The last week was one wretching at the gullet with news, most of it stinking of idiocy and insouciance. In particular, the reports of the Western Australia shark cull reminded me of Dostoyevsky's quote from 'The Brothers Karamazov':
'Man, do not pride yourself on your superiority to the animals, for they are without sin, while you, with all your greatness, you defile the earth wherever you appear and leave an ignoble trail behind you.'
Despite the fact that shark attacks in Australia have fallen to their lowest level in five years (2 fatalities in 2013), this has done little to dissuade fishing contractors from hunting large numbers of tiger, bull and great white sharks and shooting them dead in the water. This wanton profligacy is nothing less than a masculine inclination to exert superiority over anything perceived as a threat to status and machismo. As it is to sharks, so it is the attitude adopted to most everything seen as 'other' or 'dangerous' in our increasingly risk-averse culture.
Destruction is so much the easier default setting than tolerance and coexistence. The respectful acceptance that oceans are the rightful domain of shark species, and were for millions of years before man lumbered up onto the shore, should be sufficient for humans to live with and accept the inherent risks of that habitat. The mass cull of sharks to prevent a small number of attacks is as futile as levelling difficult mountain ski runs because a few have fallen foul of the risk entailed. Just because humans are the de facto dominant species does not necessitate proof through pointless destructive acts such as these.
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Apart from destroying endangered wildlife though, human kind is also exemplary when it comes to dredging the deep ocean trenches of inhumanity. The UN's commission on human rights in North Korea published this week sickening details of state sanctioned mass starvation, political 'disappearances', forced infanticide, abduction, and widespread civilian indoctrination.
The story made headlines for all of roughly one day and was greeted with little more than a contrite shrug from the international community. But why wouldn't it? North Korea's brutal despotic regime is propped up and endorsed by China who would likely veto any attempts made by the UN Security Council to impose any change.
Aside from the practical impediments, on a world psychological level North Korea has long since retreated into a province of complete indifference. If anything, North Korea has been treated as a great joke for years through films like 'Team America' and emphasis placed on the pint-sized tyrant Kim Jung-Il. Indeed, it is a country with so few parallels that people's empathy and ability to perceive possible resolutions are stretched even tauter than in other foreign crises. As the 18th century essayist William Hazlitt perceived, 'the least pain in our little finger gives us more concern and uneasiness than the destruction of millions of our fellow beings.'
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That said, I'd be reluctant to promote any interventionist policy from the outside world; of course pressure needs to be placed on China but the societal shift can only occur from within. With this in mind, it is surely all one can hope for North Korea that at some point there is a mass civilian uprising as is taking place concurrently in Thailand, Venezuela, Bosnia and of course, Ukraine where the battle for legitimacy scaled new peaks of aggression this week.
Despite a total of 88 fatalities, with the disappearance of President Yanukovych and now the imposition of a temporary government, there is at least the semblance of victory for the protestors. It's hard not to speculate on the underlying power play at work though. Russia, desperate to ensnare Ukraine, have remained suspiciously mute of late (too busy preoccupied with their ice carnival of suppressed homosexuality), leading me to predict that the Russian long game is not to step in and assist the pro-Government faction against the insurrection, but to sit back and let chaos reign.
Once the two sides have exhausted one another, Russia could sidle in largely unopposed or install a puppet government to do its bidding. This is much the same long-term scenario predicted for Al Qaeda's influence in Syria once the opposing factions have wrestled themselves into inertia, like the unrequited lover seizing the amorous opportunity after a relationship breaks down.
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