I have written these blogs before. I don’t think however I have penned one with such a sense of overwhelming dismay. The scenes that are flashed across the various media sources today are hideous, an affront to humanity. There is more than shock reverberating in my head at yet another needless slaughter. There is more than horror, more than fear that runs through my veins right now. If I had to use one word only, it would be despair.
For a month billions watched the scenes from France and delighted in the spectacle that was so gloriously played out before us. The European Football Championships. They united a country here in my homeland for sure, they brought tears to the eyes of many too. What struck me more than anything were the acts of civility that had been so commonplace. I know the Russians and the English fans were party to the darker side of football, but this was a just a poor tasting appetiser to the feast of mutual respect that followed. When Wales beat Belgium in the quarter finals, Belgian fans applauded the Welsh fans from the crowd, forming a guard of honour. When France capitulated so meekly in the final game of the tournament, a video went viral of a young Portuguese boy consoling a distraught Frenchman. Sport had united the world again. Today the world’s eye is turned towards France once more but for the very worst of reasons.
Despite threats of atrocities affecting the aforementioned tournament there were none. They were played out in Iraq, Bangladesh and Turkey instead. Whilst there are many who argue that these deaths are just as horrific, and of course they are, the degree of separation for many is a cushion to the senses. Many people in the Western World are oblivious to the plight of others in countries that have no grip on their psyche. They should not be criticised for this. It is human nature at its most narcissistic yes, but it is also a buffer that protects us. It is a darker side of human nature but the fate that befalls those that we cannot relate to is a lot easier of a burden to carry. It is easier to dismiss the tragedy that befalls others when we share little with them in terms of location or culture.
There is also a train of thought that these things happening in countries where Islam holds sway, is in some way a divine form of retribution. This is clearly obscene but in a changing world, where racism and xenophobia are rising at an incredulous rate, to deny that this is clearly evident is to fool oneself. If ever there was a time for humanity to face the harshest of truths then it is now, however unpalatable that truth may be. Look at the scenes unfolding in America where the colour of a person’s skin has never carried such significance. Look at the rise of Nazi sympathisers and holocaust deniers. Take a look at the rise of Eastern European splinter groups that espouse superiority borne from nothing other than birthplace. As vile as it may be, look at the Brexit vote and the reality that ‘foreigners’ were more of an issue than any form of realistic debate to a defining minority of the UK population. Never has the world stood on such a thin sheet of ice as it does today. More of that later, but there is a genuine reason to be scared now. In fact, there is every reason to have abject dread in what may unfold in the next few years.
What has happened in France is appalling. It is the sheer randomness of the attack, and the means by which it was perpetrated, that causes me such concern over the future my children are due to inherit. Trying to predict the location of the next attack, or when it will occur, is akin to predicting with any accuracy where the next lightning bolt is due to strike the Earth’s surface. The means by which it will be carried out is impossible to guess. We have had suicide bombings, aircraft flown into skyscrapers, gun attacks and vehicle attacks. The only thing that is certain that Nice will not serve as the epitaph to this reign of terror, rather just a link in a chain of events that history will never be able to erase. The sheer barbarism, the impunity with which life is taken from us, regardless of age, creed, political or theological background, social standing or financial status is abhorrent because that is what scares us the most. Nobody is safe. How did it ever come to this?
There are obvious arguments that can just as easily be countered. To look for a root to this issue, a source of clear origin is totally impossible. Whichever point in history you turn to and try to assert is the reason we are in such a mess, is usurped by any event prior to that. Was it the attack on the Twin Towers? No, absolutely not. There has been a deep seated mistrust between East and West for centuries. The cause of that mistrust is simple, and yet we are so keen to gloss over it. Religion. The very mention of God and the world sits up and claims that their own is the best, the most pious, the only real God. Well there needs to be a reality check. These God’s that people have used as an excuse for bloodletting are not real. They do not exist. There is no dead suicide bomber currently partying like it’s 1999 with fifty virgins. It is a myth, bedtime stories to keep the masses in check whilst still allowing for control of an uneducated underclass. The same thing is true of any other religion you choose to look at.
Christianity fares no better when placed under any scrutiny does it? Crusades, witch trials, reformations, and paedophilic priests which the Vatican condoned with a veil of silence. Of course this will cause uproar, how dare I say that? God will judge me. Well he probably won’t in fairness. He was clearly distracted last night when innocent children who should have had their lives ahead of them were crushed under the wheels of a lorry. Perhaps Pokemon Go has been approved by the heavenly censors and he was in fact chasing Pikachu amongst the angels. Never mind hash tag pray for whoever, how about hash tag wake the fuck up! Rather than waste your energy praying because the God’s aren’t listening to anyone right now.
