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A dilemma is a situation that calls for making a choice between two linked and challenging premises. A tetralemma, however, is a situation that calls for making an appropriate judgement among four interlinked, problematic narratives. In this case, the four narratives we will explore are interrelated much like the food chain in an ecosystem, where predator-prey relationships dominate the landscape. Predator-prey relationships are used to describe the animal world, typically not humans or countries. But our world has become so precarious and volatile that today, powerless people feel like they are prey walking in a dark jungle, with narcissistic national political predators stalking them…what might happen next…?
Our tetralemma crossroads – the four interlinked “prey-predator” food chains of the international ecosystem
The Apex Predator: The West
The West is a broad term representing the conquering groups of militaries, and political and financial predators which colonized (preyed upon) defenseless lands from the 16h century onwards. They passed on such practices to modern states which continued predatory imperialistic ambitions with more modern weapons and financial systems. It started with the Spanish, Portuguese, and Dutch, and continued with the French, British, Russian, and American imperialist forces up to the present time, with predatory nations subjugating weaker nations for their cheap and readily available resources and labor and for their vulnerable markets.
The West transitioned from blatant colonial entities to a more disguised system of exploitation through supporting authoritarian client regimes, controlling the banking systems, selling arms, maintaining competitive military supremacy, and threatening an already fragile global peace. The West became the most powerful predator; no prey can withstand its military and economic might.
A Secondary Predator: Israel – Prey and Predator
Jewish populations in Christian Europe were marginalized and discriminated against for almost a millennium. Then the term ‘semitic’ was coined to represent Hebrew and other Near Eastern languages in the European universities, starting from the Göttingen School of History in 1770s. Later the term was applied on a racial level, since through this linguistic classification it was claimed that the European Jews had no Indo-European roots (and did not belong to the ‘Aryan’ language family and race). As this invented idea was popularized, discrimination against the Jews flared up, evolving from religious prejudice to linguistic separation and eventually into a heavy-handed racial discrimination against the Jews. (Of course, such linguistic hypothesis and its transformation into a racial theory has no reasonable or scientific basis whatsoever). The mid- 20th century holocaust was the last systematic assault that the white supremacists, led by the Nazis in Europe, inflicted on millions of Jews. The European Jews had been treated as prey and were forced to move out of Europe.
The anthropological error by the European academics and racists was to conflate religion, language and race (in this case conflating Judaism, Hebrew, and Semitic ‘race’.) (Of course, today we know there is no such thing as a Jewish ‘race’). The intertwining, or synonymizing, of these three concepts being one and the same thing led to lumping diverse peoples of Europe into one single group, calling them Semitic, in order to crush them all. This is where the label ‘anti-Semitic’ arose
After the catastrophe of WWII, in desperation, a group of European Jews (Zionists, with whom not all Jews agreed), with the prior aid of the British Balfour Declaration (1916) and later by Zionist organizations created the state of Israel in 1948. With the post-war support of other states, this was initially designed to protect the European Jewish prey from their European predators.
Over time, however, this resulted in a group of Israeli Western Jews (whose ancestors were themselves once prey) becoming territorial predators themselves against their Palestinian neighbors. Their predatorial actions, with the support of the apex predators, against the weaker local groups demonstrated their sublimized historical amnesia.
Today, the clever propaganda of the Israelis and mass media lumps Jewish religion, Zionist ideology, Israeli identity, and Israeli politics together as one and the same thing. They are capitalizing upon the same flawed conflation of identity that led to their previous suffering as prey.
We can see this in the way the biased media and propagandistic politicians relentlessly apply the label of “anti-Semitic” to any criticism of Israel, even though it’s not aimed at Jewish religion or Jewish people inside or outside Israel. The rhetoric of “anti-Semitism” has become a convenient and clever WWII guilt card to play to suppress any dissent against the power politics of Israel. In this way, Israel has become itself a predator.
Tertiary Predator: Iran – Prey and Predator
In the 19th century, during the geopolitical “Great Games,” the predators Britain and Russia were competing to take over the internal affairs of Iran, as well as neighboring Afghanistan, and Tibet. (India and major Chinese ports were already colonies of Britain.) This situation put Iran in an extremely weak position as it strained to defend its integrity. Over the succeeding decades, constant Russian, British and later American interventions made a stable secular democracy for Iran and its people an unreachable goal.
By the mid-20th century, the Pahlavi regime in Iran had been combining modernization with despotism until the Islamic Regime took over in 1979. The regime gave itself the mandate to govern Iranians in a totalitarian fashion. Universal human rights and intellectual, political and cultural movements became the casualties, the prey, of a domestic predator.
The regime’s chanted rhetoric of “Death to America” is an immature expression of having been prey at one time. The prey has now turned on itself, blinded by its own power intoxication, religious dogma, and regional ambitions, resulting in predatorial behavior against its own people and preying upon weaker groups just outside its borders.
:As Friedrich Nietzsche once uttered
“Whoever fights monsters should see to it that in the process he does not become a monster. And when you look long into an abyss, the abyss also looks into you.”
The UN: Cannot Stop the Prey-Predator Model
Predator-prey relationships are natural in the world of animals. One could say that the UN was established in order to help humans stop functioning at that level. The UN was founded in 1945 with the hope of creating a more lawful world for all nations so that more powerful nations would not eat weaker nations, as had been happening for centuries. The UN was supposed to make sure that powerful nations with sharper teeth could not threaten and kill feeble nations.
Unfortunately, in this respect the UN has largely been a failed enterprise. By structuring a Security Council so that the five most powerful nations in the world, Britain, France, Russia, USA and China, have permanent veto privileges, the UN has insulted the world and its people needing equal voices. This structure has been the fatal flaw in the project of protecting the prey of the world from the predators.
At this point, the UN’s laws and its condemnations of misconduct seem only to apply to weaker nations. The narcissistic predatory leaders of powerful nations flaunt International Laws and continue their agendas of wars and exploitation. The UN of today does not seem to represent the modern world; it seems to be stuck in the post-WWII model, and for this reason, it has been unsuccessful in taming the overwhelming brute force of predatory nations.
Instead of being a source of transcendent, objective leadership, the UN has unfortunately become a symbol of mockery. A radical restructuring of the UN is absolutely necessary, particularly the lopsided veto power held by five nations.
?People: Powerless, or Powerful
Humanity is the ultimate government. We must never forget that.
Today, average people are prey to the inexorable machinations of political, military, and financial faces and networks. Protests and criticisms have lost their status, and average people feel powerless and unimportant.
Let’s stop electing and tolerating predatorial characters. Let’s start a global digital platform for humanity. Let’s move towards a new world parliament to replace the UN. Let’s transit from this obsolete and decadent style of governing, and embrace a New Global Enlightenment.
Our choice in this tetralemma is to defend the peace-deserving people of the West, Israel and Iran, people who have become prey to predators and their wars and their ambitious expansion of their own governments and market systems. Let’s reject for ourselves the prey-predator relationship of the animal world. If we want our modern life to be grounded in mutual dignity and decency, we cannot be at the mercy of predators at every turn