SAJI P MATHEW OFM
Now, as it was then, warfare is the most destructive activity known to humankind. Why then doesn’t our knowledge lead us to quit it? Why is it so difficult to stand the other and their liberties? Why don’t we settle for peace? Why do facts have no bearing on our decisions, voting, and more? Are we sold out to the era of post truth?
Weapons of war to weapons of work
The word weapon has an unholy origin. No one knows its father or mother. In the beginning there were only weapons of work –instruments of gathering and farming. In the Bible there is a brutal story of Cain killing Abel his brother. Cain took Abel for a walk into his fields; from the peaceful stillness of the fields the first war cry was heard -brother forcing brother to death.
We still hear the cries of the innocent from the fields; in recent times, it has become inconsolably loud from the millet fields of Utter Pradesh. Cain picked up one of his weapons of cultivation and murdered Abel. Perhaps that was the beginning of fields becoming battlefields, instruments of cultivation becoming weapons of war. We need to go back to the fields of cultivation and beat weapons of war into instruments of farming; beat our swords into ploughshares.
We have had many; but not one we remember with joy
Our history is sauced with the blood of wars, conflicts and genocides. Sauces perhaps make the dish sensational and exciting.
But it is the meat in the dish that has known the heat of the fire. Whose bloody wars and conflicts are these? Do the soldiers have the freedom and knowledge as to why be they on the frontlines of attack, and why have they put their lives on the line? Did the 19 year old on the millet fields of utter Pradesh know, why she? Who listens to their answers? Who cares for their questions? People, at the table, have grown insensitive, indifferent. We may have questions only when we become the menu on someone else’s table.
Wars and conflicts - from World Wars to tribal wars: we have seen enough of them, but not one do we remember with joy. Wars and political conflicts render people homeless and create refugees. Human rights, rape, torture, violence, mass killing, and trauma perhaps are not our day to day vocabularies. But they are rapidly becoming day to day vocabularies of an increasing number of people in our country and of those around us.
Listen to Clemantine Wamariya, an unfortunate casualty of the 1994 Rwandan genocide, who is left to tell us about the war and genocide; and what occurred after. In her own words, “Genocide does not indicate what this does to a nation. Neighbours and friends kill each other. Someone here says, those over there, they don’t belong, and people believe it; and the war begins.” War often begins far away on the borders, but sooner or later it reaches our home. It displaces people from their homes and homeland. Wamariya recalls with sighs the days after she and her sister were out of their home, “you hide, crawl and run, days are for hiding, nights are for running. You move from a person away from home to a person with no home. You are a refugee. You begin to see bodies not breathing. You are not so much used to it… Years are spent as refugees, always thinking that someone will accept us as their own.”
The need of the hour
What have we, as a humanity, learned from the small and big wars and conflicts in the world? Certain acceptance, some introspection, and radical choices which may take humanity a long way. I believe that the human capacity for invention and innovation is greater now than it was thousands of years ago when humans conceived the idea of war first. We must teach ourselves that our success does not rest on the destruction of the other. We must make radical choices.
Teach undistorted history in schools and institutions
When a man/woman is honoured or praised by one as a freedom fighter; and is vilified by another as a terrorist, there is definitely something wrong. Either one or both of them have become too parochial, self-centered and small. Teach undistorted history in schools and institutions. If we are not objective beyond our narrow patriotism, our history books will become ovens that guard the simmering coals of revenge, which will be passed on to this generation who otherwise are busy building their lives on progress, modernity and enlightened thoughts. Perhaps the tragedy has already happened. A young people’s poll in Britain shows that a significant number of young people in Britain are proud of the Empire (the British Empire about which the hyperbolic compliment was made as an empire on which sun never sets); and they would love to have it back. Have they any idea as to what they are proud of; and at what expense they love to have it back? So they and we have to be taught undistorted history dispassionately. They must know that it was an empire, like many other empires, built on the bloody conquest, exploitation, plunder, death and anguish of innumerable people. There is nothing that causes greater human anguish than wars and political conflicts. It is a huge waste of human potentials.
