Wednesday, June 13, 2012

The Ironies of History

As an RT news anchor commented yesterday, who would have thought, twenty years ago, that Russia and China, who for decades during the Cold War traded insults, that the two largest and most populated countries would form a united front against the hitherto most powerful nation the world has ever known.

If you have been following the news on RT or France 24 or Al-Jazeera, you probably know about Putin’s recent trip to China. The existence of two new ‘blocs’ is also apparent in the Syrian crisis:  Russia has offered to host an international conference to which Syria’s neighbors, as well as Iran, would be invited. Washington, and less stridently, the European Union, are opposed to Iran’s presence at discussions on Syria, with France scheduled to host a meeting of the Western-backed Friends of Syria group on July 6th.

In another touch of irony, some readers may remember the Jewish-Black alliance in the United States that began early in the 20th century and lasted until the 1970’s, when the interests of the two groups began to diverge.  Currently Israel is expelling 4,000 Black Africans who were formerly given refuge.

And finally, on a lighter note, the English language channel France 24 confessed that the latest foreign tourists to find the French less than friendly are...... the Chinese. Apparently, while history moves inexorably forward according to the arrow of time, countries, whose ethos is largely dictated by culture, tend to remain the same.

This is true of Russia, China and the United States as well, the first two imbued with the Socialist tradition of solidarity, while the third continues a tradition of force.


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