One World, Many Peaces

Ban on English Language in Malaysia Causes More Problems than it Solves

After months of heavy lobbying by socially minded ultra-nationalists, the Malaysian state government has legislated a ban of the English language in sectors of higher education. This bold move against multilingualism in a country that was once a British colony has infuriated business leaders and educators while, proponents argue, giving more Malay students a chance at college.

The pressure for universities worldwide to ensure student fluency in English is at once  pragmatic and problematic.  Since 2003, math and science courses at the university level have been taught in English after Prime Minister Mahathir Mohamad deemed that doing so was essential to keeping the country's workforce competitive in the global economy. His successor has caved in to pressure to remove this law and revert to the Bahasa language by 2012, for practical social reasons as well as nationalistic ones.

On the one hand, those against the English ban argue that a multilingual workforce is vital to attracting multinational companies to the country, without which a dearth of jobs may lead to social unrest. On the other hand, those against the ban claim that it levels the playing field for aspiring students from rural areas who rarely receive any education in English, unlike their urban counterparts who often do from an early age. So the dilemma can be put thus: learn English and work, don’t learn English and go to college.

There is a deep disjunction between linguistic catering on the part of labor producers to multinational corporations, which are ironically trying to cater to local consumer markets in their own languages. The notion of "English as a world language" and national languages do not necessarily have to conflict with the notion of language rights as human rights. But banning languages for any reason creates more problems than it solves. English as a global lingua franca is a current event a long time in the making, however we must beware of it creating a monolingual rather than a multilingual future. 

Why the G8 is the Past, the G5 the Future and How Activists Need to Refocus

Members of the G5 (Mexico, Brazil, China, India and South Africa ) are making their differences with the G8 (Canada, France, Germany, Italy, Japan, Russia, the United Kingdom and the US) clearer at their summit in Italy than ever before. However, they are doing so only according to the agenda they were handed. In this light, protesters may be mistaking longstanding enemies for potential friends, a risk strategic activists should be less eager to take in seeking to make a greater impact.
 
A relatively minor force at such summits for five years now, the G5 is starting to steal the G8's thunder, if in some cases to environmentalists' dismay. With even bona fide G8 members such as France and Germany calling for a more inclusive and representative world economic summit, it may not be so long before the two Gs become one, and then some. How can activists shape this seeming inevitability coagulation, or at least prepare for it?
 
Reviving the formation of multilateral trade agreements to replace the gross asymmetries of bilateral trade between more and less developed countries (the crux of the stalled Doha talks) is probably where all this is heading. If so, protesters today may be pissing on the wrong tree, missing an opportunity to align themselves with major economic and political powers who already share many of their interests, and could possibly have their ears open to others.
 
Doing so would surely be no less effective than screaming on a freedom high in the G8's ears, deaf to all but their own narrow interests. The current G8 is not the past in the sense that it has or will soon disappear, but rather in that it's predominance will continue to wane as that of the G5 waxes. The recent, formal formation of the BRIC (Brazil, Russia, India, China) to counter the more and more amorphous Western bloc can be taken as a sign of events to come, and indicative of the new roles activists can and should take on.
 
Instead of protesting to no avail against the G8, activists of all denominations should be trying to get the G5 on their side. Because if they do, the G8 will sooner or later follow. It's time to stop being purely anti- and start being more pro-. Che Guevara shirts and confrontations with police may become a thing of the past too, if and when they are replaced with more effective business and law suits with a mind for the future rather than nostalgia for 1968.
 
The G8 and G5 are and will continue to be key current events creating the future, especially if their respective power positions are changing, let alone being reversed. Whether or not selective activism against or for them is (or, more precisely, becomes) effective depends entirely on how, and how well, activists refocus their efforts.

Chinese Riots Rooted in Conflation of Religion, Race and Class

Rather than Chinese government crackdown deaths, those in Urumqi today were mostly by rioters against their targets, with their respective and deep-seated identities as the ultimate causes.  The roots of the Chinese riots defy the easy categorizations upon which most media outlets depend in crafting 'breaking news' stories and weaving them into a series meant to attract your mouse clicks. Here is the gist and background of the situation as it is still unfolding.

 

Muslim Chinese (present in the northwest Xinjiang region since the times of Genghis Khan, c. 1200) have resented the central governments suppression of their religious practices, which in their recent communist manifestations were supposed to be alleviated by economic prosperity. Instead, the prosperity went mostly to ethnic Han Chinese of the region, creating a two-tiered society with Muslims at bottom and Han on top. A secessionist movement grew and violence erupted in the early 1990s, but all seemed to be quiet on the northwestern front until today.

 

While the roots of the conflict are thus clear, what remains unclear is the trigger for today's street violence in which about two-hundred were killed and many times more wounded from knives, home-made bombs and other weapons of minor destruction.  Confusing the roots of the conflict in the conflation of religion, race and class with its immediate causes (yet unknown), journalists have scrambled, speculated and spectacularized instead of getting their facts straight and relevant quotes, and leaving the commentary to the commentators. It was even suggested that the riots were meant to further tarnish China's reputation abroad. 