All have said lies; some perhaps have said it first
Being gifted with an amazing past is great. Being gifted with an amazing ancestry is great. Being gifted with amazing abilities is great. The relevant question for the present is; where do we go from there? The biblical people of Israel, lived in the glory and memory of their past. They were obsessed with the fact, utilizing the expressions of St. Peter from the bible, that they were a chosen race, a royal priesthood, a holy nation, and a people set apart. There were many stories to underline these beliefs. I would say that these stories were quite subjective, and at times they were even myths. They have also become part of sacred scriptures. They were canonized, as others did with their religions and with their stories. They were posited as the objective truth in quite early times. In recent times there are other organized religious groups who are trying to do the same in India and elsewhere. Of course this makes us angry. I think it is an exercise in humility to know, that all have said lies but some have said it first. And just because they did so first, it sounds more like the truth.
Today people are on a mad rush to authenticate their stories and disprove and overthrow others’ stories. In that mad rush to validate what they hold as their great past, people, societies, and nations cross one another’s paths. And when they cross paths not everyone manages to cross over. People die. Societies disappear. Nations become territories terrorized by the more powerful. I would go with the wisdom that proposes: humanity is not for religion; instead religion is for humanity.
Men must take some blame, and perhaps leave the reigns to women
Men, take an unflinching introspective look at your own selves. I paraphrase what Hector Garcia, a scholar of war studies and a clinical psychologist, had said, in our world a definite initiator and doer of violence is a single demographic -men. The vast majority of every conceivable violence; from spousal abuse to gang rapes to mob fights to world wars is committed by men. Men will go to war for the sake of honour, and patriotism, and to protect their homeland; but, although unmentioned, most of the times, there is also an ancient and powerful reward for war, which is mostly in the subconscious minds of men, and that is, sex. Hector establishes that this is true also of male apes, chimps, monkeys, and other animals. He researches further back into history. In hunter-gather society, the powerful men in the tribes waged war against the next tribe and took their women away. In the Stone Age, women of reproductive age were not killed but taken captive. How do we know that? In many war sites their skeletons were absent. In Bible, Moses is ordered to conquer and kill all the men, boys, and old women and take the young girls who had never slept with men as captives. Everybody has blood on his hands. In the Guinness Book of World Records for the greatest number of offspring goes to the infamous blood thirsty Moroccan sultan called, Moulay Ismail Ben Sharif. He had 888 or more children, and had 500 concubines. How did Ismael manage to get all these? Yes, you are right. It was by raiding his neighbours.
May be, gone are the days of taking women captive away, because now men are civilized; they love to parade their impeccable social status. So the modus operandi is changed. Modernity has witnessed the terrible malevolence of wartime rape. The numbers are alarming; during the Bosnian genocide there were 50,000 rapes, the Rwandan genocide had 250,000, In World War II the numbers go up to 2 million and more. Every war, every political conflict has had as many or even more numbers. Rape is used as a device to subdue and terrorise people. The inconsolable cry that was heard from the battlefields then, is now heard from the millet fields of Utter Pradesh, and from many other fields of many other states as well.
What do we do in such situations? Throughout our history, men have dominated the positions of political power. I stand with Hector Garcia who proposed, that when the ratio of women in governance increases nations are less likely to use military force to solve conflicts with other nations. Military expenditure will go down and we will witness greater political stability. Our success lies perhaps in transcending our biology and biological dominance. As a distant and wild thought, one could say, that artificial intelligence has transcended the limitations of human biology. It does not discriminate. Will there be a time when artificial intelligence, which has already taken over much of our routine mental engagements, also take up the reigns of the nations; and humanity will thus move to live in greater peace?
Choice. Choice. Choice.
The power to choose, the possibility of choice, the urge to make choices has set the present generation apart from bygone generations. Civilized choice-making is the key. In one of the recent international conventions on climate change, the leader of a developing country, justified his country’s right to exploit nature with the logic that so far a few countries had taken the largest slices of the cake. (meaning, they had taken the maximum resources out of the earth and had thereby contributed to the maximum in carbon rise), it is only now we are arriving on the stage, let us also have a fair slice of the cake for a while before we think of ecology and initiate restrictions. That perhaps is clever thinking, but an absolutely self-destructive logic whether we apply it to ecology or political and economic power. I remember reading how a childhood incident that took place with his grandparents taught the exceptionally clever Jeff Bezos – who later founded the Amazon – that “Cleverness is a gift, but kindness is a choice”. It is harder to be kind, sensitive, and inclusive than to be clever, successful and endlessly lucrative. It is only that harder path that will take us to our future. The future may not be crafted by governments, but by individuals, families and communities and their initiatives. What is your initiative towards peace? What is your choice, war or peace?∎
