The countless aeons of history that have gone before us are full of fighting and killing, full of domination and oppression, full of taking over and wiping out, conversion, subjection and vanquishing, the growth and decline of empires and peoples. The strong overcome; weakness is obliterated and suffers.
Does extremism make people violent or do psychologically disturbed people get attracted to the violence, power, fear and atrocities possible in the life devoted to the evangelism of the mad, bad and truly horrific Whatever? Does war and violent evangelism offer an apparently pure excuse for the anger and alienation of some young people, waiting for their lives to start? I say “Whatever” because historically the motive for aggression can be anything, that’s the point really. Some wars are simply about land and resources – we want ‘your’ this, that or the other and we will kill as many of ‘you’ as we have to in order to get it. Oh, and the rest of ‘you’ can be our slaves.
Then there are the crusades – our religion or philosophy, culture or Whatever is right and yours is wrong, so we will kill as many of you as we have to, to convert you to our ways plus we will destroy your homes and cities and flatten your country until there is no one left to oppose us. Then we will have won and you will believe what we believe or you’ll be annihilated and that will be the victory of our Whatever. In the Middle Ages the English kings led the crusades to the East to convert the people they broadly called the infidel to Christianity. It seems mad today doesn’t it? Now we have the descendants of those peoples waging jihad against their peoples and neighbours to establish their caliphate, because they think if they kill and destroy enough, they will be able to take over and rule, convert and build an empire, like Hitler or Stalin or any other mad megalomaniac from the countless centuries that have gone before trying to impose their Whatever by force.
Of course, each thinks that their Whatever is different, theirs is the Real Whatever, but for everyone else coping with the consequences of the onslaught, it’s the onslaught that matters, that gets noticed, the Whatever is the price of peace. So here we are again, there always seems to be somewhere in the world where someone is trying to convert to Whatever by killing. It used be to Ireland. For hundreds of years there was fighting and killing on the face of it between two types of Christians, the Catholics and the Protestants. Any of them knew what they were doing was wholly contrary to their Christian beliefs, to the “in my Father’s house there are many mansions” of the Bible they were purporting to defend. Everyone could see it wasn’t really about religion, it was wholly anti-religious. So is the killing, maiming and destruction that occurs in the name of religion going on today, whether it is between Jews and Arabs, different types of Muslims or different types of anyone else. The text is always “We are right you are wrong, mend ‘your’ ways to our ways, or die” but the subtext is always that of fighting, killing and destruction.
The apparent motive for the aggression must be on the face of it a pure and totemic idea, that people can be blindly and suicidally committed to. However, the apparent motive can be almost anything, “Whatever.” The main requirement is that death in its cause will create martyrs, so the young can be recruited and turned to its service and kill and die and yet live forever in heaven. Interestingly, those dying in the Christian crusades were martyrs, as are those dying today in the jihads. Everything changes, but nothing changes, the death and destruction are the same, only the names of the protagonists are different. Whatever.
What is it about mankind that attracts large numbers of people to war, fighting and death? The defenders are fighting for their lives, for peace and survival. The attackers are usually fighting to impose their Whatever on others. Why? When will we ever learn? We were getting there. There is little appetite in the Western world for war, we have seen its terrors and want none of it. So it is all the more frightening that in some parts of the world now education is vilified and girls cannot be educated, women live like prisoners in their homes, while boys and men are indoctrinated in “Whatever” and prepared for modern crusades. Ignorance is our greatest enemy; ignorance and starvation and the desperate fight for survival that leads peoples out of their barren starved, parched lands to seek water and life. What will we do about them?
The problems we face as humans are so massive and all encompassing; we surely have to find new ways to resolve our differences and those problems. Yet how can the mediation of peaceful solutions wage war on terror, death and destruction? We have a race on our hands to answer that question, because it is an idea whose time has come and we have to make it happen fast. Mankind must stop fighting and start talking about how to solve the problems of the world together. Unless we start to prioritise the mediation of solutions and agreements that are life affirming, tolerant and create a peaceful world we are all dead. That is my Whatever.