The Language of ‘Seamless Trade’

By David Simmons

Would the European Union work any better if it made a non-European language the official one for the bloc? Maybe Mandarin, or Arabic?

The Association of Southeast Asian Nations has done something similar, making a non-Asian language – English – official for the bloc’s intra-regional business. It could be argued that UNASUR, the EU-like Union of South American Nations, has also done so: It has four official languages, none of which are indigenous but are the tongues of former colonizers Spain, Portugal, the Netherlands and England.

The EU, for its part, has 23 official languages.

The ASEAN choice of English makes practical sense. The bloc is one of the most ethno-linguistically diverse in the world, and is dominated by four language groups: Malayo-Polynesian (primarily Malay and Tagalog), Austro-Asiatic (Vietnamese and Khmer), Tai (Thai and Lao), and Tibeto-Burman (Burmese). About half the region’s population belongs to the first group, but Malay is rarely heard outside Indonesia, Malaysia, Singapore and Brunei, the four nations of the bloc where it is official, while Tagalog, the basis of the Philippines’ main official language Filipino, is only heard outside that country among its vast overseas workforce, such as the hordes of maids gossiping in Hong Kong’s Statue Square on their Sundays off.

The Philippines’ other official language is English, and fluency in both tongues is quite common, which has been important in making Filipinos highly valued as workers in other countries, fuelling the homeland’s remittance-based economy. The only other ASEAN country where English is official is Singapore, where it shares that status with Chinese (a dialect of Mandarin is mostly spoken by the Chinese community), Malay and Tamil.

Amid all this official linguistic diversity in Southeast Asia are myriad smaller languages, dialects and sub-dialects, some say as many as a thousand. But the fact remains that if you are a Thai trying to ask directions in Jakarta, or a Malaysian lost in Ho Chi Minh City, the language you are most likely to have success with is English.

I’ve written previously that the dominance of English as a global lingua franca is a rather unfortunate accident of history. Its highly complex grammar is almost impossible for Asians to grasp fully; its spelling system is bizarre and inconsistent among its dialects and sub-dialects. It was, of course, imposed on much of the world by English colonizers, and took root throughout the British Empire as a result of a combination of harsh intolerance of indigenous tongues and a belief in the importance of education, even of “savages”. As that empire decayed, another one it had spawned, the American Empire, took up the mantle of global English-language hegemony.

In the study of European imperialism, Southeast Asia again has a unique history. Of the 10 nations of ASEAN, only one – Thailand – was never colonized by a European power. The British Empire embraced four of them (Malaysia, Singapore, Brunei and Myanmar), the French Empire three (Vietnam, Cambodia and Laos), and Spain and the Netherlands one each (the Philippines and Indonesia). Interestingly (to me, anyway), the languages of the latter three – French, Spanish and Dutch – are now almost unknown in the region except among scholars. As a lingua franca, they have been completely supplanted by English.

Outside former British Malaya/Borneo and Myanmar (which was administered as Burma by British India until the late 1940s), the imposition of English has been largely the work not of Britain but the United States. In only one case, the Philippines, was this done by imperial force, resulting after the Spanish-American War in the rapid expulsion of any trace of the previous Spanish tyranny except in personal and place names. Everywhere else in Southeast Asia the embrace of American English has been a practical response to the need to survive in a world dependent on US economic power.

This process, predictably, has been far from smooth. Educational standards vary wildly across the region. The differences between American and British English also complicate matters, a situation recently aggravated by the growing influence of a third English dialect, South Asian. Outside Singapore and the Philippines, official spelling standards exist only among the highly educated and journalists, and even those two countries don’t agree on them: Singapore uses a form of British English (spiced up by non-official but widely spoken “Singlish”), while the Philippines uses the US standard (Webster). In Thailand, while businesses tend to prefer (usually extremely poor) American English, Bangkok’s two daily newspapers stubbornly cling to British English as official style.

But as in all things, Thailand has gone its own way through all of this. Even among the educated elite and in the all-important tourism industry, English-language facility is generally very poor. This has little to do with financial poverty; Thailand has the second-largest economy in ASEAN with negligible unemployment, and for decades has placed strong official emphasis on education, yet one finds better English skills even in the poorer countries of Indochina. It seems to be more a factor of Thai nationalism and isolationism. Thais want to be part of the larger world, but only if it doesn’t mean a lot of work.

In 2015, a region-wide “seamless trade” area, the ASEAN Economic Community, will be established. Most Thais, including businesspeople, know or care very little about what this will mean. Some of the private-sector organizations are rubbing their hands in glee, as it will make it easier for them to get around even the few and inadequate Thai laws protecting labourers, as the borders open up to workers flowing in from poorer countries, three of which – Cambodia, Laos and Myanmar – share national boundaries with Thailand, while Vietnam is not far off. Others, especially the hospitality industry, fear the increased competition.