 

What Chiang Kai Chek did with nationalism first (1920s), and Mao Zedong did with communism second (1940s), was to use ideologically-defined traits to minimize or eliminate traits stemming from other traditions. These, of course, included religion, race and class, sowing the seeds of unrest. Expatriate Uyghur Groups like the World Uyghur Congress (WUC) in Munich and the US-based Uighur American Association played up the government response to the riots but said little about their compatriots use of violence, the instigation of which remains unclear to outsiders but not the root causes. This is when the value of the non-violence espoused by expatriate leader the Dalai Lama from nearby Tibet becomes obvious.

 

Most major news providers were desperate for a scoop, resulting in piecemeal coverage even compared to the Iranian protests. Reuters was most concerned with how the riots would affect Chinese markets, consumers and producers; AP and Huffington Post dug for civil liberties issues, and have yet to find one; CNN and Fox each sought pre-internet political intrigue in their own way, sticking close to government-fed lines (US and China) and pundit performances; the BBC characteristically did a little of all the above. They were all looking for the wrong thing in the right place. No Al-Qaeda here. What's news is what's not news: Twitter is shut down.

 

It may be that this uprising marks the rise of a time when not governments acting indirectly, but concerned and somehow connected people acting directly from one country can and do influence the events in and directions taken by another country without leaving their metaphoric armchairs.  That is, the expatriates and affiliates no longer need the instrument of government to carry out their plans abroad, although they may need to ensure that their plans are not prevented from being carried out from where they are or where they air aiming. 

 

So while Obama and Medvedev are busy making nice and getting rid of not enough nuclear weapons in the process, the Summer of 2009 is shaping up to be one of international protests perhaps comparable in scale to those of 1848, the year social uprisings were brutally crushed by newly empowered national governments around the globe.  Let's hope the current events of today work out better for everyone than those then, creating a future in which such upheavals have found more peaceful vehicles.

New Worldwide Ant Colony's Advantage Over Humanity? Non-Violence

This is not science fiction: an ant megacolony originally from Argentina has spread (with human help) around the globe, making it the most widespread species on earth after ours. One evolutionary advantage they have over us is that they will not harm one of their own, no matter where they're from. 
 
Saying the same about humans would be, well, science fiction. The facts are that while these ants (Linepithema humile) are hostile to other insects in their adopted ecosystems, when they meet their kind their very biological features trigger intra-species non-violence regardless of individuals' origin. That would be like the Taliban smelling Americans during this massive attack and proposing to smoke some opium with them instead of fighting.
 
"The enormous extent of this population," on all continents except Antarctica, "is paralleled only by human society,"  writes the entomologist who discovered the connection. It has been known for decades that intra-species non-violence vastly out-proportions lethal behavior in all species, but these ants are the first to be so on a global scale. For all the problems that invasive species cause, this one in its lessons may have some much-needed solutions to offer. Now we turn to science fiction.

"Humans created this great non-aggressive ant population," the researchers write in Insect Sociaux, the journal for the study of social insects. Imagine if us humans would only create and perpetuate that trait in ourselves, culturally if not biologically. This new worldwide ant megacolony's advantage in non-violence is a current event for their species,  and may learning from it help create a better future for 'us', in the sense that there will cease to be a corresponding 'them'.

Al Franken and Ahmadinejad Have Court-Run Democracy in Common

The dramatic increase in court-won elections worldwide in recent years is proving to be a pivotal issue in deciding who is and stays in power, and in this sense Al Franken and Mahmoud Ahmadinejad have a lot in common. This transformation of democratic victories from free elections to the application of rules and regulations by the courts hit a high profile point with Bush and Florida in 2000 but has since become a political plateau that risks shaking the very foundation of liberal principles, especially those conservatives depend on most.

Comparing the statements made by the Minnesota judges in the Franken case and that made by Iranian Guardian Council makes all too clear the unabashed power of court intervention in deciding victors of 'democratic' elections. "Based on Iran's constitution, the Guardian Council is the top legislative body to review complaints over the election," says Abbasali Kadkhodai, the Council's official spokesman. "The council members have unanimously approved the election result." Unanimity is not democracy.

The judges in the Franken case also approved their decision unanimously, saying in their  official statement that "because strict compliance with the statutory requirements for absentee voting is, and always has been required, there is no basis on which voters could have reasonably believed that anything less than strict compliance would suffice." Although it is unlikely that protests will erupt in the Midwest as they did in the Middle East, they would both have the selfsame cause.

What the two cases have in common aside from the fact that they were decided by judges on technicalities pales in comparison to what makes them different: one is based on the US Constitution, the other on Islamic law.  Or maybe, when it comes to deciding elections, they are not so different after all, a real possibility which all democracies like them in the world need to confront head on or risk ceasing to be the vehicles of the people's will they were designed to be. Judges implement laws, not people's wills, and therein lies the rub.

When democracy rests almost entirely on a set of rules and regulations devised by those in power and implemented by judges placed by them, democracy stops meaning free elections or rule by the people and begins to mean automated bureaucracies devoid of relations to people's needs and aspirations. The Roman Republic was for the vast majority of its existence a totalitarian regime in disguise, which court-run democracies as current events creating the future portend.