Living the hard life

The writer is author of The Gun Tree: One Woman’s War (Oxford University Press, 2001) and lives in Bhurban

As the overly ambitious American war machine revs up for yet more action, this time against Iran, and the UN considers sticking its messy fingers in to Syrian internal affairs, it is pertinent to wonder where the voice of sanity has gone.

Wars, too many to list and the majority — either instigated by or joined in by gung-ho American troops — are actively being fought, but not necessarily won, with Afghanistan being a prime example. Most of these wars are based on nothing but greed with the ‘controlling’ one per cent of the global population, who rake in astronomical profits from the unbearable misery and needless deaths of the innocents trapped in the hells imposed on them.

It is absolutely chilling to comprehend that the deaths of others, whether men, women or children, means nothing at all to the one per cent, irrespective of nationality, who are sick — no make that insane — enough to place monetary gain above the value of human life. And, let’s face it, the long-term sustainability of the world as the inestimable destruction brought about by the vicious ravages of modern warfare does not simply fade away once the last bullet has been fired or the last nuclear warhead launched. The fallout of warfare now takes hundreds, possibly thousands and potentially millions of years to dissipate, if the environment and all existing therein manages to recover at all. But such truisms are not given consideration: money is all that counts.

Wars are rarely about artificial man-made borders these days and nor are they, if the facts were to be clearly spelled out, about cast, race or creed despite intense efforts to disguise them as such: The wars of today are all based on acquiring or holding on to natural resources such as oil, uranium and anything else considered mandatory to fuel the rampant consumerism on which ‘modern’ life depends and from which governments, corporations and private investors benefit financially. Human life is viewed as nothing more than a disposable commodity — much like the plastic bags that go hand-in-hand with the thoughtless acquisition of unnecessary goods. Although, unlike the birth of a human, a plastic bag is derived from the oil resources on which so many ongoing wars are based. Ludicrous when viewed in the latter context!

While the monstrous one per cent manipulate facts, figures, armies et al, most of the other 99 per cent heedlessly continue living as they always have done. The are expected to close their eyes and ears to the chaos rampaging through the global village that the world has become — of course, to be honest, some of these people have demonstrated the guts and the courage to stand up and be counted, but they have done that within their immediate environs. If one evokes the very word ‘peace’ in public then it is automatically, and wrongly, presumed that ‘peace’ was nothing more than a hippie catchphrase of the 1960s. And, like peace-loving hippies, the word is no longer in fashion and, therefore, no longer applicable, which demonstrates just how self-centred and self-destructive the human race has become.

Published in The Express Tribune, January 24^th, 2012.