The Thai government, for its part, seems to be very aware of the country’s ill-preparedness for the AEC, but as always lacks the competence, and support from the elite, to do much about it. It has, however, announced a new emphasis on language education, and to its credit, it has not confined this effort to English but is also pushing the learning of other regional languages, especially Malay. This is in addition to its previous encouragement of the study of Mandarin, for the obvious reason that Chinese trade and investment have a huge influence on the economy of the entire East Asian region, especially outside the other two powerhouses Japan and South Korea.

There is little evidence so far that the Thai street shares the government’s newfound enthusiasm for improved foreign-language skills; more than likely Thais will find themselves overwhelmed after 2015 by the influx of cheap, reasonably skilled and English-speaking labour exploited by highly efficient Singaporean and Malaysian corporations taking over the kingdom’s factories, resorts and office towers.

“Seamless trade” motivated by nothing other than corporate greed will in Southeast Asia, as everywhere else, turn out to be bad news for Thailand’s lower echelons for the most part, but these blocs often also have some (unintended) good consequences. Thailand’s quest to modernize is to a large degree held back by its passionate yet utterly unfounded nationalism, epitomized by its obsolete and draconian lèse majesté laws. The necessity of competing with the more efficient nations of the region, particularly Singapore and Malaysia, and those with far better English proficiency, particularly those two plus the Philippines, may provide a starkly needed rude awakening.

Time will tell. In the meantime, what about the original suggestion at the top of this essay, that the adoption by a regional trade bloc of a foreign language as its official means of communication could be a unifying force worth trying? Think of the money the EU could save by laying off the droves of translators necessary to handle 23 official languages, if it adopted just one.

And how about the Americas using language politics to throw off the vestiges of imperialism once and for all? The obvious choice for UNASUR would be Quechua, an Amerindian language with about 10 million speakers that already enjoys official status in Bolivia and Peru.

Such a policy would be more challenging in North America. The North American Free Trade Area has three official languages, all of them, like those of UNASUR, those of former imperial masters, in this case England, Spain and France. But in the US and Canada, native languages have been crushed into near non-existence. Even in Mexico the most widely spoken indigenous language, Nahuatl, now only has about 1.5 million speakers.

Since this was my idea, I make a modest proposal, that the official language of NAFTA herewith be Secwepemctsín, the indigenous language of the part of south-central British Columbia where I grew up. Lesson 1 would be how to pronounce its name.

Policies of Privilege

By David Simmons

“Honesty is the best policy,” some of us still try to teach our kids. A few of us may also throw in “Cheaters never prosper,” but it’s getting more and more difficult to say that with a straight face to a trusting little girl.

By now anyone not comatose realizes the extent to which cheaters are not only prospering, they are denying prosperity to anyone not in their tiny clique of schemers, scammers and kleptocrats, elected and otherwise. But this shouldn’t have been a surprise. If the laws against theft – the ordinary kind, shoplifting or boosting a flat-screen TV or Beemer – were repealed, would your personal moral code keep you honest? Maybe; but many would say to hell with it, I’m grabbing what I can while there’s still something left to grab.

And that’s all the bankers have done. Governments – elected by us, the 50 per cent plus one – legalized the finance industry’s more sophisticated but far more damaging brand of theft, allowed the financiers to stack the ratings agencies and securities commissions and other so-called regulators with their accomplices, and so they went on a rampage. Wouldn’t you?

And if you were an elected official hungry for a lucrative corporate directorship upon leaving public service, would you do anything that could derail the gravy train? Ask Tony Blair.

All ethics are situational. My wife and I are from two wholly different cultures; I from a wealthy Western democracy, she from a farm in a poor Southeast Asian country that has had nearly as many military coups as elections. I’ve worked for a living since I was 16, but my work was rewarded. In her world, just surviving took a struggle; rewards were what she and her family dreamed could happen some day, with the right combination of smarts and good fortune. And, if necessary, cheating a bit.

She bought me a fancy designer leather wallet one day, proudly revealing that she had paid a fraction of what it was worth, because it had been stolen and recycled into the black market. She still doesn’t understand why I refused to accept it. She tried to make another deal for an air-conditioner for the house we have built upcountry; a former brother-in-law is in the delivery business, and a proportion of the deliveries “go missing” as a matter of routine. No one, certainly not the police, asks many questions if he or she gets a nice new TV or rice cooker once in a while at a nice discount.

I’m no saint. I do follow the “honesty is best” policy in theory, and it usually stands me in good stead: Friends and employers trust me, which is rewarding in more ways than one. But if it’s clear the theory is not going to work in a certain situation, I change lanes faster than Lewis Hamilton.

