M.D. Nalapat
WASHINGTON, India, Aug. 3 (UPI) -- What
is inevitable cannot be prevented. It can only be redirected in ways either
less harmful or actually helpful.
In the 1920s, several moralistic U.S. politicians
enacted The Volsted Act, making the production and sale of alcohol illegal
everywhere in American. Predictably, that prohibition led to the rise of
nationwide organized crime and the proliferation of bootleg alcohol.
Three decades later, several states in
newly independent India attempted the same experiment, only to lose hundreds of
citizens through the consumption of illicit brew, and to watch crime syndicates
multiply to meet the demand.
Modern demographic trends mandate
significant migration into the European Union. Thanks to laws and procedures as
unrealistic as Prohibition, traffickers in human beings, as opposed to bootleg
hooch, are not in large part supplying the demands for labor, operating mainly
out of North Africa, East Europe and the China coast
None of these three regions has
institutions and societal habits that compare favorably to those found in
western democracy. While most countries in East Europe are now democracies, at
least partly, habits of the past five decades continue to infect the elites and
the rest of the population -- further effecting their re-adjustment to
societies where free choice is taken for granted.
It is not accidental, for instance, that
the largely Italian "Mafia" that rule the criminal underworld in the
United States and Europe from the 1920's on has, by the late-1990s, been
replaced in several key European cities by their "Romanian","
Russian" and "Albanian" counterparts.