It is hard to bring oneself to blog about new things (in historical and biblical studies) that I am learning all the time when every day the news is recallibrating my identity as a citizen of the West.
As a little child I wowed the grownups when I naively asked why everyone was so sad that my great grandfather was dying. Isn’t he going to heaven, I asked. Shouldn’t we be happy? Aww — so innocent!
As a teenager school student I felt it safer not to ask my war veteran elders why it was “us” who declared war on the Axis powers and not the Axis powers on us. And why the fire-bombing of Germany and Japan and snuffing out two cities with atomic bombs? I sometimes wondered if a future generation would look back and see WW2 as a titanic struggle for domination between great powers. Our identity as the liberators of democracy and crushers of fascism was at risk if such questions were taken too far.
Now today we see nothing has changed in the project to control the Middle East. Mass murder is brought into our phones and tv sets daily. The only thing that has changed is the removal of the pretence. It was easier to be deceived when the powers said they were looking for peace and that the ongoing military build up and daily occupation was all about security. Now that pretence is gone and we can see it in all its mind-numbing reality. So our leaders remain silent and criminalize those who attempt to speak out.
We are the bad guys. World War 2 was a contest to see who would dominate the world. We won. The world lost. Yes, there was welcome progress in some areas, and despite the gap between rich and poor increasing that was a good thing. But even Hitler before the war did good things for the German economy and youth welfare. Now I feel like I understand a little how anti-fascists felt living in Germany under Hitler. The difference is the propaganda. Nazi and Soviet propaganda was crude by comparison. In this post I linked to a discussion about the attempt to silence journalists. That was old hat. Today at home they are being hauled before the courts while in the Middle East they are being murdered at scale.
It’s a heavy time. Apologies.
…..
P.S. — added later….
A few days ago there was a great kerfuffle in media, in talk shows, in comedy sessions, among government and political representatives — about a lapse in security involving talk about bombing Yemen. I strained in vain to hear from those talk-fests a word of outrage over the murder of innocent human beings in an apartment building. I can no longer bring myself to listen to some of those programs ever again.
Neil Godfrey
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I’m sorry, WE are not the bad guys. But there are bad guys in control right now. There have been bad guys in control forever.
While we stay quiet do not we share some of the responsibility for what we collectively are doing?
I seem to recall (when growing up in the post-war years) hearing murmurs about the responsibility, the silence interpreted as acquiescence, among the “good Germans” in the 1930s. How are “we” any different?
Are we seeing our civilisation for what it really is, or what it has become?
It is a position of despair, if we cannot believe that there is anything to return to, or some ideal we can point to and say, that is our true selves.
Maybe after WWII we had some moral clarity, as we could create Holocaust museums and point to what we definitely don’t want to be. Dresden, Hiroshima and Nagasaki we could forgive ourselves for – we wouldn’t ever need to do that again! Well, that was until Laos. Henry Kissinger could be given a Nobel Peace Prize and no one would be the wiser!
But here we are now, committing genocide and torture, and accusing those who dissent of the hate crimes.
I walked out of my orchestra rehearsal in tears. I just wanted to bring attention to the case of a Catholic School music teacher losing her job after speaking out while receiving a music award. Her words spoke of the horrible truth, and the lies of our government and media.
The response that pierced me most: “We must be neutral”
Neutrality – the most violent word in the dictionary at the moment. The word that justifies genocide!
We are silent as we watch (or turn our eyes away from) a crime equal to any of the mass murders of the twentieth century. The signs were there before we were born — with the suppression of the popular communist parties in Greece and Italy. Democratic freedoms be blowed. Kissinger’s Chile operation (“not standing by while a country follows the will of its (irresponsible) people”) was a direct continuation of suppression of popular wills since the 1940s in Europe. It’s how it’s always been …. Trump’s outrage has been to throw away the mask that made it easy for us to think it was otherwise.
Yes, “we must be neutral” — I don’t know how I could endure such a response.