War and death

I doubt if I have transferred all the seriousness, irritation and desperation that I had when writing this post; maybe it’s good if it hasn’t.

For the past four weeks, almost ever since school started again, I’ve been reading only these in a particular subject: genocides, terrorism and war. Death, death and more death. It leaves me stunned, stumped for words.

We watched gory videos of The Holocaust that happened during WWII. I watched, in utter horror, as Hitler went about killing millions of people, and how thousands of human beings helped him kill others. I read about the Armenian genocide in the Ottoman Empire, about Stalin’s artificially created famine which killed millions again, and the Cambodian Khmer Rouge genocide. My mind is sick with the details, and I’m stuck wondering at the futility of the intelligence, the sixth sense that God (or Nature, if you wish) has specially endowed to the human kind.

I’m horrified as the details about how people were exterminated are laid down in detail for us to study. What is the point studying it if we never learn? If we never resolve not to repeat the terrible, unforgivable mistakes? Well, such large-scale extermination as The Holocaust or the Khmer Rouge hasn’t happened in the recent past as we know it, but I’m sure some silent killing is going on everywhere, probably right in our country too.

Who are we to decide certain people don't deserve the right to live? Who are we to take upon ourselves, the responsibility to apparently ‘cleanse’ the world of such ‘scum’? We haven’t learnt. I don’t know if we ever will.

And what disturbs me most is the fact that for all that I ramble, for all that understanding we have that this is wrong, we hardly choose to do anything about it. What, I wonder, have I done in my capacity to even try to rid the world of all this. Sadly, I draw a blank. Nothing. I wonder again, if I will ever be able to do anything to help matters. Can we ever do anything?

As a survivor of The Holocaust aptly put it (lifted straight from my lecture notes), “When I heard about Cambodia, I went into a depression, because the world had not learned. I felt guilty that I’m living in a beautiful home with all the comforts—and I am impotent. I do nothing. It pains me, terribly, that the world has not learned that you don’t kill your brother or sister, no matter what the reasons. I share the guilt today. I do.”

Sharing the guilt - is that all we can do?