UK. By comparison, the number of US troops stationed in Afghanistan is only 15,000 which is regarded as an occupied country. Thus, Europe is nothing more than a client of corporate America.

No wonder then the Western political establishments, and particularly the deep states of the US and EU, are as freaked out about the outcome of Brexit as they were during the Ukrainian Crisis in November 2013 when Viktor Yanukovych suspended the preparations for the implementation of an association agreement with the European Union and tried to take Ukraine back into the folds of the Russian sphere of influence by accepting billions of dollars of loan package offered by Vladimir Putin.

In this regard, the founding of the EU has been similar to the case of Japan and South Korea in the Far East where 45,000 and 28,500 US troops have currently been deployed, respectively. After the Second World War, when Japan was about to fall in the hands of geographically-adjacent Soviet Union, the Truman administration authorized the use of nuclear weapons on Hiroshima and Nagasaki to subjugate Japan and also to send a signal to the leaders of the Soviet Union, which had not developed their nuclear program at the time, to desist from encroaching upon Japan in the east and West Germany in Europe.

Then, during the Cold War, American entrepreneurs invested heavily in the economies of Japan and South Korea and made them model industrialized nations to forestall the expansion of communism in the Far East. Similarly, after the Second World War, Washington embarked on the Marshall Plan to rebuild Western Europe with an economic assistance of $13 billion, equivalent to hundreds of billions of dollars in the current dollar value. Since then, Washington has maintained its military and economic dominance over Western Europe.

There is an essential stipulation in the European Union’s charter of union, according to which the developing economies of Europe that joined the EU allowed free movement of goods (free trade) only on the reciprocal condition that the developed countries would allow free movement of labor. What’s obvious in this stipulation is the fact that the free movement of goods, services and capital only benefits the countries that have a strong manufacturing base, and the free movement of people only favors the developing economies where labor is cheap.

Now, when the international financial institutions, like the IMF and WTO, promote free trade by exhorting the developing countries all over the world to reduce tariffs and subsidies without the reciprocal free movement of labor, whose interests do such institutions try to protect? Obviously, they try to protect the interests of their biggest donors by shares, the developed economies.

Regardless, while joining the EU, Britain compromised on the rights of its working class in order to protect the interests of its bankers and industrialists, because free trade with the rest of the EU countries spurred British exports. The British working classes overwhelmingly voted in the favor of Brexit because after Britain’s entry into the EU and when the agreements on abolishing internal border checks between the EU member states became effective, the cheaper labor force from the Eastern and Central Europe flooded the markets of Western Europe, and consequently the wages of native British workers dropped and it also became difficult for them to find jobs, because foreigners were willing to do the same job for lesser pays, hence raising the level of unemployment among the British workers and consequent discontentment with the EU.

The subsequent lifting of restrictions on the Romanians and Bulgarians to work in the European Union in January 2014 further exacerbated the problem, and consequently the majority of the British electorate voted in a June 2016 referendum to opt out of the EU. The biggest incentive for the British working class to vote for Brexit is that the East European workers will have to leave Britain after its exit from the EU, and the jobs will once again become available with better wages to the native British workforce.

The developed economies of the Western Europe would never have acceded to the condition of free movement of labor that goes against their economic interests; but the political establishment of the US, which is the hub of corporate power and wields enormous influence in the Western capitalist bloc, persuaded the unwilling states of the Western Europe to yield to the condition against their national interests in order to wean away the formerly communist states of the Eastern and Central Europe from the Russian influence.

Thus, all the grandstanding and moral posturing of unity and equality aside, the hopelessly neoliberal institution, the EU, in effect, is nothing more than the civilian counterpart of the Western military alliance against the erstwhile Soviet Union, the NATO, that employs a much more subtle and insidious tactic of economic warfare to win over political allies and to isolate the adversaries that dare to sidestep from the global trade and economic policy as laid down by the Western capitalist bloc.

It would be pertinent to mention that though Theresa May’s Conservatives-led government is in favor of Brexit, the neoliberal British deep state and European establishments led by France and Germany are fiercely opposed to Britain’s exit from the EU. They could have hired any rogue agent for the attempted assassinations on the Russian exiles that draws suspicions toward Kremlin.

