The recent terrible killings in Paris should not have happened, need not have
happened, must not happen again - millons
of horrified people must have thought that. We would be hard-hearted and cruel if we didn’t.
Perhaps then the cruelties may have
awakened or strengthened our
determination to oppose war more strongly than ever?
But opposing war is deadly
difficult.
Unnecessary wars have produced chaos and destruction , millions
of people dead, physically and
spiritually maimed, millions homeless, and yet the war
cries are going out stronger than ever :
“We will hunt down …we will pursue to
the outer reaches of the planet ….we are at war with terrorism….we will
increase our bombing missions….we will wipe
out …….” , the language is as old as humankind and as deadly. In the midst of real sorrow for the dead and miserable came the sounds of verbal war dances from governments
and politicians determined to wrench the
progress of our evolution back into primitive
warrior mode lest we might be in danger of evolving into
rational beings who solve problems by thinking and talking rather
than by clubbing each other to death.
Even the ones who celebrate Christmas with songs of peace joined the
ones who celebrate “the festive season” with cries of profit, happily returning war for war, death for death, eye for eye , tooth for tooth while
even the loudest of cries for mercy, peace and dignity were drowned out by the quiet
hum of their drones.
And so , children
will go on being trained to hold
weapons from the age of three, joyfully undoing their parcels of toy guns under the
Christmas tree.
After the massacres there
were still some few voices daring to ask
the real reasons for them : did European
and American governments really believe they could forever wage war comfortably on an enemy a thousand miles away whom they would not
even dignify by looking at them while they killed them? One more despairing,
tattered decency thrown to the wind.
Having successfully reversed whatever success we had in
outlawing terror by torture, governments have now made torture and terror respectable again; they
have thrown the principle of “innocent until proved guilty” to the winds ; they
have exiled politics from the forum and dug it deep into the market place where
those who pay win ; most of the
decencies we gained or thought we gained
after the second world war have not just disappeared but have been stolen from
us by people who wanted too much for themselves at whatever cost but whom we trusted. The atrocities in Paris and so many other places should not have happened,
and neither should the wanton wars in Iraq
and Afghanistan and Syria and Lebanon and a host of other places.
Those wars happened because so many
people really believed they could steal at a distance and kill at a distance while the fellow citizens of those they killed and cheated would be unable
to hit back.
But people do hit back,
even if they have no greater weapon than a brick to hurl though a tormentor’s window. The arrogant invasions which were carefully designed – as their perpetrators clearly said – to create awe and
wonder and terror are being answered by people
who had no terror weapons then but have them
now.
Whether we are on the way, as some people say, to world war
three it is impossible to say. We may be , unless perhaps there is still some rationality lurking somewhere among
the richly greedy of this world.
We need to stop them whether
there is or not.
