Many of you know that I am a conscientious objector. My parents, especially my mother, from a very early age on, told me she was hoping I would never choose to become a soldier. As I was growing up her view, and that of my father, only made sense to me. Both are children of WWII. My father's father, my grandfather Bruno Srajek, died in Russia (likely after a terrible gunshot wound had torn off his leg and he bled to death). My mother's father, my grandfather Erich Rauch, returned from the war after barely escaping becoming a prisoner of war. However, before he could return home he had sent a letter to my grandmother essentially bidding her and his three children (my mother and her two younger siblings) farewell. My mom, to this day, becomes fear-strikken, when she hears the monthly siren-tests go off, as one of them also is for the possibility of air-raids.
When I was eighteen I had to appear in front of a council made up of both civilians and military personnel as well as one military judge. Prior to this I had submitted a twenty-page hand-written essay explaining my reasons for refusing "den Dienst an der Waffe" (armed service). It was a grueling meeting. Again and again the participants of this "court" probed deeply into my reasons for not wanting to carry a weapon, for refusing to acknowledge that, sometimes, it may be better to kill a person than to keep them alive, etc. After two and a half hours I was finally told that I had "passed" this investigation. I was free to meet my 18 months service requirement in the civil sector. My placement ended up being in a residential facility for physically disabled children where I worked from December of 1980 until April 1982.
My pacifist convictions stayed with me without change. The first time I experienced doubts about this was during the ethnic cleansing phase in former Yugoslavia. The ruthless strategies of the Serbian majority against the Croats and Muslims during this time seemed to prove immune to any interventions that came from a pacifist position. At the time I didn't further pursue my own thinking about it. Thoughts about starting my own family, professional changes, etc. kept my attention elsewhere.
It wasn't until recently that I had to confront another wave of doubt in myself about the effectiveness of pacifism. It was on a walk around a local park, considering love and empathy, that I began to ask myself how I would "love" or empathize with the people who were letting themselves be filmed while be-heading another person. My feelings and struggle during this walk were intense. As I usually do when someone has committed a crime, especially an act of cruelty, I went back to questions about such a person's childhood. This person was a baby once. He was inside a woman's womb, was born, held, nursed . . . he was a toddler, a little boy . . . what in the world happened to him? When and where and how did he begin to feel that "sacrificing" an other, a fellow human being, could be in the name of anything good? Could a man who has shed another's blood in this way ever "return" to anything like the sweetness of a little boy?
A horrible realization began to grow in me: while I was quite aware of the likely human failures that may have led this boy to grow into a man who sacrifices others, I was also becoming convinced of the impossibility of ever rehabilitating such a person back into a culture of acceptance and mutual understanding. If captured, yes, it is possible for someone like this to be kept in prison for life. But, really, the only plausible option seems to be that such a person would have to be killed. Perhaps "destroyed" is a better word than "killed." It's the word I just read in a short article about a pit-bull that destroyed after it had attacked a police-officer. The rationale being that an animal that's attacked a human being once will never again shy away from doing so. Therefore, for as long as it is alive it presents an unacceptable risk to society. The only option, other than putting the pit-bull in a kennel for life, is to exterminate it. Swiftly and efficiently.
What has happened to me? There was a time, when my eldest, Noah (then 10 years old), had an opinion regarding the death-penalty published in our local paper. "No human should kill another, he said, such things should be left to God." Noah, by the way, tells me now that he was only saying what he had been told by others (not least of all, perhaps, me?). He strongly believes now that there are good reasons to kill another human being and that neither the choice to kill or not to kill have anything to do with God. He is eighteen, i.e., exactly the same age I was when I was standing in front of the military council to prove my truly pacifist convictions. He would, by the way, never become a soldier either. There is a clear difference for him between saying that it makes sense to kill another person under certain circumstances and to join a general war effort. The latter can never be free of the danger of becoming part of another person's or government's political agenda. Noah would not allow himself to fall into something like that.
But still, what has happened to me? Does with age come fear? Am I simply resisting the more Asian spiritual insights about change and movement? Have I, without really noticing it, become a dualistic person, believing in good and evil? Or am I even starting to be convinced that the old biblical principle of retaliation should be heeded: an eye for an eye, a tooth for a tooth?
