Civilisational crisis and the death of moral responsibility

Shelley Walia

Professor & fellow, Dept of English & Cultural Studies, PU

IN a civilisational crisis that is witness to massacre and the degradation and oppression of innocent citizens of Gaza, the peace-keeping agencies remain shamelessly inactive and moribund. The leadership, audaciously hardnosed, remains drowned in the hubris of power and profit with absolute contempt for the international law. An old woman’s screams of pain at her young son’s death, bringing tears to the onlooker’s eyes, leave governments unmoved, especially the US, which has brazenly vetoed the UN resolution for a ceasefire once again, thereby suspending its search for the truth and moral conscience. As playwright Harold Pinter said, “The search for truth can never stop”, especially when in these dark times a “vast tapestry of lies” overwhelms us and acts of blatant terrorism subsidised by the White House and great corporations persist across the world.

It is poignant to see a man put his face into the body of his wife wrapped in a white sheet. The mother, Rania Abu, lost her husband a few days ago, and now her four-month-old twin son and daughter. Stroking the body of her son, she cries out in pain, refusing to let go of the child. “My heart is gone. We were asleep, we were not shooting, and we were not fighting. What is their fault? What is her fault? How will I continue to live now?” The child’s twin sister lies wrapped in a sheet with relatives, crying softly under her breath, unable to accept the doom confronting the mother. And as her loved ones departed, so must she and thousands more before the dawn of our dormant human values. Innocent people always suffer.

Onlookers send out a wail at the sight of twenty-four bodies laid out on bloodied cobblestones outside a devastated hospital. More than eleven are toddlers. The imagery of bombed-out homes, bloodied civilians and police violence was overwhelmingly visible in the recent massacre of a hundred Palestinians around a convoy of aid, striving to lay their hands on food for survival. How many do you have to murder before you are eligible to be called a mass murderer and war criminal that must be punished by the International Criminal Court of Justice?

The ongoing massacre in Gaza is a reminder of the dark nightmares of the Vietnam War and the bombing of Hiroshima. Is this the civilisation we have evolved into where there seems to be no trial like the one in Nuremberg after World War II? How can we call it a civilisation when the debased comment of former US Foreign Secretary Madeleine Albright resounds in one’s ears: “Yes, their deaths were worth it”? These are not statesmen capable of showing empathy for the victims of war; these are leaders with genocidal aberrations underpinned by lust for revenge, overriding all sense of morality or ethics that civilised nations associate war with.

Pinter, in his essay ‘Art, Truth and Politics’, asks pertinent questions: “What has happened to our moral sensibility? Did we ever have any? And what happened to our conscience? Is this all dead?” Looking at Gaza over the last few months, it becomes clear that the criminal outrage witnessed by the international community has more or less been disregarded. No power gives a damn to the International Committee of the Red Cross, which defines war crimes “as acts that are disproportionate to the military advantage sought, that do not distinguish between military and civilian targets, or that fail to take precautions to minimise injuries and loss of life among civilians”. For instance, the US seems to have given itself carte blanche to engage in any form of aggression it likes.

In this age, when armed conflict seems to be ubiquitous, the overriding form of suffering is of the traumatised children asking their mother what it feels like to die when hit by a bullet and whether it is possible to stop the bleeding. It is easy to forget how regularly soldiers kill and mutilate blameless civilians, occasionally on purpose. Though the narrative underscores military action as ‘surgical’, the civilian deaths send out an altogether different message of deliberate and remorseless butchery. An eight-year-old survivor in Yemen, a country where thousands died in the airstrikes carried out by the US-backed Saudi forces, vehemently expressed her anguish, an eye-opener to the insensitive sabre-rattlers of the world: “My father says he will buy me toys and get me a new schoolbag. I hate schoolbags. I don’t want to go anywhere near a bus. I hate school, and I can’t sleep. I see my friends in my dreams begging me to rescue them. So, from now on, I’m going to stay home.”

This is just one story of pain among many still untold, but it should remind us that war is a form of sabotage and bloody aggression. Strangely, in contemporary times, we never hear of anything like the Nuremberg trials. And even when specific war criminals are condemned, there is a visible absence of any denunciation of war. Armed conflict seems to be the sole remedy in our ‘civilisation’, notwithstanding the appalling suffering of those who live through war.

I often wonder if the citizens of our civilisation should ever honour a soldier or jubilate over a victory in war. Why not give due consideration to the future of humanity and discontinue despatching soldiers to kill and terrorise? Why not begin to think of the tragedy that the people undergo and document the systemic sadism of savagery, the ruthless atrocities and the merciless clampdown on truth?

The acknowledgement of recorded war crimes remains abysmally low. Instead of millions spent on weaponry, why can’t the nations support those agencies that are dedicated to the welfare of refugees and the survivors of war. In such a world, the true price of war must occupy the minds of those who believe that ours is a civilisation built on fellow feeling and compassion. And nations must realise that truth has to do with how you structure your role in the world and how you choose to epitomise it. You cannot just use power to allow your friends to beat and subdue and murder and destroy the populace, and then, without any qualms, proclaim to the world that democracy has triumphed. This self-congratulatory attitude is attributable to the US foreign policy in much of the last hundred years.

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