Moral vacuum at the heart of modernity, now embodied in US laws!

 

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MAN and nature are running out of time. That’s the core message of the UN Inter-governmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) report released this week.

` UN secretary-general António Guterres called the report a “code red for humanity”. “The evidence is irrefutable: greenhouse gas emissions from fossil fuel burning and deforestation are choking our planet and putting billions of people at immediate risk.”

` What can we, individually and collectively, do about it?

` Many animals and human beings cannot survive at high temperatures. Seattle, a temperate climate city, hit 104 degrees Fahrenheit in June, only four degrees below the maximum 108 degrees where humans can’t survive.

` Like the pandemic, the twin effects of climate warming and biodiversity loss are hurting the bottom half of society who are most vulnerable to natural and/or man-made disasters.

` Indeed, indigenous and native people who live closest to nature, comprising 5%-6% of world population scattered in remote areas, are likely to face loss of culture, lives and habitat because all their water, food and livelihoods will be devastated by climate change.

` In essence, we are in an existential situation whereby nature is being destroyed by human excess consumption, which creates pollution and carbon emission, but all this is made possible by monetary creation by bankers and businesses who seem to care more about their profits than the human condition.

` Thus, decisions over climate change, human activities, financialisation and globalisation are essentially moral questions over the power to lead us out of the wilderness of nuclear destruction through war or planetary burning.

` In his monumental “History of Western Philosophy” (1946), British philosopher Bertrand Russell argued that those in power understand that they have twin powers over nature and political power to rule other human beings.

` Traditionally, the limits to such power have been God and truth. But today, religions are also in turmoil on what is their role in finding pathways out of the current mess. Furthermore, FakeNews obscures what is truth.

` The current mess is not unlike the Lost People wandering in the desert waiting for Moses to find the 21st century version of the 10 Commandments. Unfortunately, the 17 UN Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) are aspirations and not commandments.

` As economists say, climate change is a market failure, but there is no modern day Moses nor operating manuals to translate SDGs to environmental, social and governance (ESG) projects and programmes for businesses, governments and social institutions.

` In this twin injustices against man and nature, people sense that there is both a moral vacuum in globalised modernity, as well as lack of a shared, practical pathway out of planetary destruction. If secular science or politics cannot help us, is religion the solution?

` Ironically, religion has played a far larger role in the current quandary than meets the eye.

` Two papal bulls empowered the Portuguese and Spanish conquests of new land in the second half of the 15th century. Papal bulls are public decrees, letters patent or charters issued by a Catholic pope.

` The Papal Bull Romanus Pontifex issued by Pope Nicholas V in 1455 gave Portuguese King Alfonso the right to “invade, search out, capture, vanquish and subdue all Saracens and pagans whatsoever, and other enemies of Christ whatsoever placed, and the kingdoms, dukedoms, principalities, dominions, possessions and all movable and immovable goods whatsoever held and possessed by them and to reduce their persons to perpetual slavery... to convert them to his profit... [such assets becoming] justly and lawfully acquired.”

` The Papal Bull Inter Caetera, issued after Christopher Columbus returned from America in 1493, not only reinforced the Spanish right to property and slavery seized or colonised from non-Christian kingdoms or pagan natives, but also established the Doctrine of Discovery.

` This doctrine formed the basis of national and later international laws that gave licence to explorers to claim vacant land (terra nullius) on discovery. Vacant land meant land not populated by Christians, and thus the Christian discoverers and occupiers could have legal title to them, regardless of the rights of the indigenous people.

` In short, historically it was the Church that gave the moral blessing for colonisation, slavery and genocide during the Age of Globalisation. The tragedy is that the Doctrine of Discovery is now embodied in US laws.

` In the historic case of Johnson vs McIntosh (1823), Supreme Court Justice John Marshall ruled: “According to every theory of property, the Indians had no individual rights to land; nor had they any collectively, or in their national capacity; for the lands occupied by each tribe were not used by them in such a manner as to prevent their being appropriated by a people of cultivators. All the proprietary rights of civilised nations on this continent are founded on this principle. The right delivered from discovery and conquest, can rest on no other basis; and all existing titles depend on the fundamental title of the crown by discovery.”

` If humanity still treats nature as a free asset to be mastered, and other human beings to be dominated and disenfranchised because of the Doctrine of Discovery, how can we move forward morally to create human inclusivity and planetary justice?

` Under secular science, the elites that control the media, military, economy, political or social institutions have forgotten that they are not masters of man and nature, but stewards to protect human well being and nature for future generations.

