The odour from a shoe whose owner stepped in a cesspit cannot be removed by incessant swiping on the grass or mat. As the owner steps back into the bus the smell will make the trip an unbearable eternity for everyone. The shoe should be washed with soap and left to dry for days or thrown away.
The Russian-Ukraine war teeters the world towards a precipice and this provokes questions. Some secondary and consequential to primary ones. In the realm of the secondary, is Russia’s war on Ukraine raising interest rates or is it about supply shortages and value chain disruptions? Among the primary — is the war about the territorial integrity of the two countries and ethnicity? Is it a fight about superpower status between the US and erstwhile mighty Russia? Is it about rebalancing the multilateral system? Or, worse, is it about the appetite for testing the power of nuclear weapons on a grand scale? Or, better, is it about the progression towards the ultimate collapse of the capitalist economic system which has remained the prime mover since the two world wars and the Cold War?
On the face of it the war seems to represent a rise to the top in a competition of interest rates hike between national reserve banks. Across Europe and the US they have spiked an upward movement in the rates. Not to be outdone, the governor of the South African Reserve Bank (SARB) announced an increase in the repo rate by 50 basis points, putting the rate at its highest in almost 25 months. The repo rate is now 4.75%.
Ironically, unlike in the two world wars, whose geographic expanse was huge, the current one is not only unique in the insignificance of its geography, but in the similarity of its onomastics. It is a war between Volodymyr and Vladimir. A war of brothers, just like the Palestine-Israeli war. Two unique contemporary proxy wars marked by the intensity of geographic space. The Russian-Ukraine war, concentrated in the tiniest of geographic space and between neighbours, will probably go down in history as the one with the biggest impact on the economies of the world. The significance of this war in the aftermath of declining Covid-19 has been to disrupt energy value chains in Europe and the US, nip manufacturing in Europe and stop the supply of wheat to the world from Ukraine. Its impact has been as immediate and global as the pandemic, but with a spike in inflation. It is a war sparked by Nato’s ambitions to expand its artillery to the border between Ukraine and Russia, with the latter having none of it. Your cattle kraal’s wall has to be miles away from where your animals are kept or marauding lions have easy prey. These concentrated geographic radii of war have consumed the energies of Russia on the one side and Europe and its faraway ally the US on the other, highlighting how proxy and foolish this war is. Yet its foolishness does not stop it.
There has not been a notable war in the US since the turn of the 20th century, except for Japan attacking the US from the Pacific front in World War 2. In this context, will this war unleash a different trend in warfare, where we witness war on US territory? Japan’s misplaced World War 2 tantrum, in which a balloon bomb was detonated over Oregon on May 5 1945, resulted in the deaths of five children and an adult. Every death is one too many and all count. The rest of Japan’s attack on the US from the Pacific was toothless. However, with all the evidence that this was the case, then US president Harry Truman unleashed atomic bombs on Nagasaki and Hiroshima to try to stop “already exhausted” Japan from continuing with the war. More than 200,000 people were killed by the bombs, far more than those who died in the Oregon skirmish. Worse, the populations of the cities developed lasting medical conditions from radiation exposure, the first and, to date, only in the history of warfare. Yet the spectre of such is more pronounced and deadly. On June 9 1950 Niels Bohr, one of the prominent scientists responsible for the concept of fission in nuclear science with Albert Einstein, petitioned the secretary-general of the newly established UN to deplore the use of atomic bombs. “I address myself to the organisation, founded for the purpose to further cooperation between nations on all problems of common concern, with some considerations regarding the adjustment of international relations required by modern development of science and technology. At the same time as this development holds out such great promises for the improvement of human welfare it has, in placing formidable means of destruction in the hands of man, presented our whole civilisation with a most serious challenge,” he wrote. Bohr and Einstein fled Germany mindful of what would happen if Adolf Hitler had access to nuclear fission knowledge. They went to the US, a country of ironies, as we will learn later.
Bohr said this of his concerns regarding the abuse and deployment of such for war: “My association with the American-British atomic energy project during the war gave me the opportunity of submitting to the governments concerned views regarding the hopes and the dangers which the accomplishment of the project might imply as to the mutual relations between nations.” He agued, correctly, that: “For the modern rapid development of science and in particular for the adventurous exploration of the properties and structure of the atom, international cooperation of an unprecedented extension and intensity has been of decisive importance.” Yet the opposite is true. The acquisition of nuclear weapons threatens world peace, as it did in the dying years of World War 2 when Truman said: “My choice early in life was either to be a piano player in a whore house or a politician. And to tell the truth, there’s hardly any difference.” Politics and economics show a whore house exchange in which morality and lack of empathy to humanity is monetised for the highest bidder. In the past two years of Covid-19 people and companies with concentrated wealthy benefited financially.
The escalation of the Volodymyr-Vladimir proxy war, with its disproportionate use of lethal force, leave Hiroshima and Nagasaki looking like a children’s picnic.
Bohr’s fears are captured in his assessment of the tensions that mounted before the war, ones that accentuated the barriers to free intellectual intercourse and cooperation among nations and scientists. However, oozing with hope, he notes that “international scientific cooperation continued as a decisive factor in the development which, shortly before the outbreak of the war, raised the prospect of releasing atomic energy on a vast scale”. With the advent of the historic signing of the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs) and subsequent Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) such hope could today justifiably ooze. Further, with the Paris Agreement on climate change, Bohr’s dream for science-based cooperation could not be better, yet vaccine nationalism makes it clear the world is headed for crass materialism
The escalation of the Volodymyr-Vladimir proxy war, with its disproportionate use of lethal force, leave Hiroshima and Nagasaki looking like a children’s picnic. Will the US be enjoined in the Hiroshima-Nagasaki relic, where there are no victors nor vanquished? If that happens, what started as a reaction to the consequences of the war will be reduced to a comical game of clowns raising interest rates in an insignificant side show. They will be left with no instruments with enough digits to which to peg their song.
We are in a bad space. The crisis of capital has reached its zenith, with the Volodymyr and Vladimir proxy underlining this. The odour is unbearable.
Dr Pali Lehohla is a research associate at Oxford, professor of practice at the University of Johannesburg and a former statistician-general of SA. Meet him @Palilj01 and at www.pie.org.za
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