How does one work through such contradictions when bringing up a child in the way she should go? Cheaters do prosper; people who don’t accept “discounts” are losers, we see that more and more. Is there any point in clinging to a philosophy, nurtured in the formerly privileged West, that increasingly appears based on little but wishful thinking?

I suggest that there is. Morally decadent societies have always collapsed in the past, resulting in massive human misery, sometimes for centuries before those societies could resuscitate themselves; sometimes they never do. In the modern ultra-connected world, the preservation of a survival morality, based on human rights and co-operation, not on theft, is more crucial than ever. And yet it appears to be under threat from powers more formidable than we have seen since the falls of fascism and Soviet communism.

It might be up to the privileged to carry the torch of survival morality.

According to my analysis of modern Thai history (an analysis with which my Thai wife heartily disagrees), the most meaningful reforms were instituted by a man of great privilege, Thaksin Shinawatra. Let’s make no bones about it, Thaksin is the poster boy of the argument against the “cheaters never prosper” adage. His enemies hate him not because he was a crook, but because he was far better at it than they were. And after he weaselled his way into the premiership, he used his power to make himself and his cronies even more wealthy. But – and this is what really irked the elite – he also introduced reforms that reduced poverty, and installed a universal health-care system many Americans could only dream of.

I’m privileged too, always have been. I like to think I came by my prosperity more honestly than Thaksin did, but that might be gilding the lily. Just being born in Canada gave me advantages denied to most of my fellow human beings; a good family, a good education, good health, supportive mentors all came my way like warm breezes, welcome but not summoned, perhaps even undeserved. Warm breezes, while others endured blizzards of hardship and tragedy.

It’s still like that. I’m not wealthy by Western standards, I work six days a week to support myself and my family, but we have a nice life. Under the recently increased minimum wage in central Thailand (bitterly opposed by the Mercedes-driving right wing), a labourer working six days a week would earn about C$230 a month. Most months I net more than 13 times that.

So I can afford to turn down the black-market leather wallets and discounted “missing” air-conditioners, and still give my little girl a good education. And as long as I can in a world desperately short of role models, that curriculum will include “honesty is the best policy”.

That’s my privilege.

M’aider! Drowning Rats

By David Simmons

As is so often the case nowadays, I had to be reminded by a glance at my Facebook feed that as I write this, it is the May long weekend back “home” in Canada, a country I haven’t seen for more than a decade.

I couldn’t even remember the official name of the holiday; had to look it up on Wikipedia. (It’s the Victoria Day weekend.) More and more, the Internet is my only link to my homeland.

But there is much more than that to the disconnect I experience between my old home and my adopted one, something that occurred to me during a much better-known May holiday, on the first of the month: International Workers’ Day. Here in Thailand, it is a public holiday known in English as Labour Day. In Canada and the United States, that name is applied to a completely different holiday on the first Monday of September.

In the US, the difference derives from the reluctance of president Grover Cleveland to recognize a workers’ holiday that commemorated a massive act of anti-worker police brutality, the Haymarket Massacre in Chicago in 1886. But while the September workers’ holiday in Canada was not officially declared until 1894, it commemorates an earlier, Canada-only event that eventually led to the repeal of anti-union legislation. Outside Quebec, May 1 has never been very important to the Canadian labour movement.

It is unfair to disparage the North American Labour Days as “fake” simply because they do not coincide with the internationally preferred date, but the dichotomy has come to symbolize for me the great gulf between the lot of workers in East Asia and those in North America.

On the most recent May Day, there were sporadic protests in some North American cities, variously viewed as a resurgence or a death rattle of the Occupy movement. While the goals of Occupy are noble, they do seem to be too little too late. Wealth and power have gradually shifted from workers to a tiny oligopoly centred in the towers of the financial industry, and to profit-addicted mega-corporations that happily export jobs to other countries where workers are easier to exploit, while elected governments in Canada and the US look the other way, and the people who elected them are bought off by the resultant cheap goods in Wal-Mart.

What we have in North America is massive, probably irreversible, erosion of workers’ well-being. The word “erosion” derives from the Latin rodere, “to gnaw”; the word “rodent” derives from the same Latin root. The image presented is one of rats in $1,000 suits gnawing away ordinary people’s jobs, savings and pensions, and North Americans for the first time face the spectre of their children’s futures being less prosperous and rewarding than their own.

This could have been avoided. If workers had lived up to the spirit of Labour Day and marched and struck to preserve their rights, as their forebears had faced up to police truncheons and bullets and tear gas to win those rights, instead of merely using the first Monday of September as a last chance for a summer picnic with the family, if they had paid attention to what was going on around them, seen beyond the pro-consumer hype of free-trade agreements, had resisted the emasculation of the media by corporate monopolies, and had not squandered the great gift of the ballot box by electing anti-worker governments that allowed university tuition to rise beyond their children’s reach without accumulating huge debts, allowed banks to cook up “complex instruments” with which to sabotage the economic system while stealing from pension plans and enriching the oligarchy, and weakened unions.

