Complicit in the blood-dimmed tide
Attacking a neighbouring country on a shoddy pretext, systematically destroying it’s infrastructure, evicting it’s people, massacring it’s children, bullying the “peacekeepers”… What next?
Sure as hell, Israel -unlike Iraq- has more than it’s share of WMD’s; I wonder if, even now, the Israeli government is seeking for a plausible excuse and a window of opportunity to use them.
Fuckin’ barbarians; I’d curse them to rot in hell if I could believe that there’s a worse kind of suffering than what the people of Lebanon are going through right now. There can be absolutely no fuckin’ justification for the indiscriminate killing of women and children, let alone for purposely targetting them. Everyone directly responsible for such acts, from the lowliest soldier committing them to the heads of state ordering them automatically forfeit their humanity (and the rest of us must either carry the burden of their conscience, or become complicit in their crime). Every country, every nation, every religious, philosophical or social system condoning them is deserving of our scorn. Wars have been waged since the dawn of history, yet such atrocities are it’s blackest pages, and the half-life of their blemish on the human psyche runs in the hundreds of years. Religious doomsday portents aside (I don’t believe in that kind of sanctimonious, war-justifying bullshit either), the poet said it best once again:
Turning and turning in the widening gyre
The falcon cannot hear the falconer;
Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;
Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,
The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere
The ceremony of innocence is drowned;
The best lack all conviction, while the worst
Are full of passionate intensity.
– The Second Coming, Y. B. Yeats
And the rest of the world looking on the terrible proceedings in equal measures of impotent rage, quiet desperation and weary indifference, all yielding the same result, of course. In a globalized society, innocence is drowned worldwide, at the rate of media updates.
I know: we’re lost for words and reactions, we the “decent people”. We’re all savvy to the usual arguments; been force-fed approved and sanitized lines of reasoning for so long that we dare not even express our indignation at witnessing such atrocities. Fearing to offend and appear bigoted, we whittle down our humanity, and raise the bar of what is tolerable until yesterday’s screams are heard no more. But we better find our voices soon, because we know too well what silence and apathy amount to in such times.
“The Jewish bandits are despicable cowards who hide behind women and children.”
– SS-Gruppenführer Jürgen Stroop on the resistance in the Warsaw Ghetto, 1943 (quote found here)
Disclaimer: This post is an honest-to-humans rant; no informative links to be found here. Go look for yourselves, the web is full of pain these days. Or, at least, it should be.
Google (cluster)bomb: barbarians, murderers, childkillers, war criminals