Since the referendum, the British deep state and European establishments have created numerous hurdles in the way of Brexit. The First Minister of Scotland Nicola Sturgeon is demanding more autonomy and control over Scotland’s vast oil and gas reserves and a debate is raging on over a “soft border” between Northern Ireland and the Republic of Ireland which will remain in EU post-Brexit. Instead of a smooth transition to an independent state, Britain is more likely to disintegrate in its effort to leave the EU.

Finally, a New Cold War has begun. 25 out of 28 EU member states have recently signed an enhanced security cooperation agreement known as the Permanent Structured Cooperation (PESCO) whose aim is to structurally integrate the armed forces of EU members. Britain along with Denmark and Malta are being left out. The main objective of the recent assassination attempts on the Russian exiles is to intimidate the Conservatives-led government that Britain will be left to fend for itself post-Brexit.

Metrosexuality and Family Values

Bilawal Bhutto's selfie with Paris Hilton.

In the light of my limited experience with the Western culture, I have come to realize that a fully functional family is hard to find in the modern Western societies. Coming across a functioning family unit is more of an exception than a norm in the Western culture.

Most Western women with whom I have interacted are generally divorced, single mothers who are raising their children all by themselves; while the men folks either don’t get married at all, or even if they do get married under some momentary impulse or infatuation, they tend to leave their wives and kids behind them and either run away with their newfound girlfriends or they are otherwise non-committal in their relationships.

Although this behavioral infidelity can be found in both genders but it is much more prevalent in metrosexual men of modern societies. Since women are physiologically built to raise children and since they occupy a comparatively insecure position in male-dominated cultures, therefore they generally take their relationships seriously.

Unlike the traditional Eastern societies which are family-centric, the Western societies are mostly individual-centric. Reductive individualism and runaway hedonism might sound theoretically alluring but this unnatural state of affairs cannot last for long.

Birth rates all over the Western world are already dwindling, and in some countries, population growth rate is in negative. There was a time that population growth rate in Europe was so prolific that the Europeans had to colonize Americas and Australia to settle their surplus population. But now, the only thing sustaining their population growth rate is not their natural birth rates but the immigration of people from the developing world to the Western countries.

The institution of a fully functional family is the cornerstone of a healthy society and if the social environment is not conducive to the development of such a pivotal institution, then there is something fundamentally wrong with our social axioms.

Marriage is basically a civil contract meant for the purpose of raising children and family; and if one of the partners leaves the other midstream, it creates an unmanageable burden on the other partner (generally women) to raise children single-handedly. Sweeping such serious issues under the carpet that affect every individual and family on a personal level by taking an evasive approach of ‘see no evil, hear no evil’ will only exacerbate the problem.

Individualists generally posit that an individual holds a central position in society; the way I see it, however, being human is inextricably interlinked to the institution of family. The only things that separates human beings from the rest of species is their innate potential to acquire knowledge, but knowledge alone is not sufficient for our collective survival due to excessive and manifest intra-special violence in the form of conflicts and wars. Unless we have social cohesion -- which comes from love, compassion and empathy -- we are likely to self-destruct as specie.

The aforementioned empathy and altruism, however, are imparted by the institution of family, within which spouses love each other and their children, and in turn, children love their parents and siblings. This familial love then transcends the immediate environs of family and encompasses the entire humanity.

Thus, without the institution of family, there will be no humanity, or individual, in the long run. In order to reap the fruit of love, one first needs to sow the seeds of love. One cannot expect to raise loving and caring human beings with authority and teaching alone, only the institution of family has this unique gift of teaching love by practicing love.

Although family life in the Eastern societies isn’t as perfect as some of us would like to believe, but they are traditional societies based on agriculture-era value systems. Industrialization and consequent urbanization is the order of the day. These rural societies will eventually evolve into their urban counterparts.

My primary concern, however, is that the modern paradigm that we have conjured up is far from perfect in which divorce rates are very high and generally mothers are left alone to fend for themselves and raise their children single-handedly; consequently, giving rise to a dysfunctional familial and social arrangement.

