THE PRAIRIE EDITOR: The History Of Nations

The history of nations is entirely a recent story. After so many thousands
of years in the caves and plains and mountains of the earlier human
planetary experience, when our forbears increasingly organized themselves
into tribes and kingdoms, and unpremeditatedly formed the social and
political structures to which borders and languages and families adhered,
the account of nations, large and small, is very short.

Roving tribes became kingdoms, and only in the briefest interval can we
set down authentically national histories. Of course, a few millennia or just
thousand years might sound to each of us of like a very long time, and a
world population now exceeding seven billions might seem difficult to grasp,
but to understand the current evolution of the world’s nations, we need to keep
in mind how quickly modern human history occurs.

Perhaps this enables us to realize that after only about 10,000 years of
recorded history, in spite of our inventions and technologies, how truly
primitive human civilization is today. Some who read this assertion will be
scandalized and outraged by this description. “Have we not split the atom,
identified human genomes, flown through the air at great velocity, cured
problematic diseases, and constructed great structures?” such persons
 would no doubt ask.

Yes, we have done those things, but it is not our resume of physical
achievements which make us a true advanced civilization. Our greatest
true advance as a species was very recent, i.e., the creation of democratic
capitalism, but today even its very constituent parts are everywhere threatened
from within and from without. Barbarism still threatens most of the planet,
and a large part of humanity is under no less totalitarian and inhuman
rule than that of warlords, tyrant kings and cruel dictators of the past. Violence,
persecution of minorities, mistreatment of women and armed aggression are so
widespread today that only a persistent self-denial of those persons who consider
themselves “free”and”civilized”enables them to see the human species in a
“progressive’ light.

The United Nations, the world’s largest international organization, born in the
spirit of cooperation, peacekeeping and promoting human rights, has been
kidnapped by international thugs who are aided and abetted by the remaining
democratic governments and their self-aggrandizing bureaucracies.

After the brutal and chaotic 20th century, with its two “world” wars and violent
other struggles between the democracies and totalitarian forces, the new century,
recently begun, signals various shifts in international power, including assertions
of military and economic force by two huge nations, China and India, and by
transnational regions in the Middle East and Asia. It is difficult to see any clear
direction of this global trend away from humanity’s persistent primitive impulses
and patterns. To think otherwise is to think, as George Orwell so acutely and
presciently observed, that what we perceive and say is the state of the world is, in
fact, its uncivilized opposite.

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Copyright (c) 2013 by Barry Casselman     All rights reserved.