You really don’t have fixed views about people and local or international issues until you are a teenager. At that age, you know it all. Everything is clear to you, and your assessment is formulated in absolute terms. No grey; all is black and white. Then you mature as you grow up. The grey becomes part of the equation, and you stop talking in absolute terms. Your assessment now takes into account relativity, circumstances, and possibly putting yourself in other people’s shoes. Such is life.
Then you get older and you tend to become less tolerant and your views become absolute again. Not necessarily in the same way as when you were a teenager, but I would say it’s close. You now have firm beliefs in ideas and ideologies, and you have a clear opinion about people and issues. My sister once told me something about that which still resonates in my ears. “I’m over fifty now,” she said, “I can afford to say what I think.”
Being in that category where I can afford to say what I think, I know that there are two basic camps in this world. The first one, led by the United States and its poodles, basically aims to dominate the world using any means possible. It is empowered by its fiscal power in addition to its control over the international banking system, and it is driven by brute greed. The other camp is essentially everybody else, and its members include Russia, China, and all countries opposed to American hegemony. I have no doubt that the other camp too would like to dominate the world. There, I said it! The unipolar world is behind us now and so are the ideologies such as capitalism, communism, socialism, etc. Communist China today practically has a free-market economy, and the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea has some sort of communist regime. The only clear difference is whether you belong to this camp or the other. I am also certain that the leaders of both camps strategize day and night about how to destroy the other camp.
No point (or space, for that matter) now to go into examples to demonstrate what this camp or that camp does in order to achieve its goal. However, just about every single military or political conflict in the world today, whether in Syria, Yemen, Venezuela, Ukraine, Crimea, etc., is a battlefield for the two camps. Unfortunately, the people of these hotspots pay the price – their countries are being torn apart.
No grey area about this in my mind. It is black and white as far as I am concerned. I simply cannot stand the hypocrisy, the lies, the double standards, and the sheer cruelty of the camp led by the United States under the pretext of promoting democracy. I realize that those in the other camp are not angels either, but there is a world of difference, and there is no doubt in mind who are the good guys and who are the bad guys. My allegiance is clear, and I say it with a teenager’s certainty. I am no poodle!