Bush Balkanizes the world
By Jerry Mazza
Online Journal Contributing Writer
Feb 8, 2006, 16:44
Paradoxically, Bush & Company’s relentless push for world hegemony seems to be Balkanizing the world, that is, splintering countries, regions, even zip codes, into smaller units, which are more hostile to each other though ethnically more homogenous. Additionally, this push is having the same effect in the United States, breaking it into red and blue states, a division beyond traditional North-South divisions. What’s more voting districts are being split into religious, ethnic, racial, and economic sectors as well, creating the specter of Balkanization.
This leads me to wonder if there isn’t some law of political physics at work. That the more a dominating nation presses for hegemony, the more the pressure produces a breaking point, scattering nations (states) into smaller units, in essence, undoing a nation as it does an empire, as painful the deconstruction as the creation of either.
If this seems like I’m thinking too hard, this notion occurred to me after watching Far From War: Chechnya, the Endless War. This moving documentary, directed by Gustavo Cortes, poignantly chronicles that region’s mayhem. The film’s descriptive copy reads . . .
Dubbed “the silent war of the 21st century,” the conflict between Russia and rebels in the breakaway republic of Chechnya is put into perspective by Moscow Chechens in Gustavo Cortés’s documentary. More than 200,000 Chechens fled to Moscow after the recent war broke out. This migration was but one in a long series of horrific events visited on the Chechens for centuries. Despite discrimination from Russians and apathy from the international community, Moscow Chechens are banding together and here speak out regarding their plight.
http://onlinejournal.com/artman/publish/article_497.shtml