Paradoxically, some social scientists draw our attention to the supposed ‘unnaturalness’ of the institution of family and the practice of polygamy and polyamory etc. in primitive tribal societies, but if we take a cursory look at the history of mankind, there have been two distinct phases of cultural development: the pre-Renaissance social evolution and the post-Renaissance social evolution.

Most of our cultural, scientific and technological accomplishments are attributed to the latter phase that has only lasted for a few centuries, and the institution of family has played a pivotal role in the social advancement of that era. Empirically speaking, we must base our scientific assumptions on proven and verifiable evidence and not some cock and bull stories peddled by self-styled anthropologists.

Regarding the erosion of the institution of family, I am of the opinion that it has mainly been the fault of the mass entertainment media that has caused an unnatural obsession with glamor and consequent sexualization of modern societies.

Regardless, modern liberals generally are educated and pacifist people. They abhor violence in all its forms and manifestations; so much so that they are appalled by the mere thought of murder, even if it is justifiable and legally sanctioned execution such as capital punishment. Some of the more ‘tender-hearted’ sorts go even a step further and give up eating meat by becoming vegetarians, whether as a matter of moral principle or for reducing weight is anybody’s guess.

I find it curiously intriguing, however, when some ‘bleeding heart’ liberals blatantly violate their own sacrosanct tenets by endorsing the practice of feticide in the form of abortion. What moral high-ground do they have despite their revulsion at capital punishment and animal slaughter when they endorse the gruesome practice of killing unborn babies?

Finally, it would be unfair to lay the blame squarely on the Western culture. The reason why people shy away from getting married and raising children has partly been the doing of modern economics. Industrialization and capitalism have created an unnecessary burden on the lives of individuals and families in modern times. The agriculture era used to be a labor-intensive epoch. Back then, a household with large number of children used to be a boon because the manpower was utilized for cultivation and farming.

After the industrial revolution and consequent urbanization, however, most of the physical labor is being performed by machines. Thus, the cost of raising and educating children in the post-industrial societies outweighs their utility and benefits, that’s why many middle-income families keep the number of children to a bare minimum to avoid financial burden.

Moreover, it has also been the preferred state policy of many Third World countries with large populations and meager resources to restrict the number of children to a minimum in order to reduce the burden on their developing economies, such as the one-child policy of China and the two-child policy of India and Pakistan.

The ‘China Model’ of Development

Mao and Nixon in 1972.

It’s an incontrovertible fact that the British colonizers built roads and railways in India, they established missionary schools, colleges and universities, they enforced the English common law, and the goal of exploiting the natural resources and four hundred million strong Indian manpower at the time of independence in 1947, and trading raw materials for pennies and exporting finished goods with huge profits to the Indian consumer market never crossed the ‘altruistic minds’ of the British imperialists.

Puns aside, there is an essential precondition in the European Union’s charter of union, according to which the developing economies of Europe that joined the EU allowed free movement of goods (free trade) only on the reciprocal condition that the developed countries would allow the free movement of labor. What’s obvious in this stipulation is the fact that the free movement of goods, services and capital only benefits the countries that have a strong manufacturing base, and the free movement of workers only favors the developing economies where labor is cheap.

Now, when international financial institutions, like the IMF and WTO, promote free trade by exhorting the developing countries all over the world to reduce tariffs and subsidies without the reciprocal free movement of labor, whose interests do such institutions try to protect? Obviously, they try to protect the interests of their biggest donors by shares, the developed countries.

Some market fundamentalists, who irrationally believe in the laissez-faire capitalism, try to justify this unfair practice by positing Schumpeter’s theory of ‘Creative Destruction’: that the free trade between unequal trading partners leads to the destruction of host country’s existing economic order and a subsequent reconfiguration gives rise to a better economic order. Whenever one comes up with gross absurdities such proportions, they should always make it contingent on the principle of reciprocity: that if free trade is beneficial for the nascent industrial base of developing economies, then the free movement of labor is equally beneficial for the workforce of developed countries.

The policymakers of developing countries must not allow themselves to be hoodwinked by such deceptive arguments; instead, they should devise prudent national policies which suit the interests of their underprivileged masses. But the trouble is that the governments of the Third World countries are dependent on foreign investment, that’s why they cannot adopt independent economic and trade policies.