` In this polarised age, we forget that the shamans of the indigenous people carry ancient wisdoms about how to live with nature and each other through traditional values, medicine and shared rituals. The shamans are not seers but healers and carriers of tribal memories and values.

` When modern scientists and technocrats have no solutions to present problems except more speed, scale and scope in the rush to modernity, isn’t it time to listen to traditional wisdoms from those who have living but dying memories of how to live with nature and each other?

` Without moral bearings, no wonder we have no maps out of the current mess.

 

By Tan Sri Andrew Sheng (born 1946) is Hong Kong-based Malaysian Chinese banker, academic and commentator. He started his career as an accountant and is now a distinguished fellow of Fung Global Institute, a global think tank based in Hong Kong.^[1] He served as chairman of the Hong Kong Securities and Futures Commission (SFC) before his replacement by Martin Wheatley in

Andrew Sheng comments on global affairs from an Asian perspective. The views expressed here are his own.

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Human right violators: USA,Canada, Autralia, UK, EU - Racism against Asians: Forever foreigner, alien or pendatang

 

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STOP THE HATE ... 

 

Why are they choosing to speak up for Asians？





反仇视亚裔浪潮席卷全美 “人权灯塔”为何常年灯下黑？20210330 |《今日关注》

 

 

Children attend a March 17 vigil at Clemente Park in Lowell, Massachusetts, for the victims of the shooting spree in Atlanta. Erin Clark/The Boston Globe via Getty Images

 

MY sister and her husband, both senior citizens, are very cautious about going out.

It’s not just because of Covid-19. It’s because they fear being victims of a hate crime in their country for simply being Chinese. The country? Australia.

Which is ironic because they made the difficult decision to leave Malaysia 30 years ago to give their children a better future in a nation they believed would play fair and recognise talent with no quota system based on race.

But anti-Asian sentiments are making headlines everywhere as the number of attacks on people who look “chinky” rise alarmingly in many Western countries.

A study on police records in 16 of the largest American cities showed hate crimes increased 150% against Asian people in 2020. The latest is the March 16 attack on three Atlanta spas that killed six Asian-American women.

In the UK, hate crimes toward Chinese, East and South-East Asians rose 300% in just the first quarter of 2020. In Vancouver, Canada, the number rose from a mere dozen in 2019 to 142 in 2020, a 717% increase.

And an Australian National University survey of more than 3,000 people found 85% of Asian Australians reported at least one instance of discrimination between January and October last year.

My sister and her husband live in Sydney and being sensible people, they wear their face masks whenever they venture out. That has earned them brushes with white idiots who come up to them and deliberately cough in their faces.

The pandemic, because of its assumed origins in China, has brought out latent, long-simmering resentment, prejudice, even jealousy towards Asians in Western countries.

Asian immigrants, notably the Chinese, because of their capacity for hard work and determination to succeed, created backlashes wherever they landed in droves.

The United States and Australia treated the Chinese badly. Brought in to work on building America’s railroads, they were accused of stealing jobs from the whites. Chinese gold miners in Australia faced the same accusation. Both countries enacted anti-Chinese immigration laws; the US Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882 and the White Australia Policy of 1901 to 1911.

The second half of the 20th century was a better time for Asians in the West with the rise of human and minority rights but racism never completely went away.

Emboldened by former president Donald Trump’s four years of insane leadership, the racists in America wormed their way out of the woodwork to wreak havoc on the country’s race relations, particularly in the treatment of black Americans.

Covid-19 gave them the perfect ammunition to revive old hatred towards Chinese people and fuel resentment against China’s rise as a superpower. Since they can’t tell us apart, all East Asians are attacked.

The hate crimes spurred The Washington Post to look at past episodes of a similar nature. One was the 1900 outbreak of bubonic plague in San Francisco in which the Chinese community was made the scapegoat:

“It is likely that the outbreak began with a ship from Australia, but since the first stateside victim was a Chinese immigrant, the whole community was blamed for it. The episode was a prelude to the racism that has been aimed at Asian Americans during the coronavirus pandemic... Trump frequently called it ‘the China virus, ’ ‘the Wuhan virus, ’ and the ‘Kung Flu’.”

What hit me hard was what theconversation.com had to say:

“Research has found that most Americans assume a person of Asian descent is foreign-born, unless there is some aspect of their appearance that clearly marks them as American – such as being overweight.” (This is hilarious, I must say.)

“Asian Americans of all types experience this perception of being ‘forever foreigners’ in a wide range of ways. Regardless of whether some or all – or none – of these latest assaults on Asian Americans are proved to be hate crimes or not, race plays a historic role.”

