Man's Fate and God's Choice, Bhimeswara Challa [best free ereader .TXT] 📗

nothing has changed and we, as a species, are addicted to killing each other, whether it is through war or a civil war, or ethnic cleansing or religious reprisal.

And if we somehow exhaust all of these options, we will invent new ones. How else can one explain the chilling fact that the world currently spends 11 times more money killing each other than trying to stop the innocent from dying? In another kind of ‘war’ caused by epidemics like AIDS, millions of people die and many more become orphaned — 40 million people by 2010 in Africa, according to the United Nations. It is a ‘civil war’ in those lands, but it is a ‘moral war’ for the rest of us, and we are failing; symptomatic of the state of human consciousness. The real ‘famine’ rages inside man, caused by chronic shortage of sensitivity, compassion and spirituality. Then again the cause and effect question comes up. Why does Nature/God heap catastrophe after catastrophe over a particular place and over a particular set of people? Does it have something to do with their ‘collective karma’?

As if all this is not bad enough, there are the mercenaries, private armies, and adventurers who do it for the money or just for the thrill of it. And one has a deadly menu of place and kind to choose from. Every war is a horror, a legalized massacre. It is human invention to murder or maim in a twinkling, a mass of unknown men, women, and children. It is a quick fix to satiate our timeless thirst for blood. From the earliest times, man has had a

 

 

 

261 Chris Hedges. On War. The New York Review of Books, USA. 16 December 2004. Accessed at: http://www.nybooks.com/articles/archives/2004/dec/16/on-war/

262 Chris Hedges. On War. The New York Review of Books, USA. 16 December 2004. Accessed at: http://www.nybooks.com/articles/archives/2004/dec/16/on-war/

 

singular fascination for blood, far before William Harvey’s mid-17th century description of the circulation of blood. It came to be recognized as the life principle, long before it was scientifically established; and a feeling of fear, awe and reverence came to be attached to the shedding of blood. Blood rites and blood ceremonies were commonplace among our early ancestors. War offers us the maximum opportunity to spill maximal blood with minimum effort. In Leo Tolstoy’s War and Peace (1869), Prince Andrei says that the object of warfare is murder. The Prussian military historian Carl von Clausewitz said that war by its basic nature war drives onwards to extremes. And, in the words of American writer Garry Wills, “raping, robbing of civilians and brutalizing and killing of prisoners in war are not

anomalies.”263 They are not aberrations, or the zealotry of perverted soldiers, or the dark deeds of desperate minions. Such atrocities are perpetrated not by barbarians or monsters but by ordinary people who are persuaded by war to think that the ‘enemy’ is a monster, at least not fully human. And maybe, the ‘fun’ they could not afford on the street, they could in a war. Totally inhuman acts are made acceptable by justifying them in the name of patriotism, national honor and self-defense. The former American President Jimmy Carter said in his Nobel Prize acceptance speech that war may be a necessary evil, but evil it still is and that does not change, and that we will not learn to live in peace by killing each other’s children. One could even question the qualification, necessary. Like the concept of a ‘just war’; a ‘necessary war’ is not only a questionable concept but also an obnoxious doctrine, like a ‘necessary rape’, and a ‘just mutilation’, and a ‘right way’ of maiming children. In the mind of the perpetrator, every war is ‘just’.

The ‘justness’ and ‘justification’ come from our history, epics, mythologies, and scriptures. Indeed, war is ‘holy’ and every atrocity committed is automatically absolved of any human or divine censure. Killing in war is the highest human virtue and getting killed in a war is an assured path to heaven, in spite of whatever sins one might have committed in one’s life. Victory sanctifies every moral obscenity. It is always the defeated that are hauled up for ‘war crimes’, never the victorious, who often go on to commit even more horrendous crimes. War is no different from genocide and mass murder sanctified by the State. War is evil not only because of what waging a war entails, but also because of what it leaves behind, and what follows in the vanquished land — starvation, suffering, social suffocation, and slow death. Before the modern era, wars were still seen as evil, but they were mainly between bands of professional warriors and those affected were the ones whose ‘duty was to die and kill’. At least that is the story we would like to believe. But despite all the glory, romanticism and heroism attached to the classical wars, they were still gory and never confined to the combatants, as they left behind orphans, widows, and the wounded.

