Measuring the East West Chasm: How It Has Changed “Us”
Measuring the East West Chasm: How It Has Changed Me
By Philip Shaw M.Sc.
It seems like a long time ago now. In February of 2003, fresh from my last sojourn to Bangladesh the first edition of East West was published right here in Cktimes.ca. It’s been a journey. Yes, it’s probably time for East and West to get together again. Plans are in the mix to bring this team together once again.
After over three years of writing this column is east meeting west? Do we have a better understanding of what makes this world tick? Have we had any impact on world affairs? Is this a worthwhile venture three years out? Even more importantly how has the east west attitudinal information transfer affected Dr. Haque and myself? For me, that is a most interesting point.
Case in point I bring you a few quotes from the past few weeks, which have shown up in our western media. It’s not always pretty, but it’s a good microcosm of when East meets West.
Quotes
“The devil came here yesterday,” “It still smells of sulphur today.
Hugo Chavez, President of Venezuela referring to US President George W. Bush
“The wave of the Islamic revolution will soon reach the entire world”.
Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, President of Iran
“Ah-mad-in-a-head” and “a Hitler type of person”
U.S. Senator George Voinovich referring to Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad
What did I do? What did I do? I worked hard to try to kill him. I authorized a finding for the CIA to kill him. We contracted with people to kill him. I got closer to killing him than anybody has gotten since. And if I were still president, we’d have more than 20,000 troops there trying to kill him.
Former U.S. President Bill Clinton referring to Bin Laden
“I have to manage the bloodlust of the American people.”
U.S. President George W. Bush—attributed to President Bush by Eddie Goldenburg, former top advisor to Canadian Prime Minister Jean Chretien on a visit to the White House two weeks after 9/11.
In the old days, pre University of Guelph, pre-meeting Dr. A.K. Enamul Haque I’d be railing against Ahmadinejad and Chavez. However that’s all changed. Once I had friends in the developing parts of the world I realized that “things aren’t necessarily the way they appear.” After repeated times of “debating the issues” with my good friend Dr. Haque, I came to realize that even more so. What the west says is not always what it seems, even though at times it seems quite harsh. At the same time things in the developed world aren’t what they seem either. At times the vitriol reaches new levels.
If you look at these quotes you can see the great chasm, which can develop between East and West. It gets emotional. Some of it feeds on each other. Much of it is based on ignorance of each other. Some of it is the truth. Some of it is a lie. The great struggle continues.
I grew up working in the farm fields surrounding the small southwestern Ontario Canadian town of Dresden. At that time we only knew what our environment allowed us to know. One TV set with only a few channels kept me abreast of what was happening in the Vietnam War. Through that chiseled spectrum my world grew. If I hadn’t got out of that through education, I probably would believe what I had come to know. My world would be poorer because of it.
The rest as they say is history. However, there is nothing like “world travel” to enlighten you more. You all know I’ve been to Bangladesh three times, touching down in Europe, and Singapore on the way. However, one of my first exposures to the pressures in the third world came to me in Trinidad earlier in my career. That’s where some people wanting to buy American money besieged me. In my naïve view at the time I couldn’t understand why these Trinidadian people didn’t realize I was Canadian.
I suppose in many ways some of this mirrors what Enamul was thinking as he made his way from Bangladesh into the cold, icy winter of 1986 in Guelph Ontario. As close as he could estimate “donuts” were the food of choice for these people of the west. At least he liked the donut called “Maple Dip.” If he hadn’t of liked that, his first impressions of that cold Canadian winter might have being even worse.
As for me, this whole “East West” debate has made me more liberal. I am more open-minded. I certainly have a better appreciation for the ways, means and culture of people far away. I can better understand the public stance of the Chavez’s, Ahmadinejad’s, Clinton’s and Bush. The challenge for the people in the developing world is to measure it for themselves. The west is what it is. It is not necessarily always what it seems.
What Is The Message Between The Lines?
By Dr. A.K.Enamul Haque Ph.D
Ever since we started writing in public or more precisely as soon as East West began to appear in CkTimes, I was not sure whether I had improved this situation in our surroundings or not. My first impression is that we have not been able to change a bit. The debate between Phil and myself was designed to reflect our individual as well as our social mindset on world issues and my sole purpose has been to inform the readers that there is another world and there is another mind. That mind is not necessarily that “bad”.