“Forever foreigners”. Now doesn’t that make you think of how Malaysian Chinese (and Indians) are forever called pendatang? Indeed, race plays a huge role in our history too, and still does.

It was just last month that HRH Sultan Ibrahim Sultan Iskandar felt the need to say that where Johor is concerned, the Chinese are not pendatang but guests invited in by his forefathers dating back to the 16th century to help develop the state.

“They are the ‘Bangsa Johor’ – just like the Malays, Indians and others, who are all Malaysians, ” he was quoted as saying in the interview with Sunday Star (“’The Chinese are not pendatang’”, Feb 21; online at bit.ly/star_chinese).

That was a nice gesture but as Sabahan anthropologist Dr Vilashini Somiah writes in The Evolution of Pendatang on newnaratif.com, the word meaning immigrant, which was originally neutral and without political insinuations, has evolved since the late 1970s to become derogatory and disparaging.

She says the word has been weaponised and “Today, pendatang is used by Malaysian politicians as an exclusionary tool of identity politics” and as a divisive and exclusionary insult by members of the public.

As an example, Dr Somiah recounts the 2010 incident in which a school head called all non-Muslim students “pendatang” and told them to “balik” (return) to their “country”.

That same taunt to go back to China was thrown at Asians in Western countries since the start of the pandemic. We have had none of that in our part of the world.

I did not fear being spat at or coughed on by fellow non-Chinese Malaysians. For once, in a country that is obsessed with race and where every form requires us to state our ethnicity, that did not seem to matter in the fight against the coronavirus.

Malaysians have been fortunate that no major racial riots have taken place since May 13,1969, but the reality is, our race relations have been fraying for decades.

Time and time again, certain politicians have shamelessly alluded to the possibility of another May 13 whenever they felt the need to warn “immigrant” Malaysians not to be too demanding of their rights.

The anxiety my sister feels now in Australia will surely pass and hopefully they remain safe from harm. But this ugly period will not make them regret their decision to emigrate. After all, their sacrifices paid off as their children are doing very well in Sydney.

The most important thing is racism is no longer institutionalised or legitimised in that country.

Australia has laws that make it a crime to discriminate on the basis of age, disability, race and sex in certain areas of public life, including education and employment.

Even that is not seen to be enough after the spate of pandemic-induced racist attacks and there are calls now to “simplify and strengthen Australia’s racial discrimination and vilification processes... to properly protect victims”.

On the other hand, in Malaysia, where it has long been recognised that racial polarisation has increased while racial and religious tolerance has ebbed, the previous short-lived government did plan to table a Religious and Racial Hatred Act to curb the growing number of such cases, particularly on social media.

Back in 2018, the then Minister in the Prime Minister’s Department (Religion) Mujahid Yusof Rawa said the law was to “ensure that our multi-religious and multiracial society is protected from being insulted and belittled”.

But in August 2020, Perikatan Nasional’s National Unity Minister Datuk Halimah Mohamed Sadique told the Dewan Rakyat that there would be no new law as existing ones are able to look after interracial and religious harmony in the country.

I wish I could believe she’s right but as a born and bred Malaysian of Chinese descent who has no desire to call anywhere else home, I think more can be done.

For one, I would like to see calling someone like me a pendatang forever banished.

The views expressed here are entirely the writer’s own.

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中美高层战略对话在即 美不行待客之道 中方严正回应！ 20210319 |《今日关注》CCTV中文国际 中国核心利益没有退让余地 中美需避免零和博弈管控分歧 20210320 |《今日关注》CCTV中文国际  .

 

Searching for Covid-19’s origin

China aid offers Covid-19 vaccine assistance to 80 countries

The first batch of Chinese-donated COVID-19 vaccine doses is unloaded from a plane at Robert Mugabe International Airport in Harare, Zimbabwe on Feb 15, 2021. Photo/Xinhua] 

Vaccine assistance is first large-scale effort of its kind

China is providing and will offer vaccine assistance to 80 countries and three international organizations, the first large-scale assistance of its kind, the country's International Development Cooperation Agency said on Friday.

The vaccines are being donated to a wide range of countries from five continents in a timely and orderly manner, including 26 in Asia and 34 in Africa, the agency's spokesperson Tian Lin said in an interview.

The country also offered vaccine doses to the African Union, the Arab League and the United Nations Peacekeepers, Tian said.

China has acted swiftly to donate the vaccine doses, he said, adding that the nation is also providing injection devices to countries facing difficulties.

