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Revival of Cold War
Posted:11:03 PM (Manila Time) | Aug. 12, 2002
By Letters to the editor
THE WORLD is at risk of the revival of the Cold War under President Bush. The US "first-strike policy", as Vice President Guingona has argued, points to that direction. This time the Cold War is not between US and Russia. It is between the Islamic World and the US. Academicians call it the "clash of civilizations". I call it plain and simple US war mongering and hegemonism.
The likelihood of US attack on Iraq before the November US congressional elections proves it. The recent US policy classifying the Communist Party of the Philippines-New People's Army (CPP-NPA) and other freedom movements in the world as foreign terrorist organizations (FTO) is a prelude to the promotion of US-backed local civil wars in the Third World.
President Gloria Macapagal-Arroyo, whose eyes are hooked to 2004, is paving the way for such an internal war in the Philippines.
The world empathizes with US citizens for the Sept. 11 bombing of the World Trade Center. No doubt about it. But President Bush and his colleagues in Washington, D.C. have over-reacted by curtailing the basic freedoms of their own citizens and by arrogantly forcing and maliciously bribing the world to unduly expand the concept of terrorism to suit the vested interests of the all-powerful US military-industrial complex whose main aim is to export US military aggression outside the US territory to pump prime the graft-ridden and bleeding US economy.
Freedom movements that genuinely seek radical political, economic, and social reforms in the midst of corruption, inequity, feudalism, and structural decay in their respective countries, and which observe the rules of war under the Geneva Conventions, are not foreign terrorist organizations. They are freedom fighters.
US global capitalism may have its own definition of free-market democracy and social justice but it does not have the right to impose its ideology on the whole world, especially on peoples of the Third World and the Islamic World who, for decades, have been impoverished by US multinational companies and their proxies in the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund and who are bombarded daily by American consumerism, materialism, and moral decay.
The American people must wake up. They must balance their Sept. 11 grief with sanity and equity in foreign policy. And they must teach their political leaders to be more discerning in their approach to global politics, world social justice, and international multi-culturalism. Otherwise, the whole world would face the real danger of a new Millennium Cold War.
MANUEL J. LASERNA JR., professor of law, Far Eastern University Institute of Law, Manila
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