War and human civilisation: a moral paradox

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The question might sound naive to bellicists, yet it is pertinent in this age of admirable human development and scientific advancements around the world: Can, despite all the claims of human knowledgibility and maturity of consciousness, the raging wars in Gaza and Ukraine be justified, particularly when the war casualties impact the innocent children and women?

After all, what type of future is being bequeathed to the generations to come? Would they not think that the pursuit of knowledge, wisdom, consciousness, scientific progress and human development cannot guarantee a world sans barbarism which human civilisation claims to have left far behind?

Such wars seem to be the telltale signs of human regression towards the Stone Age with animalistic instincts as the law of the jungle. Such bloodshed and genocide with carte blanche remind me of Mark Twain's satirical essay, The Damned Human Race, wherein he proposes a theory and corroborates it with historical details that man is not the highest point of evolution, rather arguably the lowest. He says that unlike humans, animals kill only for a reason, not for fun or greed; they don't conduct wars because they don't possess any religion or patriotism.

Similarly, in the second voyage of The Gulliver's Travels by J Swift, on the Gulliver's proposal to the Brobdingnagian king to use gunpowder against the enemies, the king appallingly summarises the human civilisation: "I cannot but conclude the bulk of your natives to be the most pernicious race of little odious vermin that Nature ever suffered to crawl upon the surface of the Earth."

The so-called guardians designated to keeping or restoring peace on this earthly planet, like the League of Nations and the United Nations Organization, had and have proved incapable of implementing their existential writ the world over. As the former had failed in stopping WWII from happening and died its natural death, the latter too would follow suit if it fails to stop either of the above wars because such wars can balloon into a world war.

These institutions had been established to be proactive to defang the impunity of any group, organisation or country to threaten the world peace, but their inertness shows that peaceful human existence would soon become extinct as it has already become an endangered species due to the species' own self- or auto-destruct practices.

United Nations Secretary-General António Guterres branded the war "the deadliest of conflicts" in decades. Speaking of Israeli carte blanche, he highlighted that Israel killed 196 humanitarians, including 175 UN staffers; most of them belonged to the Palestine relief agency UNRWA. "More women and children have been killed in Gaza by the Israeli military over the past year than the equivalent period of any other conflict over the past two decades," says an Oxfam study published on 30th September 2024.

Now the question is not "Will the UN act to play its role in stopping genocide in Gaza?" as it has long been answered with a resounding NO. Instead, the very question arising from the pyre of disappointment with the UN has matured into a philosophical, moral and deeply political one: Is the UN helpless against the impunity of the US and Israel?

"To assuage their collective guilt for their early years of indifference towards one genocide - the Nazi extermination of millions of European Jews - the United States and Europe have prepared the grounds for another," said Arundhati Roy in her acceptance speech on receiving the PEN Pinter Prize 2024. "If the US government withdrew its support of Israel, the war could stop today," she said, calling a spade a spade.

The justification of Israel's egregious human rights violations against Palestinian civilians by labelling the October 7 attack by Hamas as a terrorist attack reminds me of one of the Aesop's fables wherein a wolf cooks up false rationale to attack the lamb.

It would not be wrong to say that the world is under the siege of exploitative capitalistic pursuits. "The nuclear-armed state of Israel was to serve as a military outpost and gateway to the natural wealth and resources of the Middle East for US and Europe," says Arundhati Roy in the speech.