… And a stitch in time saves nine. Being proactive rather than being reactive is without question the way to go in dealing with life’s issues.
So we live in a world that is a virtual minefield, with Mother Nature striking us with earthquakes, floods, drought, tsunamis etc. These are things that are beyond our ability to control. When they happen, only then we could respond to the tragedies that befall us.
However, for eons, we have had to deal with the bloody misery of wars that are man-created without seriously getting to the bottom of how they are started by who. This one evidence of an apocalypse that might be prevented and preventable has been one of the curses of mankind and if we look carefully at what is responsible for it, we’ll see that without fail, it has been via the instigation of one man here or another there. It’s really been a one-man show, of leaders drunk or mad with power and left on their own to run wild and trample upon the rights and lives of others out of the wrong and strong, might is right, psychology that belongs to those who sit on their thrones.
Thus, up to a billion persons have died in wars caused and created by individuals who like, Putin, at the moment, feels he has to flex his country’s muscles by killing and displacing the Ukrainian people while just destroying the country that they have built – inch by inch, block by block.
And the world is practically taking this in stride, as if every now and again, if a madman emerges, it is his historical turn to be the next Lenin or Stalin, Hannibal, Hitler, Mao, Genghis Khan and so on, and so on. And we the people of the world, in our imagined helplessness, just sit back like paraplegics and let the horror unfold as we spit out their names, as we now puke out Putin’s name.
But we could do something, you know. In the Wild West, when a gunman started terrorizing innocent people, a bounty was immediately put on his head with flyers of his face on it, a marshal with a posse, was hired by the people to go after the culprit with the powers to bring him back, Dead or Alive. You know what, this approach eventually worked and the Wild West was tamed. Yes.
At the global geo-political level, there are leaders, madmen, butchers, who are intent on destroying the peace of this world and we are letting them do it because of some unwritten law that says leaders are untouchable and immune to censorship (and bounty hunting). This Russian invasion could screech to halt in an instant, if this instant, Putin is taken out by a hitman, if there is a bounty put out in the open for his assassination. Caesar, two Kennedys, three Gandhis and Benazir Bhutto were assassinated. Why is Putin immune to the sharpshooter’s bullet? Political madmen must know at all times that there is a bullet with their name etched on it – if the ICC, for example puts out a bounty across the globe for leaders who are misbehaving, forcing all leaders to watch their backs as they wonder who might be a bounty hunter keeping an eye on them, the Putins of the world would be eliminated, gone forever.
Bet your bottom dollar, this world will be a better place, a paradise, once leaders realise that are walking prey and they must always pray – just to stay alive.
As it is, the ICC only acts after the crime is committed, after thousands are massacred and their country flattened. What we need is an updated version of the ICC that vigilantly keeps an eye on world leaders and the minute they see something fishy about a leader, that he looks like trouble, you take him out. Isn’t it better we get rid of one for the sake of the rest…of us?
L. Siddhartha Orie