Far from COVID & American Politics, a Continuing Unraveling

 

As serious as our pandemic issues might be, as tumultuous as the American political climate has become, there are two huge stories that are getting short shrift in global, particularly American, attention: the acceleration of climate change and the challenge of brutal dictators (focusing now on Belarus, a CIS bloc nation). These issues seem distant, lacking the immediacy of a pandemic that has killed close to 180 thousand Americans (a number that will rise significantly by the November election). As foreign fires rage – from the PRC repression of Hong Kong’s freedom seekers to the seeming ongoing execution of political opponents by the Putin regime – the struggles of one more nation to oust one of the last remaining European dictators are lost in the tsunami of American issues. Voter suppression. Post Office impairment. Red vs Blue.

But the world hasn’t otherwise stopped. Climate change is mounting fast. And the uber-violent repression in Belarus is just one more reminder of the malevolent harm that repressive autocrats continue to inflict on their peoples. In an over-connected world, we are impacted no matter how much we believe we are isolated from the rest of the planet. The first story takes us to that climate change barometer, Greenland, where this year’s loss of glacial ice to the oceans exceeds the prior record of ice loss by a whopping 15%.

“Over the past 30 years, Greenland's contribution to global sea levels has grown significantly as ice losses have increased… A major international report on Greenland released last December concluded that it was losing ice seven times faster than it was during the 1990s… Today's new study shows that trend is continuing.

“Using data from the Grace and Grace-FO satellites, as well as climate models, the authors conclude that across the full year Greenland lost 532 gigatonnes of ice - a significant increase on 2012… The researchers say the loss is the equivalent of adding 1.5mm to global mean sea levels, approximately 40% of the average rise in one year.” BBC.com, August 21^st. Climate changes is already reconfiguring coastal communities everywhere. Try getting a new 30-year mortgage for beachfront property in South Florida. As coastal buyers drive to their bank through routinely flooded streets, they probably won’t do better than 15 years.

That’s the “inconvenience.” It is more than an inconvenience to those who face flooding and violent tropical storms and storm surges with increasing frequency, whose coastal properties are slowly slip-sliding away while others face wildfires, drought and disease-laden insect migration. That’s just here in the United States. Wars incented by the inability to grow food, migrations from now fallow regions and giant resulting shifts in wealth will strain our military and political systems the world over.

The recent “election” in Belarus, where the major opposition candidate, Siarhei Tikhanovskaya was arrested on May 20^th, morphed into an international debacle. Tikhanovskaya’s wife (Svetlana) ran in his place. Minsk reported a landslide to reelect the incumbent dictator, President Alexander Lukashenko. His sixth consecutive term. The immediate protests from Svetlana’s followers were met with severe beatings and military/police assaults on protestors; the violence spread. The streets were soon overflowing with people demanding that Lukashenko resign and that new and fair elections be called. No one believed the results except Lukashenko’s cronies, including Russia’s Vladimir Putin. Deep concern rippled through the nation that Russian forces might intervene in support of this deeply unpopular brute. Fearing for her life, Svetlana fled to Lithuania, where she continues to address her constituency. While some of the violence subsided, Lukashenko was not yielding ground.

“Prosecutors in Belarus opened a criminal investigation Thursday [8/20] against opposition activists who set up a council to negotiate a democratic transition of power amid massive protests against official election results that extended the 26-year rule of the country’s authoritarian leader.

“Belarusian President Alexander Lukashenko, who has dismissed the protesters demanding his resignation as Western puppets, had threatened opposition leaders with criminal charges. Following up on his warning, prosecutors opened an inquiry against the new council’s founders on charges of undermining national security.

“The Belarusian Prosecutor General’s office said the creation of the Coordination Council that met for the first time Wednesday [8/19] violated the constitution… ‘The creation and the activities of the Coordination Council are aimed at seizing power and inflicting damage to the national security,’ Prosecutor General Alexander Konyuk said.

“The council members have rejected the accusations and insist their actions fully comply with Belarusian law. The United States on Thursday [8/20] urged the authorities to engage in a dialogue with the opposition council and described the Aug. 9 presidential election that handed Lukashenko a sixth term as neither free nor fair.” Associated Press, August 19^th.

Belarus has worked closely with NATO and the European Union in the past, but those relations are now strained. After this election and the violent repression of protestors, “The EU declared that the imprisonment of opposition figures and protesters contravened human rights laws, and imposed new targeted sanctions on major Belarusian officials and businesspeople.” Wikipedia. Global pressure against Lukashenko was mounting, but time will tell if any of this makes any difference.

The headline for the United States is for us to get our political and economic house in order, to rejoin the world in fighting common enemies and common issues. We cannot go it alone anymore, and we cannot be so self-absorbed that we fail to recognize the complex puzzled interaction we have created among nations and people… that defies isolation and separation.

            I’m Peter Dekom, and there is no shelter from global complexity and there is no unilateral reshaping of the earth through mythology and denial.