Changing face of war

Posted on by Reena Saxena

It was called a “black-out” in 1971.

Windows and skylights were covered with thick black paper. The sound of an aircraft drove the neighbourhood into deep distress.They prayed for invisibility, huddled inside the silence of fear, pulling sheets above their eyes.

I’d have loved to see the enemy’s face. But the next morning, Uncle said it was only a civilian aircraft.

War is far more sophisticated today. You shake hands, then wonder about the real motive and alignments.

someone seeks revenge
for unmatched value systems
geared up in defence
I wince with pain, lower guns
attackers come from my clan

W3 Prompt #119

38 thoughts on “Changing face of war”

  2. Living, breathing and greatly suffering people on this atrocity-prone planet are [consciously or subconsciously] perceived as not being of equal value or worth to everyone else, when morally they all definitely should be.

    Human beings can actually be seen and treated as though they are disposable and, by extension, their suffering and death are somehow less worthy of external concern, sometimes even by otherwise democratic and relatively civilized nations.

    In other words, the worth of such life will be measured by its overabundance and/or the protracted conditions under which it suffers; and those people can eventually receive meagre column inches on the back page of the First World’s daily news. It’s an immoral consideration of ‘quality of life’.

    Meanwhile, with each news report of the daily death toll from unrelenting bombardment, I feel a slightly greater desensitization and resignation. I’ve noticed this disturbing effect with basically all major protracted conflicts internationally since I began regularly consuming news products in 1987.

    Furthermore, it’s sadly and even shamefully true that while some peoples have been brutally victimized throughout history a disproportionately large number of times, the victims of one place and time can and sometimes do become the victimizers of another place and time.

    _____

    With news-stories’ human subjects’ race and culture dictating
    quantity of media coverage of even the poorest of souls,
    a renowned newsman formulated a startling equation
    justly implicating collective humanity’s news-consuming callousness
    — “A hundred Pakistanis going off a mountain in a bus
    make less of a story than three Englishmen drowning in the Thames.”
    .
    According to this unjust news-media mentality reasonably deduced
    five hundred prolongedly-war-weary Middle Eastern Arabs getting blown
    to bits in the same day perhaps should take up even less space and airtime.
    .
    So readily learned is the tiny token short story buried in the bottom
    right-hand corner of the newspaper’s last page, the so brief account
    involving a long-lasting war about which there’s virtually absolutely
    nothing civil; therefore caught in the warring web are civilians most
    unfortunate, most weak, the very most in need of peace and civility.
    .
    And it’s naught but business as usual in the damned nations
    where such severe suffering almost entirely dominates the
    fractured structured daily routine of civilian slaughter
    (plus that of the odd well-armed henchman) mostly by means
    of bomb blasts from incendiary explosive devices, rock-fire fragments
    and shell shock readily shared with freshly shredded shrapnel wounds
    resulting from smart bombs often launched for the
    stupidest of reasons into crowded markets and grade schools. ….

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    2. There’s so much anger out there. I myself have been inexplicably angrier over the last couple of years and sometimes consider that I may someday leave this world that way.

      The human race seems to desperately need a unifying fate-defining common cause. Perhaps a vicious extraterrestrial attack is what we collectively need to brutally endure in order to survive the long-term from ourselves.

      Collectively and maybe even individually, we humans seem hopelessly prone to our politics of scale and differences. Still, from within ourselves we, as individuals, can resist flawed yet normalized human/societal nature thus behavior.

      Perhaps somewhat relevant to this are the words of American sociologist Stanley Milgram, of Obedience Experiments fame/infamy: “It may be that we are puppets — puppets controlled by the strings of society. But at least we are puppets with perception, with awareness. And perhaps our awareness is the first step to our liberation.”

      In the meantime, people should avoid believing, let alone claiming, that they are not capable of committing an atrocity, even if relentlessly pushed. Contrary to what is claimed or felt by many of us, deep down there’s a potential monster in each of us that, under the just-right circumstances, can be unleashed — and maybe even more so when convinced that God’s on our/my side.

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        1. To me, collective human existence is still somewhat analogous to a cafeteria lineup consisting of diversely societally represented people, all adamantly arguing over which identifiable person should be at the front and, conversely, at the back of the line.

          Many of them further fight about to whom amongst them should go the last piece of quality pie and how much they should have to pay for it — all the while the interstellar spaceship on which they’re all permanently confined, owned and operated by (besides the wealthiest passengers) the fossil fuel industry, is on fire and toxifying at locations not normally investigated.

          As a species we can be so heavily preoccupied with our own individual little worlds, however overwhelming to us, that we will still miss the biggest of crucial pictures. And it seems this distinct form of societal penny-wisdom but pound-foolishness is a very unfortunate human characteristic that’s likely with us to stay.

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