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Israel and the US’s attack on Iran and the dastardly assassination of Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, the Iranian supreme leader and head of state, has taken place barely two weeks after the American secretary of state Marco Rubio in his speech at the European Security Conference bemoaned the terminal decline of Western empires and the apparent end of the West’s dominance, among other things, by anti-colonial uprisings. Such uprisings, he said, had transformed the world for the worse and the Western world’s future, according to Rubio, needed to be saved from being “ a faint and feeble echo of our past”.

Illustration: Pariplab Chakraborty.

Those utterances and US President Donald Trump’s convoluted idea of the ‘America First’ principle and of ‘Make America Great Again’ are manifested in the sinister manner in which Israel and the US attacked Iran and the death and destruction they have caused not just for Iran but the entire West Asian region as well as the global order created during the post-Second World War period.

Gandhi’s vision of a post-World War order

That global order witnessed the rise of the Asian, African and Latin American countries after they secured independence from the highly exploitative Western empires – the decline of which has been lamented by Rubio. Mahatma Gandhi anticipated the emergence of such a global order even before the end of the Second World War in 1945.

In his article “Suppose Germany Wins,” published in the Harijan on February 15, 1942, Gandhi while emphatically stating that the same method of non-violent struggle would be employed against Germany as was done in case of Britain presciently wrote:

“And out of this holocaust must arise a new order for which the exploited millions of toilers have so long thirsted. The prayers of........

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