But the wealth we in the “developed” world used to enjoy before the Wall/Bay Street mafiosi plundered it didn’t come out of thin air, nor was it “generated” by our own hard work, at least not entirely. Much of it was stolen in the first place from the “developing” world. That word “developing” began as a euphemism, but in the process of robbing their own middle class, the Western oligarchs and lapdog politicians have inadvertently enriched the East. And so we have “emerging economies”.

And here we find another Latin word, mergere, “to dip”, which gives rise to both “emerge” and “submerge”. In the past, Asia was forced underwater by the European colonizers and its own corrupt mandarins who enabled the exploiters. Now, old-fashioned colonization has vanished from East Asia, most recently in 1999 when Portugal returned Macau to Chinese rule, two years after the sun set on British Hong Kong. Globalization was supposed to be the new colonization, making theft of resources and enslavement of people more efficient through technology and deregulation.

To some extent, that has turned out to be the case, but there have been unintended consequences. China has become the new leader of Asia, and may soon take over the world. It has done this by manipulating the West’s two great modern economic systems, capitalism and communism, into a unique form of planned economy that has used Asian values (including corruption and brutality) to amass great power, while real wages of its huge population have gone up notably (admittedly from a very low base) at the same time as those in the West are dwindling. Underpinning this is the unsustainable debt that is rocking the foundations of Europe and North America, of which China is the main creditor.

Similar economic shifts have occurred elsewhere in the region, but much of Southeast Asia, while in various measures inspired by and benefiting from the “Chinese miracle”, has departed from that model by embracing democracy. Again, these are democracies with Asian characteristics, which means primarily that they brook a level of corruption officially frowned on by the West, though as the collusion between the corporate/financial mafia and political leadership becomes more blatant, Western frowning is now increasingly shrugged off as mere hypocrisy.

In the early 1980s, while I was working for the British Columbia Ministry of Highways trying to scrape together enough money to go back to college after Milton Friedman’s economic theories started destroying jobs everywhere – and had dried up opportunities in what had previously passed for my career – the right-wing provincial government tabled a sweeping set of anti-labour bills branded as “restraint”, very similar to the “austerity” plague that has infected most Western economies these days. This inspired something called the Solidarity Movement, as unionists around the province rebelled against the government.

A mass rally was called in Vancouver’s Empire Stadium, and the government initiated a campaign of threats against any provincial employees who attended. Many of us, including me, ignored the threats and exercised our right of free assembly. Government goons came to my workplace to see if anyone was missing; my boss told the goons I was indeed absent but on a legitimate “flex time” day off (which was true) and that he neither knew nor cared how I spent my free time (which was only partly true). About 45,000 attended the rally.

Union bosses met with the government and won some concessions, averting a general strike in exchange; but it was a last gasp, for the Decline of the Western Empire initiated by Ronald Reagan and Margaret Thatcher was well under way. Canadian workers kept their head above water better than many others, but in the end its was submergere for all but the privileged Rodentia order.

The Solidarity Movement took its name from the concurrent Solidarność in Poland. Of course the two were very different; one group fighting to obtain rights from a Communist dictatorship and the other fighting to prevent a right-wing holocaust from stealing the rights they already had. In the same way, the modern Occupy movement claims inspiration from the Arab Spring, but the needs and aspirations of the two are very different, and it remains to be seen whether either will achieve anything in the end.

Meanwhile here in Southeast Asia, workers are emerging as a force. It’s early days, and just like in the West, a well-funded right-wing minority is wielding its power to keep working people down. In Thailand, the Chamber of Commerce fights tooth and claw against the “populist” measures of the Shinawatra family brought to power by the once-oppressed rural majority of the North and Northeast regions, while the elitist Democrats hold power in the capital, Bangkok. Over the past few years we have seen a military coup and deadly riots, and the once-lively media have run for cover. But more sober observers than the Chamber and its allies in the Federation of Thai Industries recognize that Thailand is empowered by its workers, not its corrupt elite and certainly not by its “revered institutions”. Parasitical industries like the garment trade are fleeing for greener pastures in still-oppressed Cambodia and Myanmar, while the automotive and electronics industries flourish – and provide decent-paying jobs and career opportunities.

Back in the ’80s, we thought we had it all, but our leaders let us down. To turn back the tide, to repair the erosion, would take a lot of effort and willpower. I think it’s too late “back home”, but this old leftie sees reason to hope in emerging Asia. That hope will be dashed, again, if the workers of East Asia drop the ball like we did.