Religion is a crutch, and a useful one for the huge majority that follow it. It allows them to believe that our lives are just a vehicle to better things. I respect that view as it allows for the edge to be removed from ultimately death, but any tragedy that besets us, yet it butters no parsnips with me. We are an organic animal, evolved over a couple of million years from a monkey. Was it not said that we were made in God’s image? If so, I would rather not ever meet him (or her) because those who represent him (or her) on the mortal coil are not the greatest endorsement of an omnipotent beings architectural skills. We evolved and right now, in the twenty first century, we are devolving. We are regressing in our ability as a species. Crocodiles have existed for 65 million years. They will survive that long again. They care little for power, for political standing or fame. They eat, they shit and they die. They exist and are content to. What makes us so special? The ability to mourn, to love, to think? So do countless other species but they do not use the death of one of their own as an excuse to eradicate another species.
A great deal of fuss was made last year that if the honey bee died out then within three years the world would face a famine. If we disappeared tomorrow as a species the only other species to take a hit would be the seagull, no longer able to scrounge a living off landfills the detritus we highly evolved organisms see as a sign of our superior sentience. We are no better than the most simple of living things, and in many cases we are far worse.
So what comes next? Do we look to apportion blame to the security forces? I have said before, and I stand by those words, that they have done far more to aid us than we realise. I genuinely do believe that and worked in that world for over a decade. Some people may say that we are ‘only linguists’ who sit in an office. What little you actually know. The work that goes on behind closed doors is responsible for the saving of far more lives than are ever lost. What can any security force do to prevent against a lone wolf type attack such as last night? This is where the terrorist threat is so hard to counter. If this is proven as a terrorist attack at all. ISIS are happy to claim credit for a car backfiring, but have yet to confirm their role, if any, in this attack. The link is tangible, it is credible and it is likely that the lunatic Frenchman who carried out this outrage was a follower of Islam. Does that mean we now think all Muslims are barbaric? No they aren’t. What all Muslims must accept though, is that those who currently take such heinous delight in the murdering of so many innocents, attach themselves to Islam. I am not saying all terrorists are Muslim for that is a catch all statement that is both disingenuous and deliberately misleading. Terrorist atrocities are committed in the name of all religions. In God We Trust was championed as we laid waste to areas of Afghanistan and Iraq as Christian nations. I ask a question here, and it is entirely relevant. Prior to the illegal wars we fought against Iraq and Afghanistani tribesmen, were there more or less attacks carried out in the name of Islam? Is it simple coincidence that our interfering in the affairs of other nations has led to such a bloody rebuke? Of course not.
In the light of the attacks on Paris last November, the UK were quick to attack areas of Syria in order to combat terrorism. We dropped heavy duty ordinance from the skies and we lapped it up. Again I ask a question. Since those attacks have we seen a decrease or an increase in terrorist activity? It is entirely logical that we should see an increase. We are the greatest propaganda boost ISIS could wish for. We really are so myopic in our belief that we can win this war. We cannot whilst we are so ill advised by politicians who see war only as a means to retain power or to boost company profits. The battleground is not in the desert of a war ravaged country, it is not in the mountainous areas of countries that can’t be conquered. The place this war needs to be fought, the battlefield where we can make a difference is in the minds of our youth. If only one tenth of the money wasted in dropping bombs on piles of camel shit in the desert had been invested into programmes to educate our youth we could have made a difference.
Reach out to the communities that are the birthing grounds of the disenfranchised youths and educate them. These mass killings are not carried out by old men. They are planned by old men. The misinformation and the brainwashing is conducted by cowardly geriatrics, but we must understand the simple truths to counter this. A seed thrown on a rock cannot flourish. It will never grow. Throw it on fertile land and left unchecked it becomes a forest. By embracing humanity rather than seeking to isolate aspects of it, there can be progress, possibly.
The biggest concern I have right now is not that I will be the victim of an attack, or my children, as the chances of winning the lottery are lower. It is that this terrorism will succeed in allowing for greater schisms between tolerance and intolerance to develop. In Russia we have a madman at the helm. China is a huge military presence and worse is to come this November. The US presidential election is the single most important democratic event in the last two hundred years. Donald Trump is more than just a comedy caricature. He is not the fifth Golden Girl, regardless of what his ‘hair’ may claim. This is a man that has a realistic chance of delivering a World War to our doorsteps.
