Game changers

A lot of events are unfolding world-wide. Each day we get chilling news that we wonder what the world is going into. 

Even in the Philippines we see game changing events, triggered mainly by President Benigno Aquino. His unconstitutional collection and expenditures of billions in public funds, his intransigence against the Supreme Court and the rising tide of public protests against his government make us wonder what the end game of his administration would be.

Let us momentarily set aside commentaries on his State of the Nation Address as almost all television and print media analysts speak their minds. Even Facebook is collecting a lot of ideas that we need to pause for a while and see a wider picture of the world in flux.

The Philippine’s population has breached the 100 million mark and some see disaster ahead. That is precisely what the population control advocates want us to see as if the world ends tomorrow or the country will experience terrible hardships because we have now, by Department of Health count, over 100 million people to feed, clothe, educate and care for.

Doomsayers choose to forget that is also what the population controllers said in 1960 and now here we have the President in his SONA telling us how wonderful life is now under his stewardship, how the International Monetary Fund and the World Bank are praising the country of economic strides never before experienced, how many billionaires we have now, and how many billions of dollars our overseas workers are remitting.

We are even being billed as the new Asian tiger (devouring who?) and our national reserves had never been as high as now. The President even gave the Central Bank (apparently without the CB asking for it) billions of pesos because demand for money is increasing to create more economic wealth.

So who is afraid of the 100 million Filipinos? As former US President Bill Clinton said during his visit here, we are fortunate we have a young population while others (the industrial worlds especially) have an aging population.

But the 100 million will be game changers in due time if the government today fails to put an end to official corruption that deprives the people of opportunities to progress. Already classrooms are packed 70 to a class and while we have an oversupply of education graduates, there is dearth of over 20,000 teachers for schools.

But there is a greater danger that lurks today, greater because unless cooler heads and the experiences of the two world wars of the last century intervene we are in for annihilation.

It is now clear that Russian President Vladimir Putin is changing the game of international cooperation to world confrontation. For those who know of the preceding events that lead to World War II, the Russian moves are akin to that of Hitler. The parallelism is too closely similar that the end game will be the end of all geopolitical games.

Hitler, hurt by the German defeat in World War I and the humiliating Treaty of Versailles, used Aryan purity and cultural affinity with Austria and then the neighboring countries with Germanic origins to annex these countries. The Allied Nations acquiescence to the incursions of Hitler because after all these countries were Germanic. Emboldened Hitler expanded his reach by claiming Gdansk in Poland as its own. 

What Hitler was doing in Europe, Japan was doing in Asia, invading Shanghai and infiltrating neighboring countries. Unimpeded by Allied appeasement to retain “peace in our time”, Hitler and Tojo finally unleashed their armies.

Putin is doing the same. He felt betrayed by the collapse of the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics that reduced its domain to the original Russia. First he took Crimea claiming it belonged to Russia, not Ukraine. The West imposed effete sanctions and he thought he can expand his reach.

He fueled the Ukrainian rebellion and when the Western countries tightened the screw of sanctions, he increased military and financial assistance to the separatist.

There is now proof that Russian hand and weaponry shot down MH17. Russia is supporting nuclear armaments of Iran and arming Hamas, the Syrian rebels and now the Libyan militants to create pockets of war. The Islamic States of Iraq and Syria are killing Christians who refuse to convert to Islam and destroying churches and monasteries. These conflicts are keeping the hands of the West off-balanced.

If China and North Korea get involved, there will be game changes of Armagedon proportions. World War II would have been a child’s play.*    

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