Bloody summer

By Deauwand Myers

Recently, President Barak Obama declared the 20th and 21st centuries as being the best time to be alive in all of human history. In 1995, violent crime in America was at or above 700 incidents per 100,000 people. Today, the number is half that, and decreasing. Some diseases, like polio, the measles, and rubella, for example, which crippled or killed many millions of people, have been eradicated, or nearly so. Technologies have made work, life, and travel more convenient, faster, safer, and less polluting. Women, like many racial, religious, and sexual minorities, are nearing equality.

All of these are true. Yet, you'd forgive me if I'm more cynical about all of this. My grandparents were alive after the First Great War (over 30 million dead), only to be followed by World War II (over 60 million dead). These, along with Stalin's Purges, The Korean War, The Vietnam War, Iraq Wars One and Two, conflicts in peace time, and famine, have cost an aggregate human death toll outstripping the combined populations of Korea and Japan: over 200 million.

Further, the means and technologies by which we wage wars have dramatically increased in lethality. The eight known nuclear powers (with sophisticated nuclear warheads and the ability to deliver them over vast distances, a distinction not yet achieved by North Korea): The United States, Russia, the UK, France, China, India, Pakistan and Israel, have a combined nuclear arsenal to effectively and instantaneously destroy thousands of Earths.

And then we have the summer of 2016. Being an avid consumer of news, I have seen American police killings of black men, recorded on video in gruesome detail. Worse, in sheer number, this summer has seen the most terrorist attacks (and deaths thereof) in over a decade in countries like Iraq, Turkey, France, America, and Afghanistan. Over 500 terrorist attacks have occurred from May to July of 2016, with deaths in the many hundreds, each more lethal and spectacular in scope and scale than the one preceding it.

War, murder, genocide, torture, maiming, pogroms, and proscriptions are older than recorded history. And so, as we have become more sophisticated, we have not.

The duality of modernity and these throwbacks to a time before electricity is jarring for the senses, to be sure. Are liberal democracies, and human advancements in general, the cure for what ails the human condition?

Let's go back to the cognitive dissidence of modernity and the simultaneous rejection of science, rationality, reason, and empirical evidence.

In countries where there are white majorities (The United States and the UK, for example), plenty of the social unrest within that demographic is racially informed, by way of economic anxiety. Real wage growth, the ability to accrue wealth, and opportunities for gainful employment has all stagnated. The wealth gap between the very rich and the unwashed masses has increased.

Globalization, people argue, is part of the problem. This is why Bernie Sanders, a democratic socialist, and Donald Trump, an eccentric and egocentric narcissist, have garnered such attention and political success (as of the writing of this article, Donald Trump has secured the presidential nomination of the Republican Party, if you can believe it).

Liberal democracies and neo-liberalism have helped make all of this economic anxiety possible. Both progressive and conservative political parties in much of the developed world have embraced deregulation of the banking sector, partial privatization of public services, the lowering of corporate taxes, and stagnated spending on social welfare programs.

In America, these policies, over many years, have led to plenty of whites not being able to make living wages. These same whites emphatically voted for politicians who helped make it so, out of an affinity for social value/cultural issues (anti-abortion rights and gun rights, for example) and racial and ethnocentric anxieties. In America and the UK, working class whites have voted against their economic interests for generations.

In Korea, it hasn't been much better. Taxation has decreased, particularly for the wealthy and the private sector, whilst Korea spends less per capita on social welfare programs than most other OECD countries.

Further, domestic and foreign policy, like from the US, have only helped to inflame Islamism. Orchestrating a coup in Iran, leading to a theocracy, the second Iraq War, and being a close, decades'-long ally to the hyper-conservative nation of Saudi Arabia (a country that's funded schools across the globe preaching a cancerous, misogynist, homophobic, anti-rational, and implicitly violent form of Islam) are just a few examples.

Brexit, Trump, the refugee crisis from the Syrian civil war, the racial tensions and violence in the US, and the horrors of recent terrorist attacks aren't organic. In no small part, they've formed from poor judgment and poor leadership. America, Korea, and the UK are all democracies.

Democracies deserve the governments they get and the world said governments create.

Deauwand Myers holds a master's degree in English literature and literary theory, and is an English professor outside Seoul. He can be reached at deauwand@hotmail.com.