Spirituality and Ecological Hope

Fostering Ecological Hope

Today from Margaret Swedish:

I’m catching up with my NY Times reading today after a few days of separation.  So I had missed this front page article about the visit of the president of Kazakhstan to the US.  Bush received him with nothing less than a state dinner, and we know he hates state dinners. 

VP Cheney has also been pretty chummy with the Kazahk president, Nursultan A. Nazarbayev.  Visited him last May and complimented him on the country’s ‘political development.’

Kazakhstan is a former Soviet republic, now a strategically important Central Asian country.  Well, you know why — oil.

Now, Bush is all over the news in recent weeks talking about how we are fighting for democracy in the Middle East, Iraq, all over.  This is the great US export he’s pushing on the world — democracy.

Meanwhile, over there in Kazakhstan, there is a little problem – the anti-democratic tendencies of the government.  As the Times notes, these include suspicious murders of  two political opponents, corruption, fixed elections, and more.  Nazarbayev even shut down two US-funded ‘democracy’ groups just before leaving for Washington.  You can read more about the country’s human rights problems by reading, well, our own State Department’s report on Kazakhstan.

No matter.  He’s got oil.

The revealing quote in the article comes early, from Yevgeny A.  Zhovtis, head of one of those US-funded organizations:

There are four enemies of human rights: oil, gas, the war on terror and geopolitical considerations.

Okay, the Bush administration:  check, check, check, and check.  Oh, and add this as well — our Constitution seems to have the same enemies.

This growing competition for the remaining reserves of oil and gas, and for the pipelines to get them to port and then to our homes and businesses, is going to continue to get ugly.  It is one of the great moral challenges we face as we come to the end of the era of cheap fossil fuels — just how much violence and repression we will be willing to tolerate before our consciences kick in, before we say, this is absurd — we have got to start rethinking how we are going to live in this world.

Or just listen to what they are saying in Kazakhstan, this time after Cheney did his two-step last spring – meeting with opposition leaders just after meeting with Nazarbayev and expressing his support for the government:

Kazahkstan has gone along with a lot of the American oil agenda with the unspoken understanding that the Kazakhstan population is not going to be provoked.  There isn’t to be a  ‘color revolution’ here, and for five to seven years we don’t have to worry about needing to introduce genuine democracy.  We get a strategic pause.

Let’s see now.   If you’re Iraq and didn’t play along, you get invaded.  If you’re Venezuela and didn’t play along, you get attempted coups and assassinations directed your way.  But if you are anti-democratic and ‘go along with the American agenda,’ you get ‘a strategic pause.’  Hey, even more, you get called ‘a free nation’ by the champion of democracy, George Bush.

It’s one of the reasons why I keep saying that the issues we are dealing with here are more profoundly moral and spiritual than anything else.  They go to the very heart of our values as human beings on this Earth.