Although we may extol non-violence as one of the highest human virtues, it is strange that in most cultures and even in religion, mass murder and mutilation are glorified. Dying on the battlefield, the scripture says, is the surest and the shortest route to Heaven, even if the person was evil in life. In the epic Mahabharatha, an anecdote says that prince Yudhisthira was permitted to enter heaven in his own body (a privilege denied to his brothers and wife) because of his unblemished earthly conduct, notwithstanding the lie he uttered to facilitate the killing of his guru Dronacharya. But he is surprised to see his evil cousin Duryodhana in heaven and is told that Duryodhana was there because he ‘died on the battlefield’. Death in combat is supposed to absolve a human of all his past villainies! It not only whitewashes ‘civilian’ sins but elevates the sinner to the pleasures of Paradise! Perhaps it applies not only

 

 

 

 

263 Garry Wills. What is a Just War? The New York Review of Books, USA. 18 November 2004. p.32.

 

to those who kill and die in wars but also to those who launch wars! What other incentive is needed for one to wage wars? But what qualifies a conflict to be called a ‘war’? In the olden days, the battlefield was the only arena of war, and wars were often waged between sunrise and sunset and were confined to combatants of equal strength or skill. Now it is continuous, multi-fronted and not confined to combat. So, who qualifies to go to heaven? Today, there is intense competition among murderers; many ‘suicide bombers’ believe that the murder of innocents is a religious duty. Classics like Homer’s Iliad that glorify wars, paint the terrible as beautiful and evil as honor. In this technological age, wars are fought with weapons that not only decimate the ‘enemy’, which includes anyone living in a particular place at a particular time, but also decapitate the environment, bring disability across generations, and turn fertile lands into arid forests. We have wars without warriors, battles without battlefields and soldiers who look like space travelers. A ‘deserter’ is a traitor but an ‘escapee’ is a hero. And victory or defeat is not decided on the arena of action but by the public perception, which is often manipulated by the media who in turn are manipulated by the ruling class.

With the advent of advanced technologies, both the dynamics and the mechanics of war have changed and along with it the military balances in the world. Alvin and Heidi Toffler in their book War and Anti-War (1993) say, “the way we make war reflects the way we make wealth, and the way we make anti-war must reflect the way we make war. In the present technology- intensive wars, a soldier is called a ‘system’ and the uniform he wears is

called Soldier Integrated Protective Suit (SIPS),”264 designed to kill without combat or being seen. The doctrine of modern war is not to fight but to blow up to bits any of the enemy’s habitat, killing all life around, and destroying the infrastructure for a functioning society, and to decapitate, decimate and demoralize the rulers and the people of the ‘enemy country’ and force them to capitulate body and soul. It is a doctrine designed to maximize suffering, mutilation and murder, deliberately and diabolically. A prisoner of war is an economic commodity, dead or alive, a subject of sadism.

Even assuming that violence and war may be necessary to fight abominable evil or intolerable injustice, and even perhaps to retain or reclaim one’s dignity, human beings are morally afloat and emotionally underdeveloped to be able to tread the fine line between necessary and needless violence, egoistic bravado and cowardice from the perspective of human good. Those who plan and prosecute war do not have a divine shield or any moral exaltedness any more than anyone else. Often, they reflect the meaner side of the human spectrum which is needed to acquire power. Often they have the political power to unleash war but not the sagacity and the power to control its conduct and facilitate its conclusion. As a result, many wars go awry, triggering unanticipated damage, laconically, if not sarcastically, called ‘collateral damage’, which is the killing of tens of thousands of non- combatants. That, in turn, generates more enmity and animosity and adds to the cauldron of accumulated hatred in the world. In one sense, the worst part of war comes after the war. The dead are gone, mercifully, to a better place. It is the survivors, the victor and the vanquished and the soldier and the civilian alike, who bear the brunt of carrying the ravages for the rest of their lives. A man conditioned by the culture of war will carry the same culture into other walks of life and infect, like a virus, the society at large. The intoxication and thrill of destruction fill their days with wild adrenalin highs, which conjure up grotesque landscapes that are almost hallucinogenic. They become ‘killer gods,’ accustomed to “killing, carrying

 

 

 

 

264 Alvin and Heidi Toffler. War and Anti-War: Survival at the Dawn of the 21st Century. 1993. Little, Brown and Company. Boston, USA. p.119.

 

out acts of slaughter, with no more forethought than they take to relieve themselves.”265 The species-spin-off is that the essence of human condition gets further coarsened and corroded and the millions who are infected by the war in turn infect millions more every day, triggering a noxious ripple effect in the whole pond of humanity. In today’s context, any war, of any type or scale, can escalate into a nuclear or biological Armageddon. The specter of nuclear war is well known, an integral part of almost every doomsday scenario; rather less widely known or discussed is biological warfare. But that seems to be as potentially real as a catastrophic nuclear war. Although some sort of rudimentary germ warfare dates back to at least 400 BCE, when Greek armies hurled arrows dipped in the blood of decomposed bodies, it was child’s play compared to the havoc modern-day bacteriological and toxic weapons can cause. We are told that scientists have created mutant viruses and super-bugs (like vaccine- resistant smallpox) for germ warfare. If these pathogens are let loose in error or by design, they may kill billions, but that might not ‘yet’ lead to species extinction. It is feared that man might soon discover the means to create pathogens completely lethal to everyone, which could result in extinction. Humans, it is said, are almost genetic clones and therefore are much more susceptible than other species to this sort of attack.

Under the ruse of ‘necessary evil’ and ‘national security,’ it is the State that has become the greatest perpetrator of violence and evil in the world. The ‘State’, after all, is another institution and every institution interacts with the outside world through the medium of individual human beings and whatever