Despite years spent working around the clock for international media outfits in news offices and in the field, interviewing diplomats, watching war events unfold and speaking with umpteen experts and locals on a wide range of fronts, I have yet to fully comprehend the politics of war.
Regardless of venue, mentality, background, battlefront or historical setting, I still don't understand the darkness that can sweep over individuals, an insurgent mob, an army or a nation during war times.
Numerous journalists have captured "the darkness" in novels and essays.
“We like to think we are so advanced. We like to imagine we have protection from our own dark impulses. The truth is it doesn't take much for all of that to be stripped away. Desperate people sometimes do terrible things," writes CNN correspondent Anderson Cooper in his current bestseller Dispatches from the Edge. Cooper has covered some of the world's hottest war zones.
In more detail, Christian Science Monitor and New York Times writer and author Chris Hedges describes the same phenomenon in his memoirs War is a Force that Gives us Meaning:
"I learned early on that war forms its own culture. The rush of battle is a potent and often lethal addiction, for war is a drug, one I ingested for many years. It is peddled by myth makers - historians, war correspondents, filmmakers, novelists and the state - all of whom endow it with qualities it often does possess: excitement, exoticism, power, chances to rise above our small stations in life, and a bizarre and fantastic universe that has a grotesque and dark beauty. It dominates culture, distorts memory, corrupts language and infects everything around it, even humor, which becomes preoccupied with the grim perversities of smut and death. Fundamental questions about the meaning, or meaninglessness, of our place on the planet are laid bare when we watch those around us sink to the lowest depths. War exposes the capacity for evil that lurks just below the surface within all of us."
In as much as I am human, the same evil lurks within me. To pretend otherwise would be farce. And it frightens me to ponder what I would do were I thrust into the throes of battle.
What myth might I create or what truth might I choose as my path? What lengths would I go to in order to protect myself and my son? Could I preserve personal integrity? Live with myself afterwards?
I quizzically ponder the teachings of the father of passive resistance, Mahatma Gandhi.
He possessed an incredible degree of self-discipline and practiced unfaltering restraint. I could never do that. I can barely keep my thoughts from scattering during yoga practice. But aren't his teachings worth at least striving towards?
Here is part of Gandhi's philosophy on ahimsa or the way of non-violence:
"The accumulated experience of the past thirty years, the first eight of which were in South Africa, fills me with the greatest hope that in the adoption of non-violence lies the future of India and the world. It is the most harmless and yet equally effective way of dealing with the political and economic wrongs of the down-trodden portion of humanity. I have known from early youth that non-violence is not a cloistered virtue to be practiced by the individual for the peace and final salvation, but it is a rule of conduct for society if it is to live consistently with human dignity and make progress towards the attainment of peace for which it has been yearning for ages past."
His philosophy makes perfect sense. Violence begets violence. You can't make peace with bullets. But as Gandhi also points out, in order to incorporate a purist non-violent stance, one must really find compassion.
"It is not non-violence if we merely love those that love us. It is non-violence only when we love those that hate us. I know how difficult it is to follow this grand law of love. But are not all great and good things difficult to do? Love of the hater is the most difficult of all. But by the grace of God even this most difficult thing becomes easy to accomplish if we want to do it." (M. Gandhi)
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