Ugly Choices

By David Simmons

“War is ugly,” US Defence Secretary Leon Panetta said in the Pentagon’s latest damage-control effort following troops’ misbehaviour in Afghanistan.

Well, why do it, then?

My parents were veterans of a “just” war, the one that tore Europe apart in the 1940s. Although they rarely spoke of their experiences in World War II, and certainly never pretended there was any glory or honour in it, my early life was nevertheless immersed in the concept that war is sometimes necessary, and that good can be done by it – but only as a last resort.

Like many of my generation, I found that line of thinking challenged by the Vietnam War, a harsh awakening to the possibility of a “war of choice” and, more broadly, the illogic and disingenuousness of the Cold War itself. It turned out that wars were not necessarily waged to defend home and hearth or to protect our “freedom”, but to maintain global economic imbalances at best, or at worst for no sounder reason than ideology.

During that period, we also were forced by the My Lai scandal to wake up to the fact that, in the heat of war, “atrocities” are not always committed by the enemy, but by the good guys too. It should have been obvious, but a lot of us had let the mythology of the “just” wars in Europe, the Pacific and Korea cloud our logic. War films have had a lot to do with that distortion; a notable exception, of sorts, is Saving Private Ryan, in which a German machine-gunner who killed one of their colleagues is captured by US Captain John Miller and his team. Some of the men want to kill the German in revenge, but Miller lets him go.

I seriously doubt that in real life, a real Captain Miller would not have let his men slaughter the German. Would you? Would I, in such a situation, when I had been sent to a foreign land where people were killing my friends and, when we managed to catch one of them, we had the chance to blow his despised head off? With no repercussions? How many such “atrocities” by the Allies were covered up?

Even 30 years later, My Lai–type events rarely came out in the open. It took more than a year for independent journalist Seymour Hersh to break that story; how many other atrocity stories died with their perpetrators? The very word “atrocity”, derived from Latin atrocitas (“cruelty”), is a propaganda tool, implying that such things are not the norm.

Nowadays independent journalists are practically a thing of the past; nothing is reported if there is no money to be made. But at the same time we journos were selling our souls to the corporations who paid our salaries, we were being replaced by cell-phone cameras and the Internet. And so the Abu Ghraibs and peed-on corpses and grinning soldiers posing with body parts go viral, stripping us of any excuses we have left to deny that “war is ugly”. That it should be avoided at all cost.

Yet self-delusion is a powerful thing, and we won’t learn from the Afghanistan horrors any more than we learned from those in Iraq, Bosnia, or Nicaragua or Vietnam or Korea or the Ardennes.

Sometimes, the facts are just too ugly to face up to.

The Roundness of Time

By David Simmons

The trouble with timelines is that time is not linear but circular. That’s why we have news cycles and boom-and-bust cycles, and why history repeats itself. What goes around comes around.

Progress is the unbending of time, the often fleeting escape from the vicious cycle that is the natural order of things. It almost never happens by accident, but takes a lot of effort and co-operation, which is why progressive movements such as democracy and poverty reduction are so hard to keep from curving off track.

Innovation is a tool humans have used since the invention of language and the greatest circle of them all, the wheel, to progress technologically. It took thousands of years for technology to progress in a major way, but like all things, without tremendous effort, it too becomes little more than a circular argument.

The first technological marvel I can remember getting excited about was the “flicker”. That’s what my parents called flashing car turn signals. Our first Volkswagen Beetle had semaphore turn signals that popped out of the B-pillar, but our brand-new 1957 model had real flickers, just like “grown-up” North American cars.

But the flicker was soon to be superseded on my excitement scale, because this was the 1950s, when time was in the early stages of an unprecedented spurt of linearity. That same year, the Soviets launched Sputnik 1, and I would stand in our yard in the evening and watch in awe as it tracked across the sky. It was the birth of the space age, and we thought it would change our lives.

But much smaller innovations around the same time, which didn’t make the headlines or heat up the Cold War, turned out to be much greater world-changers. Even as the Russians fired their rocket into space, full of sound and fury, a few bespectacled scientists somewhere quietly invented the first computer languages, and in 1958, the integrated circuit.

The thread that has run through the often circuitous, sometimes marvellously progressive timeline of human development is the one thing that really makes us different from all the other animals, the mastery of complex communication. That technology reached an apex with the printing press and the newspaper. Back in the 1950s, of course, we all knew that the newspaper was dead. Sure, it had survived newsreels and radio, but there was no way it would survive television.