The so-called ‘multinational’ corporations based in the Western financial districts make profits from the consumer markets all over the world and pay a share of those profits to their respective governments as bribes in the form of taxes. Every balance of trade deficit due to the lack of strong manufacturing base makes the developing nations poorer, and every balance of trade surplus further adds to the already immense fortune of the developed world.

A single, large multinational corporation based in the Wall Street and other financial districts of the Western world generates revenues to the tune of hundreds of billions of dollars, which is more than the total GDP of many developing economies. Examples of such behemoth business conglomerates include: Investment banks - JP Morgan, Goldman Sachs, Barclays, HSBC and BNP Paribas; Oil majors - Exxon Mobil, Chevron, British Petroleum, Royal Dutch Shell and Total; Manufacturers - Apple, Boeing and Lockheed Martin.

Pakistan’s total GDP is $300 billion and with a population of 210 million, its per capita income amounts to a paltry $1450; similarly, India’s per capita income is also only $1850. While the GDP of the US is $18 trillion and per capita income is well in excess of $50,000. Likewise, the per capita incomes of most countries in the Western Europe are also around $40,000.

That's a difference of more than twenty times between the incomes of the Third World countries and the beneficiaries of neocolonialism, North America and Western Europe. Only the defense budget of the Pentagon is $700 billion, which is more than twice the size of Pakistan's total economy. Without this neocolonial system of exploitation, the whole edifice of supposedly ‘meritocratic’ capitalism will fall flat on its face and the myth of individual incentive will get busted beyond repair, because it only means incentive for the pike and not for the minnows.

Regarding the contribution of British colonizers to India, the countries that don’t have a history of colonization, like China and Russia for instance, have better roads, railways and industries built by natives themselves than the ones that have been through centuries of foreign occupation and colonization, such as the subcontinent. The worst thing the British colonizers did to the subcontinent was that they put in place an exploitative governance and administrative system that catered to the needs of the colonizers without being accountable to the colonized masses over whom it was imposed.

It’s regrettable that despite having the trappings of freedom and democracy, India and Pakistan are still continuing with the same exploitative, traditional power structure that was bequeathed to the subcontinent by the British colonizers. The society is stratified along the class lines, most of South Asia’s ruling elites still have the attitude of foreign colonizers and the top-down bureaucratic system, ‘Afsar Shahi Nizam,’ is one of the most corrupt and inefficient in the world.

Finally, China is an interesting case study in regard to its history. First, although it did fight a couple of Opium Wars with the British in the middle of the nineteenth century, but the influence of Western imperialism generally remained confined to its coastal cities and it did not make inroads into inland areas. Second, China is ethno-linguistically and culturally homogeneous: more than 90% Chinese belong to the Han ethnic group and they speak various dialects of Mandarin, thus reducing the chances of discord and dissension in the Chinese society.

And third, behind the ‘Iron Curtain’ of international isolation beginning from the Maoist revolution in 1949 to China’s accession to the World Trade Organization (WTO) in 2001, China successfully built its manufacturing base by imparting vocational and technical education to its disciplined workforce and by building an industrial and transport infrastructure.

It didn’t allow any imports until 2001, but after joining the WTO, it opened up its import-export policy on a reciprocal basis; and since labor is much cheaper in China than in the Western countries, therefore it now has a comparative advantage over the Western capitalist bloc which China has exploited in its national interest. These three factors, along with the visionary leadership of Chairman Mao, Zhou Enlai and China’s vanguard socialist party collectively, have placed China on the path to progress and prosperity in the twenty-first century.

Gender Identity as a Social Construct

The distinction between male and female genders is based less on their physiological traits and more on their respective mindsets. These mindsets, in turn, are a product of social expectations of behavior in a cultural milieu. It is expected from male members of a society to behave in a supposedly manly fashion and it is similarly expected from female members to act in a purportedly feminine manner.

But this emphasis on binary distinction of genders in a rural-agrarian setting served a purpose: the division of functions between male and female members, where women were expected to do housekeeping and nurturing children, while it was expected from men to produce food for the family. Although this distinction is still maintained, to a lesser or greater extent, in urban and industrialized societies, but a distinction based on division of functions is a hypothetical imperative: as means to achieve certain ends and not an end in itself.

