Sow the wind and reap the whirlwind

 BC and known as prophet of doom. He was married to a prostitute, representing symbolically the Covenant of God with Israel, which proved itself unfaithful by its practices of idolatry, but God did not abandon it.

The Book of Hosea is included among the “minor prophets” of the Bible, but that does not make it less important. He sounded a severe warning to Israel to abandon idolatry and seek repentance. The failure to repent is believed to have resulted in Israel being caught in a whirlwind when Israel was conquered and the Jews were deported to Babylon by its King Nebuchednezzar II.

Two generations of Jews remained in exile, moaning by the rivers of Babylon, as we are reminded by Boney M, until the Persian emperor Cyrus defeated the Assyrians and allowed the exiled Jews to return to their home land. The human memories are short-lived and this is not an exclusive feature of the Jews, but their excessive love for money and greed in business made them a vulnerable target across history.

The Nazi holocaust is probably uppermost in our memories, but that tragic history was repeated often times in the western history. The ongoing misdeeds at the Wall Street in our times may bring about a world economic collapse, drawing once again the sword of the avenging angel upon the silent manipulators of the world market with the assistance and collaboration of a superpower sustained by it.

The modern day avatars of Hosea are likely to be ignored, just as in the past, allowing the sowers of the wind to reap the whirlwind. It is unfortunate though that many innocent victims are carried away by it. The Jewish attraction for golden calf is narrated in the Bible (Exodus 32). We are told how Moses broke the two tablets of Covenant law on the golden calf, which he burnt to dust and gave to the idolatrous Israelites to drink.

While Moses ordered the faithful Levites to slaughter the culprits, God punished the surviving guilty with a plague. We do not know if that plague had anything to do with the gold dust they were made to drink.

The insatiable greed is directly or indirectly linked with world calamities through institutionalized interests that hide behind the modern political and economic systems.

Born out of colonial loot and exploitation of slave labour. The so-called democratic systems of the modern world act as gold dust thrown into our eyes, but which continue to be deadly effective in luring nations into adventurism and killer projects.

The most that can be said in favour of modern democracies is that they provide opportunity to share the loot in turns, instead of leaving it to individual dictators to enjoy for longer periods with unchallenged opposition. For the rest they open the floodgates of “freedom” which no political system has yet succeeded in damming. It becomes “rule of law” when the power is enforced in the name of the State, but classified as “terrorism” when marginalized groups among the exploited seek to wield power to change their lot. The result is there for all to see in the growing unrest, which is not entirely of outside provenance.

As reported recently by the International Centre for Counter-Terrorism in The Hague [http://bit.ly/1SIQBHV] of the estimated 3,922 to 4,294 foreign fighters from EU member states in Syria and Iraq, some 2,838 came from Belgium, Britain, France and Germany. These unpleasant data fly in the face when the West tries to convince us of its superior values, instead of admitting failure and proving right Shakespeare’s famous dictum that “something is rotten in the state of Denmark”?

The problems facing EU today cannot be explained merely by the refugee crisis, or by financial crisis in the Euro zone, or by the Russian new-found ability to challenge NATO expansion bordering its frontier. The mother of all known problems, and others that may be in incubation phase, can only be explained as a “whirlwind” that the West is reaping from the wind of freedom sown by the French Revolution with the help of guillotine, and centuries of economic loot of the colonized world, enhanced by the mass production and use of fire arms, since its Industrial Revolution.

“The chickens are coming home to roost”, could be a valid alternate title for this essay reflecting upon the aftermath of the superpower display of the West in various parts of the globe since World War II, and specially in the past two decades in the Middle East.

At the root of the political extremism in the Middle East and Africa are artificial borders imposed by the western colonialism, causing ongoing conflicts among local tribal and other social groups, competing to benefit from their national resources following decolonization. The West is embroiled in this unrest and feels compelled to intervene, because of its continuing dependence upon oil resources.

To conclude, the growing unrest within EU it is due to growing awareness that the central European powers, most of them former successful colonial powers, have constructed EU a new intra- European colonial empire to replace the colonial empires they lost. The EU members of its periphery feel cheated.

Teotonio R. de Souza is the founder-director, Xavier Centre of Historical Research, Goa (1979-1994).