The inhumanity of humankind!

The on-going international refugee crisis in the wake of the ambitious adventures of the powers that be should serve to bring home to all right-thinking people that welfare of human beings does matter. Riding roughshod over people’s right to life and livelihood is just not on — no matter what the justification.

On the outskirts of the beautiful city of Algiers, a visitor would find the very well-maintained Commonwealth War Graves Cemetery. Buried there are servicemen who lost their lives fighting for the victors during the Second World War. Those who have had the opportunity to visit this cemetery will have noticed etched on the gravestone of one young soldier the epitaph: “Someday we shall know the reason why.” One could hardly think of a more apt summing up of man’s anguish over the insanity of war than this poignant outcry of the distraught family of this young victim.

Over the years, men have gone to war against other men at the behest of ambitious leaders, killing and maiming their fellow beings in the process. And yet, when history was at long last written — by the victors — nothing but nothing emerged to justify the carnage, the cruelty and the havoc wrought as a result of these horrendous campaigns.

The history of man’s march towards civilisation is replete with vivid instances of man’s inhumanity to man; of man’s greed, rapaciousness and untold ambition. All to what end? Man’s inherent mental capacity to distinguish right from wrong is, instead, utilised to justify the unjustifiable; man’s covetousness of what is not his but rather the veritable right of his fellow beings.

Each war that has been fought has had its own peculiar justification and particular set of advocates. These advocates take pains and go to any extreme not only to justify the conflict but also to glorify the gory details. In the current conflicts the powers that be have coined a brand new pretext: pre-emption. This pretext is based on the philosophy that a mighty power has the inherent right to hunt and destroy any hapless minion that in its opinion could one day pose a threat to its own selfish interests.

The recent conflicts are no different from the wars in the past waged by those who coveted what was not rightfully theirs. The solitary difference is that the visual media have conferred on the conflicts an entirely new dimension. People around the world follow them like on-going soap operas; only that the bullets are real, the smart bombs and daisy cutters lethal and it is real human beings who are being cut down.

The world is passing through an extremely difficult, nay critical, phase. Talk everywhere is of belligerence, not peace; of bigotry, not tolerance. War, which was once regarded by sages as the last option, is now being peddled as a quick-fix solution for all ills. Human life, shorn of its sanctity, has never appeared so cheap or so dispensable.

A wanton act of terror has turned the entire world order upside down. Doesn’t the irrational response of the great world leaders over the past years indicate that they have played right into the hands of the ‘terrorists’? After all what does a terrorist hope to achieve through his desperate act, but to create terror? A dispassionate look back would indicate that this is exactly what the perpetrators of 9/11 have managed to achieve.

Response to terror does not lie in counter-terror, just as the riposte to murder does not lie in vendetta. The international agencies have yet to pin a plausible definition to ‘terrorism’ or, more importantly to ‘state terrorism’. No religion condones wanton violence per se. All uphold the sanctity of human life. Advocate justice, fair play and righteousness. It is the greed of man rather than his creed that breeds violence. And greed has no nationality or ethnicity.

Time may be opportune for the elders of the world to join their heads together to devise an integrated plan to tackle the root cause of terrorism, as also of chauvinistic adventurism. If this course were to be followed, the elders may well come to the conclusion that the remedy lies not in an open-ended sordid adventure, but rather on a course of conciliation.

Published in The Express Tribune, September 9^th, 2017.

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