In the last few days, we have been bombarded with photos of destroyed buildings looking onto the streets of Kyiv; footage of young Palestinian girls being violently attacked by the Israeli police force; stories of massacre and suffering as the future of an Ethiopian political community perishes; accounts of people with no home, people preparing to wage war, people waving their uncertain farewells as half their families have to rush onto a train leaving their men and streets behind. Hands waving, eyes tearing, hearts pounding in the face of the immediate imposition of the future, opening as a wound in their existence. People are the victims of war, not nations or ethnicities or religions. There is no segregation when it comes to such violence, no differentiation between cultures, no dissociation in terms of feelings. Amongst all the visions that have occurred to me in the last few days, one has remained with me particularly: a vision of ‘peace’, written in a Nigerian dead language on the breast of a friend. Perhaps the symbols of a dead language can keep us from despair, more than those prolific spiels of words that attempt to accuse, defend, justify what is happening around us in the public space. There is nothing but an exercise of humanity to be made to save us from capitulating into the pits of brutality.
For this reason, instead of providing the politics, the deliberations, the intentions of violence that have occupied the pulpits of government in the last weeks, however useful this study may be for understanding the reasons of many such occurrences, these present words are an emotional response to the circumstances. To attempt to legitimise the facts through their mere political explanation, is to legitimise the very logic of warfare. In this, I believe there is no logic. There is no sanity, no empathy; there is not love for one’s nation nor one’s people. There is strategy or tactic conducted in the name of power. The study of ‘warfare’ and ‘security’ can risk romanticising the issue or alienating people from the emotions of those who are affected by their consequences. It is good to be reminded, that the fact we are not currently surrounded by the blasting screams of warfare is a pure matter of luck. It could be us, our family, our homes torn to pieces by the decisions of men sitting around a table from their thrones of egoism. War merely redefines spaces, powers, dialectics. The cost of this, however, is humanity, both physical and spiritual. There is no other prayer one should undergo in these times but the relentless commitment to kill the seeds of hatred and violence that may inevitably arise within us, and to defeat them by desperately searching for ways to communicate and compromise with the other. It is from this very choice that our survival may depend. In such disheartening situations, it is important not to despair, and to remember that this is not the first nor last, nor only war that is tearing people and lands apart. As warfare is nothing but a performance of humanity at its worse, it seems appropriate to solely mention one of the greatest play writers of the last century. Thus, in the words of Bertolt Brecht, we must remember that in each war there will be losers and victors: amongst the losers, those who will suffer from hunger will always be the poor people; amongst the winners, those who will suffer will be the poor people. By realising that war is not a matter of power over an invisible ‘Other’, but an attitude towards how we treat human beings as a whole, we will be careful not to ‘’sit on the wrong side because all the other seats were taken".
0 Comments
|
THE ANTI-NEWS.
TO CARE IS A POLITICAL ACT! Archives
November 2023
Categories |