Not all Wars Make you Powerless.

 

 

Once, when your Grandmother was young, a majority of Europeans thought it of vital importance to exterminate each other. Yet the devastating reality of hate, the slow deaths and shattered families are, in time, smoothed over. In a bland removing of pain, justified in the name of an ideology, we ironed out the wrinkles of a million tragic dramas, and left only one. One that we can believe in.

 

What do you believe in? When the shock of the contrast is too great to bare. Our Grandparents killed and maimed each other in the most dreadful of ways, our fathers and mothers grew up in a world reeling from slaughter. And because the thought of fire-storming an entire German City, or lining up and shooting a whole French village is so alien, we can only feel confused, no matter how smooth the justification. But there was a justification, a genuine plea for mitigation. The National Socialist Party, the Nazi's, the Riechmark, were a real terror in Europe.

 

We have grown past this. We have realised that it was all a madness and we are left with a feeling of horror lest it creep up on us again. Not understanding the detail of the horror we can only stare at the insanity with alarm, like a diseased patient hoping not to have a relapse.

 

Perhaps our children's children will judge us on the nightmare of the Gulf. A war that had no justification, apart from greed. A war that, more than any, lays open the remorseless logic of the mechanisms that drive our world. A war that clearly spells out that we are not in control of our society. Our opinion no longer matters and ant like we carry on doing and making, loving and weeping. There is no need for dogma to justify the terror -for we have nothing to believe in, no righteous crusade against the evil of Fascism. Instead we have to be content with a thin tissue of misinformation and blatant and obvious lies. In our name, with our money, there is death in another country. Under the oil grey skies where miles of corpses rot, amid a searing desert of uranium dust or crushed beneath the city rubble, there is death in another country. Those who perpetrated this death have been made rich, the rest have made a true sacrifice.

 

Nearly every person who lived through the last world war was an idealist. Every person knew what they were fighting for. Even those who were against it had a defence, a feeling that it was in some way of benefit to the general welfare of humanity. Our Grandparents fought for an ideal.

 

The Gulf War was fought for power and money and gives us only room for one choice. To accept; to accept the naked truth that our life-style can only be bought by such monstrous currency. We are forced to acknowledge our complicit guilt. With every drop of petrol we accept. And we legitimatise it by telling ourselves that nothing can be done. There is nothing that we can do.

 

Our grandparents were quite mad, believing in an allusion. We are are quite sane not believing a reality.

 

 

This is the meaning of powerlessness.