Moreover, it would be normative to contend that in primitive tribal societies, women had the same social status as men. The nomado-pastoral and agricultural eras were the age of hunting-gathering, farming and strenuous physical labor, and it is a known fact that women are physically a weaker sex, that’s why we have separate sports and athletics events for men and women.

Women attained the status of equality after the onset of industrial revolution and a shift to mechanized labor, when the focus shifted from physical labor to intelligence and information; and when it comes to cognitive faculties, women are just as intelligent as men, if not more so.

Notwithstanding, instead of taking a binary approach to classification of genders, modern feminists now favor to look at the issue from the prism of a whole spectrum of gender identities. The way I see it, it should not be about being manly; rather, it should be about being human, which is the common denominator for the whole spectrum of gender identities.

When we stress upon manliness, it’s not manliness per se that we are glorifying, but the presence of feminine attributes in the socially-elevated male gender is something that we, as agents of patriarchal structure, frown upon. But such machismo is not a natural order of things, because more than the physical attributes, the rigid segregation of genders is a product of social constructions that manifest themselves in artificial cognitive and behavioral engineering of male and female mindsets.

In our formative years, such watertight gender identities and their socially-accepted attributes are inculcated in our minds by assigning gender roles, but this whole hetero-normative approach to the issue of gender identity is losing its validity in a post-industrial urban milieu, where gender roles are not as strictly defined as they used to be in the medieval agricultural societies.

More to the point, what are the virtues that are deemed valuable in women separately from the ones that are deemed desirable in men? If meekness, diffidence and complacency are disapproved in men, then why do we have double standards for separate genders? Self-confidence, assertiveness and boldness should be equally encouraged in both genders without discrimination.

However, the dilemma that we face is that the mindsets of individuals and gender roles are determined by culture, but if the society itself is patriarchal and male-dominated, then it tends to marginalize and reduce women to a lower social status. Therefore, a social reform is needed which can redefine "virtue" and the qualities that are deemed valuable in human beings should be uniform and consistent for both genders.

Regardless, if we study the behavioral patterns in the animal kingdom, a tigress is as good a hunter as a tiger; in fact, the females of most species are generally more violent than their male counterparts; because they fight not only for food, but also to protect their offspring. But how often do we find a violent woman in human history and society?

Excluding a handful of femme fatales like Cleopatra, bold women are a rare exception in human history. Thus, even though by nature, women are just as assertive and violent as men, but the patriarchy-inspired nurture and male-dominated culture have tamed women to an extent that they have unlearnt even their innate nature.

Two conclusions can be drawn from this fact: first, that it’s always nurture and culture which play a more significant role in determining human behavior compared to some far-fetched concept of essential human nature; and second, that essentially human nature is quite similar for both genders, it’s only the behavioral process of social construction of gender identity that defines and limits the roles which are deemed proper for one gender or the other.

Additionally, regarding physiological distinction between male and female genders, evolutionary biologists are of the opinion that such differences only have a minor importance. Even if we take primary reproductive organs, for instance, clitoris is regarded as a rudimentary penis in females and nipples in males are regarded as rudimentary breasts, a fact which proves beyond doubt that specialization of male and female reproductive organs is merely a mechanism to keep genetic material unimpaired by preference for meiosis division over repetitive and harmful mitosis reproductive division.

Moreover, it is generally assumed about males that due to the presence of testosterone, they are usually more aggressive and competitive than females. If we assess this contention in the light of global versus local character traits theory, however, testosterone only promotes a specific kind of competition: that is, competition for mating. When it comes to competing for food, however, males and females of all species exhibit similar levels of aggression and competition.

Therefore, it would be reductive to assume that the distinction between male and female attitudes and behaviors is more physiological and hormonal than it is due to the difference of upbringing and separate sets of social expectations of behavior that are associated with the members of male and female sexes.

Finally, there is no denying the fact that testosterone is primarily responsible for secondary sexual characteristics in the males of all species. Through the process of natural selection, only those males that have succeeded in mating are able to carry forward their genes, which proves that males with higher testosterone levels do have a comparative advantage in competition for mating, but its effect on attitudes and behaviors of animal species, and particularly in human beings with their complex social institutions and cultures, is tentative and hypothetical, at best.