We got our first TV in the early 1960s. Dad worked for a hardware store that was the town’s distributor of Electrohome, then Canada’s primary maker of state-of-the-art entertainment gizmos like stereophonic record players housed in beautiful wooden cabinets. Because of his employee discount, we were able to get both a stereophonic record player and a “portable” television set. It was called portable because it wasn’t housed in a beautiful wooden cabinet, and it had a handle on top for carrying purposes. But I don’t remember seeing anyone actually carry it alone.

At first we could only get one channel, the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation affiliate in Kelowna, a city about 70 miles (we hadn’t heard of the metric system yet) south of our village in British Columbia. Dad would rush home from work to watch the 15-minute news broadcast. I liked Saturdays, because the Bugs Bunny Show preceded Hockey Night in Canada. That was when the National Hockey League had only six teams; I lost interest in later years when it expanded and became too much work to keep track of.

But funnily enough, by the early 1980s, television had still not managed to kill off the newspaper. And so I became a print journalist. Still am, even though the people who know about such things have said the Internet will make the newspaper a thing of the past, as television and radio and movie newsreels didn’t before.

But although newspapers today look a lot like they did when I got started writing for them and later editing them, or even how they looked in the late 1950s when I first learned to read them (though mostly the funnies), the way we make them has changed in ways no one could predict 30 years ago.

And yet the changes, in a way, have been circular.

When I started in the business, newspapers were only just starting to use computers in a big way. The first paper I worked at for any length of time used a big computer to assist in the typesetting, but the stories themselves were written and edited on typewriters in noisy newsrooms.

Fast-forward to 2012, and I’m sitting all alone in my room in my boxer shorts, a cold beverage at the side, in Bangkok, editing stories for a newspaper in Hong Kong, 1,700 kilometres away. One of the stories is about the Chinese government doubling the trading range of the yuan versus the US dollar. I tap out the headline on my MacBook Pro, and send it at the speed of light. The next morning, I’m watching BBC World on my flat-screen TV, beamed to me from far overhead by a descendant of Sputnik, and there, on the newscast’s wrap of the day’s headlines from around the world, is my headline, about the yuan.

It had come full circle.

The McDonald's at the End of the World

By David Simmons

There’s not much evidence any more of the many battles fought around Megiddo Hill in northern Israel, most recently in 1918 between the British forces of General Edmund Allenby and the dying Ottoman Empire. Still, it was a worthy inspiration for the author of the Book of Revelation, who used its Greek name – Armageddon, from the Hebrew Har (Mount) Megiddo – to describe Earth’s coming final battle.

The hill – having grown up surrounded by genuine mountains in British Columbia, I wouldn’t call any of the geographic protrusions in Palestine “mounts” – overlooks the Jezreel Valley, popular among warmongers ancient and modern for its broad, flat expanse near a pass on an important trade route. The first recorded major Battle of Armageddon was in the 15th century BC, between the Canaanites and the forces of Egyptian Pharaoh Thutmose III.

More important to the author of Revelation, possibly, was Megiddo’s proximity to the birthplace of monotheism, whose three main faiths have been central to many of the world’s bloodiest wars, and have made the New Testament writer’s prediction of a true “war to end all wars” seem increasingly likely during the course of the 20th and 21st centuries AD.

It’s unlikely Thutmose’s beef with the Canaanites had anything to do with religion. It was an imperialist struggle; the point was to shore up Egypt’s hegemony in the Middle East, not to impose Egypt’s gods on its residents and certainly not, as the Israelites did later, to punish the Canaanites for being “heathens”. The Israelite kingdom was immersed in its monotheistic religion, which by its founding nature is utterly intolerant of rival belief systems – the Second Commandment is “You shall have no other gods before me.” Thus the Old Testament is strewn with blood.

Reformers over the centuries have tried to purge Judaism and its offshoots of their warlike nature, with dubious success. Jesus of Nazareth – a town about 18 kilometres from Megiddo – was one of the most important of these figures. But instead of reforming his religion he got himself killed by the imperialist Romans, and his followers started a whole new faith that eventually fell into the same warlike mode as its Judaic forebears. This was exacerbated by a third monotheism, Islam, which despite its name deriving from the Arabic root slm that also gives rise to saalam (“peace”, cognate Hebrew shalom), has always resisted serious efforts to divest it of intolerance and violence.

Recently British Prime Minister David Cameron, on a visit to the world’s most populous Muslim nation, held that country up as an example of how Islam could stand side by side with democracy, and “offer an alternative to the dead-end choice of dictatorship or extremism”. Indeed, urban Indonesians largely reject the violence and intolerance of their religion, but who really are the “extremists”? There is seething anger among that country’s devout fundamentalists. And in Bali in 2002 they lashed out in defence of the intolerance they cherish, and which is rejected by so-called moderates, who to them are the real radicals.