I don't think any of these ring true for me. I worry about them, to be sure, but worrying about them takes my own thoughts about this to an unnecessarily moral level. This is a level, however, where I precisely do not want to settle with this. The need to kill or destroy such a person has its origin in neither moral nor religious considerations. Rather it is an instinctual response. It is the response one individual or a group may have in response to an external or internal threat to its very existence.
The instinctual response to the kind of violence we're witnessing lately is violence, nothing more and nothing less. It is entirely unnecessary, in my eyes, to defend a violent response to such violence as "self-defense," a "defense of freedom." or even just revenge (although the latter may come closest to the instinctual violence response I have in mind).
An instinctual response, like the one I have in mind, is not unlike our strategies to fight cancer: we zero in on the cancer cells and we destroy them, with chemical and nuclear means. Talking to them does not work. Of course, there is a problem with the cancer analogy. Many people, myself included, think of cancer while a highly problematic health issue for human beings, also as nature's way of experimenting with its very own materials. Human beings happen to be part of the materials nature experiments on. If we're serious about evolution we should probably consider different cancers as an evolutionary force rather than saying from now on we humans decide what evolution is. And cancer is not it! In other words, just because cancer kills many of us does not mean that it is not good for the world!
So, the cancer analogy could lead us to think that Al Qaeda, ISIS, Boko Haram and other similar groups are "cancers" that literally change the ways in which our cultural societal systems have worked. Should we resist them? Cancer survivors are divided on this issue. Both sides are in agreement that to be a survivor, the cancer has to be in remission for at least three years. But the two sides are almost diametrically opposing each other in their accounts for the reasons of their survival. Some swear that had they resisted their cancer they would likely be dead right now. Others affirm just the opposite saying they would not have survived without aggressive and well-targeted treatment.
What then would terrorism survivors say? Should we resist or should we let the cancer of terrorism do its work? It seems that the idea of letting cancer cells or terrorists do their work is itself unnatural. Every animal, every sentient being would, if attacked, attempt to fight back and protect itself. It may be desperate, it may be useless, but that is what the will to live really forces us to do. The idea that we would patiently wait for the "cancer" to eat us alive or hollow us out seems absurd.
This, of course, puts us on the same level as the terrorists themselves. They, too, are simply refusing to be hollowed out by the encroaching cancer of western culture. And so, this is where we are. There is no entitlement, no moral high-ground to defending ourselves. It is nothing but one culture pitted against another in a war whose common denominator is an equally strong conviction that in order to permanently win this conflict the other must be destroyed.
This is the logic, actually, that was applied to post-war Germany and the remaining Nazis. National Socialism cannot be tolerated, not even in a political system that supports free speech, because it parasitically hollows out the very system that allows it to exist. Ergo, National Socialism had to be destroyed. Every national socialist cell that develops has to be destroyed as well. Once the cancer of Nazidom had rooted itself it will continue to metastasize for decades, if not centuries to come. The same, of course, can be said about the extreme and totalitarian forms of Islam supported by Al Qaeda et al. This bastardized version of Islam will have to be recognized and fought as soon as it develops.
_____
As I am writing this I grieve. Letting go of the idea that a world is possible where this kind of instinctual response is no longer necessary, letting go of a world that could be safe for us, for our children, really hurts. I thought I could raise my children in a political climate that made pacifism definitely the most rational choice. But, as it turns out, that may have been easier to choose while my parents raised us ("Nie wieder Krieg" was the slogan that united many in post-war Germany). I remember a moment on the subway in Hamburg talking to my friend Katrin. It was the time of nuclear build-up in Europe and many of us were afraid of an escalation.
"If we really want to stop this," I said to her, "we will have to become something altogether different. Human beings can't but be threatened and threaten back."
This idea of being "different" still has not taken shape. How could it, really? The idea that we are "homo sapiens" (wise man) is really a stretch. Wisdom continues to elude us and instead we keep embracing totalitarian and absolutist ideas. They will not bring us peace or safety.
Berthold Brecht is credited with the dictum: "Stell Dir vor es ist Krieg und keiner geht hin." (Imagine it's war and nobody shows up for it.) Our time seems different. It's no longer about a war that we could "attend" or show up for. Rather it is about stopping to run away from a merciless persecutor and saying "no."
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
No comments:
Post a Comment