Confucius wasn’t wrong there
I’d be happy never to have to write a post like this again.
My grandfather suffered as an old man from nightmares about slaughtering animals on the family smallholding. He told me how he would balance on the top rung of a five bar gate and swing a poleaxe, aiming – but not always successfully – to stun the animal with a single blow piercing the skull. There was a gap of more than sixty years between the original act and the nightmares that, he said, tormented him.
My Dad came back from the Second World War mentally and physically wrecked. Aside from the physical injuries of crushed lungs, he suffered from agoraphobia, bouts of depression and alcoholism. I’m not setting myself up as a victim here, but the war- for my Dad, in the Western desert as it happens – was the constant background to my childhood. Ask any soldier and they will tell you that the price of war doesn’t end with a triumphal parade through the city centre. In fact he came home sick and in many ways lived his entire life, until his eighties, in the shadow of traumas he rarely if ever talked about. Nobody is suggesting that his cause was unjust but alongside thousands of his compatriots including some, probably most, of my teachers; the rest of his life was bent like a windswept tree; shriven by his experiences.
So after wars are ended, as they surely must be, by negotiation and compromise, what can we do for the thousands of young men and women who have performed and seen terrible acts of violence and desecration under the protection of the state and under the inspiration of cruel ideologies, who, when it’s all over, can never revisit their innocence. There will be very little gratitude, for there will always be new graves to dig. There will be no winners or losers; just endless nightmarish dreams of revenge.
Wars are mostly started by old men for self aggrandisement and sponsored by arms dealers and states which prefer proxy wars which are more deniable. But they’re fought by young men and women and there’s a grave at both ends of every weapon. A life taken and a life ruined; either way round, it makes little difference . The only way forward is to put the weapons down.