This dichotomy exists throughout Southeast Asia, and not just in the five countries of that region that have embraced Abrahamic faiths (Islam in Malaysia, Indonesia and Brunei and Roman Catholicism in the Philippines and East Timor). In all cases the predominant religions here were imported, yet they have adapted, and been adapted, to conform with the ancient cultures that predate them. Thai Buddhism includes aspects of primitive animism and superstition that would likely get Siddhartha Gautama’s head a-shakin’, and the love of life and sexuality prevalent in Indonesia and the Philippines are constant frustrations for their clerics.

Back in their birthplace in the Middle East, though, the philosophical roots of the Abrahamic monotheisms are alive and well. Given this history, nothing would seem more likely to bring on Armageddon than throwing all three of these faiths into the same Jezreel Valley. And yet that is what has happened.

The main catalyst was the establishment of the State of Israel, a pocket of Jews deliberately inserted by Christians in the middle of a pack of Muslims, who were already fighting among themselves because of their own religious disagreements, primarily the rift between Sunnis and Shiites. Israel should have collapsed days after it began – and there is historical evidence that the British, the former occupiers of Palestine and the main enemies of Zionism in the mid-20^th century, dearly hoped it would. But the incompetence of the Arab dictatorships succeeded in shoring up Western support for the fledgling state, particularly in the newly powerful United States. That state of affairs exists to this day.

Nowadays the West has largely abandoned religion, which has opened the door to a widespread hope for global peace. However, not enough people have entered that door, and secularism has in turn given rise to rampant consumerism that must be fuelled by petroleum – much of which lies in the sands of Muslim-dominated countries of the Mideast. The result is twofold: Western nations meddle in the Middle East in the name of energy security, while their overarching secularism makes them ignorant of the religious forces in that region they inevitably have to deal with.

Currently the microcosm of this ugly picture is not so much Israel but Syria, a short jog east of Megiddo. Like most of the countries of the region, Syria did not arise naturally but was drawn on a map by occupying Christians, in this case the French. It is primarily a mixture of Sunni and Shiite, with significant minorities of other faiths, or sects of the main ones. The most important sect, because of its political power – and not because of its numbers, who are relatively few – is the Alawi, a branch of the Shia. The Assad clan that has ruled Syria since 1970 is Alawite.

Syria is also closely allied with the most powerful non-Arab state in the region, which is also predominantly Shiite: Iran. Meanwhile the powerful Arab states are predominantly Sunni monarchies and dictatorships, mostly with strong links to the US. As the US is also the most loyal and lucrative supporter of Israel, despised by Sunni and Shiite alike, yet another seed of end-of-times conflict is sown.

Over the past couple of years we have seen yet another poison thrown into the mix, the collapse of Western capitalism. In all imperial downfalls, the most dangerous time is not the ultimate demise itself but the interim period when the emperor still thinks he wears clothes, and lashes out indiscriminately in what he refuses to recognize as his own death throes. His decisions are inane, such as the European suicidal ban on Iranian oil imports, which the emperor’s propagandists tell the little people is aimed at ending Iran’s unproven nuclear-weapons program but is in fact all about the hegemony of the petrodollar.

Secular Westerners look at the blood currently pouring on to the streets of Homs and cry for a new crusade, to rescue the innocent from the evil Alawites. But even if they were properly informed by their media of the complex nature of the Syrian civil war, they would likely remain largely ignorant of the motives driving the foreign interests in that country: the hugely powerful empires of Europe-America, China and Russia battling – diplomatically, for now – for the spoils of the larger region.

One could go to Megiddo to educate oneself, but it probably wouldn’t help much. I went there in the early 1980s; I doubt much has changed since then, though I don’t think the McDonald’s pictured above was there yet. Unlike much of the rest of the Middle East, Israel is a modern quasi-Euro-American state, and it’s easy not to see the Horsemen of the Apocalypse lurking in the wings.

Dead Kids: A Purpose Served

By David Simmons

After a deranged gunman killed three children at a Jewish school in Toulouse, France, on March 19, Israeli President Shimon Peres rightly said: “There is no greater sin than the murder of a boy or a girl.

“This is the most heinous crime. To wake up in the morning and murder children in cold blood is proof of the killer’s inhumanity and insanity.”

In an interview aired by the British Broadcasting Corp, he added: “What purpose can it serve?”

But the fact is that killing children does indeed often serve a purpose. Rarely, as in the Toulouse case, is the killing deliberate and direct – rather, dead children are statistics of that hateful reality, “collateral damage”.

