I’ve contemplated this follow-up post for a week or more now. My visit to Berlin has me wondering how to think about the massive numbers of war dead between 1915 and 1945. Finally, I decided to put it into perspective, so began exploring other intentional mass death events.
Lamentably, I gave up. There are too many: Biblical slaughter, Mongol invasions, the Crusades, the Protestant-Catholic wars, Europeans in the New World, the slave trade to the Americas, the Belgians in the Congo, the Irish potato famine, Armenian genocide by the Ottoman Empire, Stalinist purges, Spain under Franco, politically-induced famine in Africa and China and North Korea, Cambodia under the Khmer Rouge, political coups in Chile and Argentina, Serbian atrocities in Bosnia, Rwandan genocide, ethnic cleansing in Darfur and the Sudan, dictatorship and war throughout the Middle East, the ongoing spectacle in Syria…for a start.
I finally decided that, in the context of the human species, this is all just business as usual. We want to tag such atrocities as inhuman, but the problem is, they are not. They are exactly the opposite. It’s not that mass killing isn’t wrong. In the context of our culture, it certainly is. But in the context of our biology, it seems to be inevitable.
Death in whatever form is the ultimate consequence of life, the price we pay for participating. The ugliness is in the varied forms it takes, and more so in the suffering and tragedy we humans seem so inclined to inflict on one another. Maybe if we began thinking this way, confronting the reality of our nature instead proclaiming the idealism of our culture, we might change our interpretation of such events and maybe our approaches to finding solutions.
In 1919 Bertrand Russell met D. H. Lawrence on the streets of London and expressed his relief that the extended slaughter was finally over. But Lawrence was far less sanguine and replied that in another 20 years the same combatants would go at one another again with increased savagery because not enough people had been killed between 1914 and 1918. Russell was profoundly shocked but came to view the novelist’s words as prophetic in the course of time.
Jane Goodall chronicled bands of chimps attacking and killing isolated members of other bands, and it was widely touted that chimps, like us, “make war.” I consider that horse shit. The wars in Afghanistan, Iraq and Syria appear to be something else to me. The military-industrial complex is deeply involved at a level of sophistication unknown in other creatures.