It’s a pretty simple choice, freedom or oppression. Take your pick

HERE we are at the apex of civilisation, much of the world with enough to eat, mostly literate, many of us in cities of almost unthinkable complexity that function smoothly, and with human ingenuity changing the way we live on an almost weekly basis.

Your car talks to you, gives you directions, and might even park itself; the towering achievements of English literature can be found on an e-reader at your fingertips; doctors can operate on you remotely while viewing a screen in another room, perhaps another country.

We can - and do, and should - genetically modify seeds so that crop yields from low rainfall latitudes are considerably better than they were only five years ago.

And our movements are recorded from almost every vantage point. Another good thing: look at the crimes CCTV has solved recently.

But we could still blunder into an apocalypse any day.

And if we do, we can blame the sixth deadly sin: envy.

Pope Gregory I added envy to the list in 590AD.

He knew a bit about it. Young Gregory (it was the name his mum and dad gave him) grew up in a Rome of invasions, famine and violence, and those troubled times helped shape his opinion that envy is perhaps the strongest of human emotions.

Today, evidence that he was right is everywhere and threatens our world order.

Take North Korea. It wasn't all that long ago that this blighted nation was fitter and stronger than its southern counterpart.

North Korea started the Korean War - as it will start the next - and can claim not to have lost, even if it did migrate back to the 38th parallel.

But this is only because it gained the support of China and the Soviet Union, then quite a player in international affairs, and because the West was weary of international conflict so soon after World War II.

A quick check of the scoreboard tells another story. Leaving Korean civilians aside, about 200,000 members of that far off "coalition of the willing" lost their lives, including 339 Australians.

But, and this figure is debated, we killed almost 750,000 of the opposition.

It was a dreadful and pointless loss of life.

In hindsight, we probably should have used atomic bombs on North Korea, as the West had a few years before at Hiroshima and Nagasaki in order to subdue the Japanese. 

The men who ordered those attacks on Japan are often vilified these days by historical revisionists, but those bombs saved lives in the end, and certainly saved a suicidal Japan from itself.

The overfed tyrant Kim Jong-un has inherited the position of supreme leader of North Korea, a job given to his grandfather by the Soviets at the end of World War II, and which he picked up when his dad dropped dead of a heart attack. Good thing that: In later years, he had taken to sponsoring international terrorism.

Friendless in a dangerous world, the young Kim is now threatening Armageddon and saying he will mercilessly attack the US and South Korea.

It's an attempt to convince influential North Koreans dubious about his IQ that he's up to the job and has a Black Caviar-like bloodline.

But really it's envy.

North Korea's annual gross domestic product is $1800 per person. 

Some North Koreans are so poor and short of food they have resorted to cannibalism.

In the south, GDP is $32,020 per person, which is what you will get from decades of capitalism, freedom and market forces.

South Korea is the world's 15th biggest economy.

North Korea comes in at 103 between Nepal and the Ivory Coast.

This is the crunch. Here's the envy.

Many North Koreans - not those in the pantomimes you see on the evening news goosestepping to oblivion - are starving, indeed, going insane from hunger, and even eating each other.

A war will distract them.

It's a similar story with the envious and resentful among the Arabs and Persians (both of whom live Arab lives, even if Iranians are haughtily dismissive of their neighbours).

Next month, it will be 65 years since Israel was declared a state by David Ben-Gurion.

Things weren't promising for the fledgling nation surrounded by hostile neighbours: it had almost no natural resources, inadequate water and little arable land.

Its founders probably knew from the outset the wars would come. Ben-Gurion lived long enough to see two of them, Israel dealing with Egypt, Jordan, Syria and Iraq in just six days in 1967 (God created the world in six days, but still he'd have been impressed by the Israelis), and then defeating the same no-hopers in 19 days six years later.

These days, grumpy neighbours still battle with the concept of Israel's existence.

Lacking the firepower to deliver Israel's destruction, they send in children with bombs strapped to their bellies to blow up innocents.

While Israelis - among them more than 1.5 million voting Arabs, the world's luckiest and most liberated - have built their cities, turned granite into green with imaginative dry-land farming, and cherished education as the best way to advance their country, their resentful neighbours have looked on not in wonder, but in anger.

It's envy. While Israel has developed one of the world's most advanced economies, its GDP has grown to $32,351.

That's the same as South Korea.

The Palestinian equivalent is $1924.

That's the same as North Korea.

If I lived in North Korea, I'd pray for change.

If I lived in Palestine, I'd vote for it.

If I wanted it.

 

Alan Howe is Herald Sun executive editor