So far, over 60 countries have authorized the registration or emergency use of Chinese vaccines, and many foreign politicians have been inoculated with Chinese vaccines, including the president and prime minister of Hungary, the Pakistani president and Chile's president, which Tian said is a vote of confidence in the security and effectiveness of Chinese vaccines.

China applies the strictest quality control measures with regard to its vaccines and ensures the timely delivery of high-quality vaccines, he said.

The moves aim to implement the promise made by President Xi Jinping at the opening of the 73rd session of the World Health Assembly via video link last year that COVID-19 vaccine development and deployment in China, when available, will be made a global public good.

The ongoing assistance is provided to ensure developing countries have fair and timely access to vaccines, and is based on the pandemic situation and the specific needs of related countries, he said.

China provides the assistance to help developing countries save lives, to which it attaches no political strings and has nothing to do with geopolitics, he said.

China is not a savior, but tries to be a friend in need, a sincere partner to be counted on in times of difficulty, he added.

Tian called for efforts to promote the fair distribution of vaccines around the globe. He noted that while high-income countries have quickly acquired a large number of vaccine doses, there are fewer opportunities for poor nations to obtain vaccines.

He said that China firmly opposes selfish behavior such as hoarding, monopolies and "vaccine nationalism", and hopes the international community will do more that is conducive to global cooperation in combating the pandemic.

Vaccine assistance will not affect domestic inoculation, he said, adding that China always offers foreign aid according to the principle of doing the utmost within its capabilities.

- China Daily/ANN/The Star 

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Basics of palliative care

 

 

 

Palliative Care: YOU Are a BRIDGE
https://youtu.be/lDHhg76tMHc

THE process of dying and the death of loved ones create a profound and lasting impact on their families and wider communities.

As a society, we are not exposed enough to be fully equipped to support end-of-life journeys.

We need to be able to normalise the process of death and have the courage to advocate for a holistic care plan not by just buying insurance policies but also by showing love, empathy and compassion. This is known as palliative care, which may begin at the start of life-threatening illnesses to end-of-life journeys.

Dame Cicely Saunders, founder of the modern hospice, described palliative care in its most holistic sense: “You matter because you are you, and you matter to the end of your life. We will do all we can not only to help you die peacefully, but also to live until you die.”

Palliative care regards dying as a normal process in the journey of life, integrating psychological and spiritual dimensions into patient care. A holistic approach care plan enables patients and families to better cope with the course of the illness and provides a support network for bereavement care.

The Covid-19 pandemic has highlighted the importance of palliative care in all healthcare systems. The need for relief from severe suffering, the difficult decision-making and complicated grief brought on by the pandemic are exactly the types of problems that palliative care was designed to help address.

My father, who is a consultant haematologist, treats cancer patients, among other life-threatening blood disorders, and fully supports palliative care causes. I, as a tech start-up builder, believe that blockchain, AI and other automation technologies will drive the future of society. Despite our different calling in life, I also join my father in fully supporting palliative care as essential care for vulnerable members of our community.

We both fully recognise that palliative care does not start and stop with doctors and nurses alone. The success of effective and affordable palliative care lies in the hands of an informed society.

Hospices in Malaysia and Singapore are typically independent non-profit entities run by community members on charitable donations and volunteerism.

Ultimately, palliative care is a community-driven initiative. All of us have a part to play as family caregivers, pastoral caretakers, therapists, healthcare professionals and more.

Through a journey I’ve undertaken as a volunteer carer in a hospice, I have developed a genuine understanding of the principles of palliative care in practice. Hospice environments provide a powerful example of how we as a community can show love, empathy and compassion when facing fear and loss of loved ones.

What matters to patients who are actively dying include relief from pain, maintaining one’s dignity, not dying alone, and having a comforting hand to touch during their end-of-life journey.

Community volunteers can support palliative care nurses and doctors by assisting with non-clinical pain management, such as cleaning and feeding of patients, providing wheelchair assistance, and spending time with patients. These acts of love for others are what truly makes us human.

Through volunteering in a hospice, I was able to face the mirror of death and fully embrace my humanity by showing love, empathy and compassion for the suffering of others – something that technology or AI machines can never truly replicate.

Let’s all do our part today to build a palliative care-aware society, whether it is through advocacy, community volunteerism or giving.

KATHERINE NG LI PEI
Co-founder of Ministry for Good, a non-profit start-up to scale technology for good

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Ministry For Good

Ministry For Good is a non-profit business consultancy and ideas incubation platform founded to improve the lives of people through effective use of spatial technology.

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