Additionally, this push is having the same effect in the United States, breaking it into red and blue states, a division beyond traditional North-South divisions. What’s more voting districts are being split into religious, ethnic, racial, and economic sectors as well, creating the specter of Balkanization.

This leads me to wonder if there isn’t some law of political physics at work. That the more a dominating nation presses for hegemony, the more the pressure produces a breaking point, scattering nations (states) into smaller units, in essence, undoing a nation as it does an empire, as painful the deconstruction as the creation of either.

If this seems like I’m thinking too hard, this notion occurred to me after watching Far From War: Chechnya, the Endless War. This moving documentary, directed by Gustavo Cortes, poignantly chronicles that region’s mayhem. The film’s descriptive copy reads . . .

Dubbed “the silent war of the 21st century,” the conflict between Russia and rebels in the breakaway republic of Chechnya is put into perspective by Moscow Chechens in Gustavo Cortés’s documentary. More than 200,000 Chechens fled to Moscow after the recent war broke out. This migration was but one in a long series of horrific events visited on the Chechens for centuries. Despite discrimination from Russians and apathy from the international community, Moscow Chechens are banding together and here speak out regarding their plight.

In the film, older Chechen men tell of the 1940s, during WW II, when Joseph Stalin deported 400,000 of their people from Russia to the freezing terrain of Kazakhstan. Many perished from the extreme cold and miserable living conditions. Stalin claimed that the Chechens had been collaborating with the Germans, contrary to the fact that thousands of Chechens, including the film survivors, had fought against the Germans in WW II.

These Chechens of the 1940s thought of themselves as loyal, patriotic citizens, though Stalin and perhaps Russia thought of them as a Muslim minority, a conflict that went back to the 18th century. The Chechens return to Russia in the 1950s did not settle the centuries-old conflict, especially not their declaration of independence from the motherland in 1991 as the Soviet Union was crumbling. It brought us to the murders of this decade.

Admittedly, this is a thumbnail sketch of the Chechen situation and hostilities. Chechnya and its people are examples of the larger phenomenon of world Balkanization. An even larger, more transcendent notion comes from the lips of the Chechen woman who narrates the documentary of her homeland and her life.

Though her two children and two of her sisters survived the most recent hostilities, she lost her husband, parents, cousins, friends, neighbors, home, savings and more: a spiritual and emotional locus. Her words are to the effect (and I’m paraphrasing), that after all of this fighting over political ideas there are so many who have been killed -- so many dead that the world of the survivors has also been destroyed. So, one goes on blankly, knowing nothing has changed, including the violence and especially the pointless dying.

Those feelings etched out of the pain of one human being, etched out of the political machinations of history, reverberate these days around the world.

I see that plump-faced woman, tears rolling down her cheeks, a bottomless well of sadness in her eyes. And I see the face of the world, the eternal mother unable to control her own destiny or vulnerability to human beings.

I see that face in Palestine or Iraq, Afghanistan or the Sudan. At home in New Orleans, New York, or in a brown-black race riot in a county jail in Castaic, California; or in a hawk-dove San Joaquin Valley Community, reported in “The Valley’s Not So Civil War” in the February 5, 2006, Los Angeles Times. The fractionating of racial, religious, political, even intellectual groups (for instance faux students spying on so-called dissident college teachers) produces hateful pockets in US communities, even as the surge to world hegemony gets meaner, more out of control.

We find these expressions of Balkanization throughout America, from our largest cities to our smallest bible-thumping towns. Each with their right and wrong side of the tracks, right, left, ultra right, far left, and mean-spirited boosters.

And I’m brought back always to the warnings of that Chechen woman. And always in the film’s background are the smoldering buildings, scattered corpses, tanks rolling over the fractured landscape like prehistoric beasts, jets soaring overhead and firing at will; explosions wrecking buildings, landscapes; landmines wrecking limbs and torsos of children, women, men, animals.

Not a Pretty Picture, Macro or Micro.

And what the film brings, too, is a constant barrage of images: soldiers and citizens running from each other, firing on each other, grappling mano a mano or with the abstract force of bunker busters, engaged in one atavistic grimace to dominate and not be dominated. It is an unhinged humanity, we see. And I must say that a great deal of that unhinging began on 9-11, when the Bush administration committed, I believe, a false-flag attack on America, thereby engendering a reason to attack Afghanistan, to illegally attack Iraq, and now to plan to attack Iran.

In continuing this march, we Balkanize old alliances and gamble with the stability of the world. One instance is Iran’s creating an oil bourse, using the euro as an oil-trading mechanism. Among others, Venezuela’s central banks will use euros to service oil demand as well, which will undermine the value of the already shaky dollar.

As we know, China holds over $200 billion in US cash, Japan even more. China you could say owns the exchange deficit and is really loaning money to the US. This, as the US sags under its debt load. If these countries turned on us further, we’d be in deadly trouble. With each grasp of ours to control some other nation, cracks are made in political tectonic plates. The shifts can be devastating.

Again at home, by illegally spying on citizens and insisting that illegality is a presidential power, by enacting the USAPATRIOT Act, by waging war on contrived evidence, we Balkanize pieces of America, creating those who blindly support and those who consciously resist.

We fractionate into smaller, angrier social groups, each demanding their way: conservative Christians, pro Israeli Zionists, pro-lifers, the not so subtle racist cabal that allowed New Orleans to drown.

In short, our government’s PNAC (Project for the New American Century) agenda of world domination takes precedence over serving the basic needs of our people: education, health care, Social Security, infrastructure, the advancment of science, the preservation of the environment, and the development of sustainable energy sources. All this is subjugated for our budget’s hugest line item: defense, which is mostly offense. And thus we are a nation whose too-long standing armies turned, as Washington warned, to building empire.

It is as William Butler Yeats wrote in the first stanza of his poem, The Second Coming . . .

Turning and turning in the widening gyre
The falcon cannot hear the falconer;
Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;
Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,
The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere
The ceremony of innocence is drowned;
The best lack all convictions, while the worst
Are full of passionate intensity.

And so, when do we hear that Chechen woman’s voice, warning that domination and retaliation are a death-dealing cycle? When do we really see its effects, even when shown them on a home television screen or larger-than-life movie screen, or in real life, scripted by history?

Who knows, perhaps it’s our lot to be caught in this cycle, nature’s way of thinning the heard. Perhaps not. Perhaps there is a way of transcending it through consciousness or simple compassion. And if not, when the Big Bang is made on earth, will it Balkanize us like so many dead stars in the borderless night. Till then, peace, please, peace.

Jerry Mazza is a freelance writer living in New York. Reach him at gvmaz@verizon.net.