How advantageous is it to keep fighting with your neighbour, when a small amount of compromise can perhaps lead to a better long-term relationship
What is a nation supposed to do when its boundaries and its people are breached and targeted by another hostile nation? The instinctive reaction would be to defend itself and perhaps even launch an assault on the attacker. This is pretty much the way humans work and think. Although, you need not always lose your temper on an individual scale. How advantageous is it to keep fighting with your neighbour, when a small amount of compromise can perhaps lead to a better long-term relationship? This is also a logical human reaction to offensive behaviour. You could take the advice of Jesus Christ and turn the other cheek, but only if you are exceptionally self-aware and have a high sense of self-esteem. This is obviously a very rare choice; it asks too much of your sense of inferiority and attacks your self-confidence.
But there are and will be other problems with the decision to send others to die; problems which are as old as humankind. Fears of death of your own, of loved ones, in times of conflict. Fear of death in general. Fear that the lives of others are sacrificed for your own safety. Fear that other means of reconciliation have been abandoned because of the need for bloody revenge. Some of us like the idea of killing and blood sacrifice more than others. Who is right and who is wrong? Both, neither or at different levels in different circumstances.
It is here that we fall into one of those rabbit-holes. Filled with craziness, rage and circular non-reason. Because often the most bloodthirsty amongst us are the ones with the least to lose. We are not or no longer part of the armed forces or security forces. We may have a few friends and relations; but the older we are, the more likely those we know of our own vintage who have survived have also retired.
Many wise men long gone have talked about how war is about old men sending young men to die. Cannon-fodder, is the expression. Women it was usually assumed were more pacifist — not necessarily true — and more likely, most were not really seen as important when such manly matters as war were being discussed.
How about this to get all armchair warriors really angry: “It is forbidden to kill; therefore all murderers are punished unless they kill in large numbers and to the sound of trumpets.” These harsh words indeed are from the French philosopher Voltaire.
British war poet, and soldier, Siegfried Sassoon caricatures our armchair fighters so well:
“If I were fierce, and bald, and short of breath
I’d live with scarlet Majors at the Base,
And speed glum heroes up the line to death.
You’d see me with my puffy petulant face,
Guzzling and gulping in the best hotel,
Reading the Roll of Honour. “Poor young chap,”
I’d say — “I used to know his father well;
Yes, we've lost heavily in this last scrap."
And when the war is done and youth stone dead,
I'd toddle safely home and die — in bed.”
We in India have suffered from attacks from those around us and have been driven to defend ourselves. The most recent attack had a mix of varied reactions. Some wondered why we took so long to respond. Others felt our response was insufficient. Still others did not believe the level of our defence responses and therefore invented their own fantasy responses. But almost all of these were clear on one matter: their own dreams of warfare, the lies and misinformation that they spread about it were sanctified by the nature of their extreme patriotism and therefore could not be questioned. But anyone else who questioned our responses was nothing short of traitorous, disrespectful of the armed forces and of our very essence as a nation. It is a remarkable twist of logic; albeit from a set of minds not really renowned for their rational thinking abilities.
How did the terrorists get into India?
Off with your head.
Why were tourists allowed into a sensitive area?
Off with your head.
I want peace not war.
Off with your head.
I don’t want inter-community fights and sectarian violence.
Off with your head.
Women are being used as tokens.
Off with your head.
Peace is thus the language of cowards. Or is it? Sometimes, you want a lot of blood to be shed. But your heroes in charge don’t oblige you. Therefore, reluctantly, you accept that and hope that maybe next time many more people will kill others and possibly be killed. If the person who calls for peace is someone you do not like, then they are evil cowards who are against the best interests of the nation. There are no absolutes. It’s a bit Shakespearean: There is nothing either good or bad but thinking makes it so.
As of now though, it’s all a bit quiet on the western front. There’s just a lot of noise in political circles as everyone wants to take credit for the end of hostilities. Apparently, after you act big and strong and violent, there are massive accolades for being big and strong and peaceful. It’s definitely a bit confusing.
Don’t ask about justice, and punishment, and perpetrators and victims. There are other criminals to be caught. Not just terrorists who entered our land and killed our people. Those who use social media are the most obvious targets. A post here and a post there and who knows how many civilisations they can bring down. Civilisations are very fragile in that way. Unaffected by guns, destroyed by opinions.
And yet, why would Leo Tolstoy say in War and Peace that “If everyone fought for their own convictions, there would be no war?”.
Whose side is he on, exactly?
Even worse I have discovered is the late US President Dwight Eisenhower. And he too was a military man. Supreme Commander of the Allied Expeditionary Force during the Second World War and a five-star general in the US Army:
“Every gun that is made, every warship launched, every rocket fired signifies in the final sense, a theft from those who hunger and are not fed, those who are cold and are not clothed. This world in arms is not spending money alone. It is spending the sweat of its labourers, the genius of its scientists, the hopes of its children. This is not a way of life at all in any true sense. Under the clouds of war, it is humanity hanging on a cross of iron.”
Takes all sorts!