I have said many times that we, in the East, are somewhat lucky in the sense that we are able to follow the press as well as the electronic media of the west. The west, on the other hand, cannot do so because most of our newspapers are not in English. Oops, Phil might say that’s not true – he gets to read the Bangladeshi Independent and the Daily Star on the net. Agreed but these newspapers have only 20-25 thousand readers and so there news coverage has been very selective. They cannot reveal the minds of the general public. In my episodes, I have tried to fill the gap. Whether I have been successful or not is still a question. Before moving on to other subjects, let me just give you the number of readers of a typical Bangla national daily in Dhaka – it is often over 250,000.
I read Chavez’s statement on my mobile set through a yahoo news alert service. I remember telling this to my colleagues in the campus and we all started laughing. Why? It just tells you the fact that no one likes others to mingle in its internal affairs. Chavez did not like it and so he became so un-polite.
I was also following the statements made by Ahmedinejad during his trip to New York. At one point he mentioned that for the past 20 years the US was never friendly to the Iranian people or its government and so its statement against Iran is not credible enough. It was a very intelligent reply from him! It left us thinking about the US-Iran relationship since Carter’s time. It is a fact. The US never liked toppling the Shah in Iran. Therefore, it is not very unlikely that the US will take every chance to see that Iran cannot develop and it has been doing so for many years. Unfortunately, Iran has recovered from many international conspiracies. First, the US government could not topple the Islamic clerics from power although they have spent millions of dollars to do so. Second, the Iraqi war against Iran and Iran seemed to have overcome that too. Third, the US war on Terrorism. In all the cases, Iran has remained cool and protected its own interests and has been able to improve its economic conditions although it is clear that years of US non-cooperation did not allow Iran to get the full advantage of its economic reforms.
To me if this continues and if Iran can become a success (despite the odds) the US-led role models will suffer a defeat. This may not be acceptable to the US policy makers and so they would try to find ways and means to harass Iran. When Ahmedinejad was running for the Presidency of Iran I remember the US press release on him – he was accused of having participated in the occupation of US embassy in Iran. The US press wanted to pressurize the Iranians to vote against him just like what they have been trying to do in Palestine. In both the cases, the people spoke strongly against US policies – Iranians voted Ahmedinejad and Palestinians voted Hamas into power.
The US became more irritated and annoyed with such insensitive nature of the people of these two nations. However, to me it was expected. Just yesterday, we had an interesting issue at hand in Bangladesh. Let me tell you what it is. Our two lady leaders do not speak to each other for the past 10 years. Begum Zia, who is currently the PM and Sheikh Hasian, who is currently the Opposition leader have not spoken in public since 1991. This is a major problem for us. People as well as our development partners were not very happy about it. Meanwhile, the country and its economy are struggling with hartals (strikes) called by opposition parties. Seeing the problem of the leaders, the US Ambassador began to work behind the scenes to make a political dialogue happen between two parties led by these ladies. Our business leaders also came forward to break the impasse. The British High Commissioner, who is also a Bangladeshi origin, also came forward to help but nothing worked.
Finally, the US Ambassador called on these leaders and requested them to have a meeting between the general secretaries of their parties. The call was a friendly one but many people were not happy. Cartoons appeared in newspapers in Bangladesh where it showed the US Ambassador is the cowboy taking two cows (with human heads) to the “dialogue box”. You can see the public reactions when foreign Ambassadors get involved in domestic affairs. Yesterday, the Ambassador invited the two Secretary Generals to meet at her residence and start discussing the problem over dinner. The Opposition initially liked it and asked the government to send its Secretary to the dinner for discussion. This morning the Secretary of the ruling party declined to attend the dinner. He was polite and explained that while he always considers the US a development partner, a friendly nation but he cannot accept that the US Ambassador comes to mediate their quarrel. Within a very short time, the opposition also reacted and totally declined that the dinner was intended to begin a dialogue. This story simply presents the sensitiveness of problems when a third party gets involved in the internal affairs of a country.
This is very similar in Iran, Iraq, Afghanistan, and Palestine and also in Lebanon. It is possibly true in Sudan too. I believe it might not be seen as a problem when the US intervenes and mediates a problem between English Canada and French Canada. Will the Canadians like US to mediate this quarrel? If no, then you might be able so see the subliminal messages in my writings.