hard to watch … don’t get too involved
JVP is holding pro-Palestine vigils and demonstrations. Courageous, but maybe a little foolhardy. There’s bound to be violence in one or another of these situations at a time when rabid passions are running amok.
I would never risk my life for any of the craziness in this world. I would never go into the military (any military) or be a “resistance fighter” or get too involved in any situation where human beings are acting crazy. Lay low or run fast in the other direction.
A friend of mine went around with a peace flag flying from his car in the weeks after 9/11 to show that the U.S. should not start bombing in retaliation. It was quite a time, if you can remember back … American flags flying all over the place; hyper-patriotism, vengeance in the air. I thought my friend was nuts. I thought for sure he would come out to his parked car one day and find his tires slashed. Or worse.
It’s a big, crazy world and a certain small gesture of an inflammatory kind could result in terrible harm to your person or your family while making very little difference in the overall scheme of things.
I’m a pacifist (except in regard to a situation of direct self-defense in the face of direct assault) and I wish the Palestinians (and the Ukrainians) would engage in mass passive resistance.
Here’s the program: Just stop everything. Stop working, stop producing, stop eating, obey no edict of the oppressors; as the horrible soldiers approach, go limp. What I’m saying will never happen, of course, but I’m convinced that it would be a much better thing to do. More consequence … more sympathy and support … less loss of life.
Ukraine: With a program of mass passive resistance ten thousand Ukrainians would die of starvation or be killed by the soldiers until the point where the world would make the soldiers stop. Enormous sympathy for passive resistance. Gandhi proved it. With active military resistance there will be a hundred thousand Ukrainians killed until the point where the horror and agony are enough to enable negotiations.
The death of the ten thousand would be agonizing, but it would be one-tenth of the loss of life in warfare. And there would be much less in the way of property destruction. And the brutal oppressors would have less stature in the negotiations.
But emotion induces military response. After the wars are the PTSD’s and the regrets and (on both sides) the “oh, my god, how unbelievably horrible, how could this have happened?’
Unbelievably horrible. From a personal perspective, try to not get involved.
(There was almost nothing like what we know of as “war” (generalized armed conflict with weapons of mass destruction) prior to the onset of statist civilization. Indigenous tribes skirmished plenty, often about territorial boundaries. In fact, the skirmishing served to more or less for-the-moment define boundaries. A tribe was protective of its self-conceived territory. If infringed or intruded, warriors would actively confront the perceived perpetrators. Blood would be drawn. A number of killings might result. Point made. There was never generalized warfare with mass destruction unless some stress factor was driving a tribal group crazy. Plenty of that was evident in the Americas after the European encroachments drove the natives crazy. So Americans tend to think of “Indian ways” as what was remembered from the long aberrant period of trauma, 1500–1900. Anyway, meanwhile, modern statist civilization is a stress factor that has driven the whole human race crazy … the genesis of ongoing conquest and warfare.)