History is the most peculiar of subjects. We see patterns run through chronological timelines that make historians ponder whether we ever actually learn anything at all. I have given in recently to the desire to study the American Civil War. As a child I bought a book in a Sheffield toy store that covered the subject in some depth. The narrative was too high brow for me to understand at that age but the black and white pictures of maimed limbs and mangled bodies is as fresh today as the day I first glanced at them, introduced to the morbid fascination that war brings and the shameful realism that men are brutal in their desire for power.
Ask anyone who has even a layman’s knowledge of world history, or the inclination to be seen as a pub quiz champion and the cause of the conflict that resulted in the death of nearly a million people is attributable to one thing, the abolition of slavery. This is a half-truth, a pretty sheen on a darker ideal. The Northern States, the Union, were not going to war because they felt pity for the Negro slaves of the south, though many did. They went to war because the North were in a position where they could not compete with the Southern States as world markets expanded. The Southern States were able to underbid the North at every turn because they had a huge quantity of impoverished slaves. They had a cheap, migrant work force that the North had no access to. Whilst the idealists campaigned against the very notion of slavery, the war was fought because politicians and moneymen stood to lose power as a result of the financial implication of slavery. It was never about emancipation and equal rights for the Negro slave, or a century on there would have been no need for a Martin Luther King, a Malcolm X or a Rosa Parks.
There are some who will shout this down, who will believe it will attrite at the heels of the Lincoln Memorial itself, but it is true. Such is the manner in which history is written by the victors, that a sheen is often placed on the real reasons why events unfold. When you look to the fact and not he fiction there are always lessons that can be learned. I sincerely hope that the population of the USA can see that before they plunge the word into a crisis it may never recover from.
I have heard Donald Trump compared to Hitler. That seems outrageous. It could be portrayed as scaremongering, a bitter aside to a man seeking power. The problem is, and I really believe this, it is not too far wide of the mark. I am going to place a quote below and before revealing who uttered those words, or when they were proffered, I will talk a little about them.
The rise of this blusterous man bewilders the educated amongst us, conjoins opposing politicians, agonises our international allies, threatens minorities, spits on the disabled, and touches the hearts of those who just don’t know any better.
Let us stop propounding how mad this all is, but instead, do something!
On first glance, this could easily have been written about the coiffured politician whom sadly is no longer simply an object of such delicious derision. A man who is blusterous, if that is an accepted verbal substitute for a man who talks and spews hatred and idiocy in equal measure, he surely is. Politicians not just within his own country but worldwide are certainly in the huge majority who simply cannot believe this odious man could become President. The minority who support him are those who stand to gain most should he rise to power. Vladimir Putin of a recovering Russia is one such example.
Those words were however written about Hitler in 1929. Fast forward ten years from when those words were uttered and the rest is, as they say, history. Talks of tagging citizens who follow a certain faith, constructing walls that are supposed to keep out citizens of a country who also have nearly twenty per cent representation on the other side, are the sort of policies that will see war as an inevitable consequence. The question is whether this war will be between a divided America, or the big players on a global stage. I fear the latter, expect the former and hope for neither. The rising racial tension in the cities of our closest ally is not a flash in the pan. There have been undertones of real racial discontent for many, many years. It just needs a real spark, and in the calamitous event of Trump gaining power, there is enough spark to ignite more than just a proverbial powder keg, the whole world could be the kindling for this megalomaniac’s burning ambition.
Should we pray? No. We hope. We don’t allow this hatred to change who we are at our very core. Strip away the skin, strip away the ideologies and we are simply eight billion souls. Religion and politics cannot dictate who we become, and it cannot be held accountable for our actions. We have the free will to shape our own future. It begins not with a thirst for rhetoric and answering the screams for vengeance with yet more death. It comes from challenging instincts and accepting that these things happen because we place faith in God’s that are bereft of any power. They are as spent as the Greek Gods and their Roman equivalents whose statues now lay at the bottom of the Mediterranean. We have the answer and it lays in the minds of the youngsters we pretend to defend, to shelter from this ‘cruel world’. Open their eyes to what is happening and instead of preaching hatred and fear, teach them how to open their hearts for if we should allow this hatred to prevail, we are actually condemning them to a fate far worse than that which we see on the news every day.
Even as I write this there is an attempted coup taking place in Turkey. The world looks set to erupt. We must dampen those flames and place faith not in arms or deities, but in the truths of education. Knowledge is the only real power, not millennia old instructions from a world that was so far removed from this one as to be irrelevant. If we can learn but one thing from history it is that we should reach for enlightenment, not follow a deluded sense of entitlement. We are transient in our existence, and it is just the one life we lead. Make it count.
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