There is no need to dwell on the fact that Peres’ own country is deeply guilty in this regard because of its brutal occupation of the Gaza Strip in particular but also the West Bank. Israel is not alone in such crimes – far from it. Indiscriminate missile, bomb and nowadays drone attacks kill children all the time. At least such deaths are quick; but the Food and Agriculture Organization reported in 1995 that 567,000 Iraqis under the age of five had died as a result of sanctions imposed against Saddam Hussein. Famously, Madeleine Albright said on 60 Minutes in 1996, when asked if this sacrifice was worthwhile: “I think this is a very hard choice, but the price – we think the price is worth it.” Albright was US ambassador to the United Nations at the time.

Again, this is not news. The tragedy of children being maimed and killed by wars, both the shooting kind and the more subtle versions like the decade-long sanctions against Iraq and the current ones against Iran, are well documented. But in terms of sheer numbers, even these casualties pale in comparison with those due to poverty.

Recently the United Nations Children’s Fund conducted a study on child poverty in East Asia and the Pacific, including my adopted country, Thailand, and four others in Southeast Asia: Cambodia, Laos, the Philippines and Vietnam. Mongolia and Vanuatu were also included.

“The study results show that, of the 93 million children who live in these seven countries, approximately 54% experience poverty, as measured by deprivation of basic needs,” UNICEF reported. “In 2006, approximately 36% of children suffered severe deprivation in at least one of the seven dimensions identified as relevant for child poverty (food, water, shelter, sanitation, health, education and information) and approximately 14% suffered from severe deprivation in multiple dimensions. In the group of countries with the highest rates of child poverty (Cambodia, Lao PDR and Mongolia), approximately 83% of children were severely deprived in at least one dimension.”

You don’t need statistics to see that within this region, Thailand has made better progress against poverty than many of its neighbours; a bit of travel can provide the evidence. It can’t be denied that a lot of this is due to globalization. Many of the jobs that have been shifted away from developed countries in search of profit at the expense of working people in Europe and North America have certainly improved the standard of living in places like Thailand. But the fact that ordinary Thais have benefited more from this shift than their counterparts in neighbouring Cambodia, Laos, Vietnam and the Philippines must be attributed to a large degree to government.

Thailand is now the “Detroit of East Asia”, a manufacturing centre for automotive giants Toyota, Honda, Ford, General Motors and others. Of course comparatively low wage costs are the main reason these multinationals came here, but intelligent management combined with reasonably well-enforced labour laws have ensured that Thai workers in this industry have gained a reputation for quality and reliability. As a result, although the automotive industry was hit extremely hard by the flood disaster of late 2011, with several factories inundated and supply chains disrupted for months, all of the major companies have opted not to relocate to less flood-prone (and lower-paying) countries. The same is true to a lesser extent of the electronics industry; Thailand is a major global supplier, for example, of computer hard-disk drives.

Despite the country’s successes, however, the Thai right wing led by the Chamber of Commerce fights tooth and nail against every attempt of the government to improve people’s well-being. Even though its own studies show that long-term economic growth will depend on a gradual shift away from export dependency toward domestic consumption, which would depend on increased disposable income among the majority of the populace, the Chamber and its cohorts are waging a huge battle against the current government’s policy to increase the minimum daily wage to 300 baht, about C$10. It’s the same song and dance played worldwide against such efforts – higher wages will “cost jobs”.

To give substance to that mantra, the garment industry, infamous for its exploitation of disadvantaged people in Asia and Latin America, has begun moving to more welcoming ground. To its great joy, Thailand’s effort to fight the income gap – still one of the highest in the region – has coincided with the “opening up” of Myanmar right next door. Even by the shabby standards of war-torn Cambodia and communist Laos, decades of oppression and mismanagement by Myanmar’s military junta have made that country desperate for any kind of investment, and the exploiters are being welcomed with open arms.

In March, six major Thailand-based garment manufacturers announced they were setting up shop in Myanmar. The newspaper I work for, whose business section is a reliable cheerleader for Thailand’s right wing, reported this in a “told you so” tone. I was tempted to insert some balance into the story, but exercising laudable restraint (and covering my own butt), I only added a sentence explaining that the government’s wage policy was aimed at improving the standard of living and addressing the wealth gap. I also headlined the story “Garment firms flee to low-wage Burma”, which made it into print.

So mega-corporations are using their wealth and clout to hold back progress in the fight against poverty, while UNICEF reports that “nearly 8 million children died in 2010 before reaching the age of five – most from pneumonia, diarrhea or birth complications. In urban areas, high concentrations of poverty combine with inadequate services to drive up child mortality.”

To borrow Shimon Peres’ words in the wake of the Toulouse atrocity, “What purpose can this serve?” The obvious purpose is to fill the hypermarkets of the rich countries with cheap “apparel” and other goods, and to fatten the profits of the corporate giants. As for the children who don’t get the medicines they need as a result or, in the longer term, cannot access the education they need to escape the cycle of poverty and misery – well, apparently “we think the price is worth it”.