Tragedies Great and Small
Here are some new thoughts: Please comment.
Its been estimated that 160 million people perished in the wars,
genocide's and starvation in the last century. It was the most
disastrous century in the history of mankind, despite the introduction
of democracy. A vast majority of these catastrophes were cause by
dictators, and political men who were suspected of being mentally
incapacitated, cognitive impaired and had dangerous demented
intentions. They were the ones who, while invoking the name of God
and Nation, gave orders to the military. Who being immune from the
human emotions of guilt, would carry out the orders of the state
without question. “I was just following orders” (of the state) was
the plea of military war criminals. Claiming protection under this
point of informal international code of military justice and conduct.
One of these military principals-who gave the orders-was Sir
Douglas, 1st Earl, Viscount Dawick, Baron Haig of Bemersyde, an ample
titled royalty and a graduate of Sandhurst, a British military
academy. In a painting, by John Singer Sergeant, Sir Douglas Haig
is in uniform and has the artificial pose and the aloof look of
English aristocracy class.
Haig was the Commander in Chief of the British forces at the two
battles of The Somme, in France during World War Two. Where 420,00
British troops were needlessly slaughter in battles that ended in a
stalemates. Neither the Germans, the British and the French could
claim victory.
After the First World War a French psychologist wrote a
psychological study of the leaders of Germany, France, Italy and the
United Kingdom- the main adversaries of World War One-and found that
they: the leaders, had exhibited the mental symptoms of psychotics
and sociopaths. His study showed the leaders had the classic symptoms
of megalomaniacs i.e. obsessed with their own power; and omnipotence
i.e. believing they were able to do anything. It was the politicians
who gave orders to military men such as Sir Douglas Haig who carried
them out without question, moral culpability or human
sentiments.
Intermingling with the greater tragedies and atrocities were the
multitudes of smaller tragedies involving hapless and innocent
civilians caught in the tides of war, the genocide's, and the
starvation of the last century. They were the salt of the earth.
They had families. They loved and were belove. There deaths almost
past unnoticed are being remembered in this article.
Howard Fast, a former communist, humanist and pacifist writer
traveled across India during World War Two and when his the train
stopped at a remote station. Fast got out and strolled around where,
he noticed, about thirty yards from the station, a tribe of small
people were huddled together on a bit of empty ground. The men were
no taller than five feet and the women were a few inches less. The
men wore string loin cloths, the women some sort of bark skirts. The
children were naked. The men carried spears with fire harden points.
and small hide covered shields. Who were they?, Fast thought.
Two uniform station attendants had appointed themselves as guards
for this strange tribe, told him that they had come down from the
hills because the game was gone and somehow heard that there was a
thing (the train} that would take them somewhere, else where-all of
this understood from sign language. No one knew a word of their
language: no one knew who they were and where they came from or what
their circumstances had been.
They were rather beautiful people. with fine features, pale
brownish skins, and on their faces expressions of heartbreaking
hopelessness, all of them pressed together, clinging to each other.
The indian station attendance had found some rice and fruit for them
but not enough to keep them alive.
And when Fast got ot Calcutta he wrote, “After seeing the great
crowds of the poor and suffering masses...and the people so gentle,
warm, so long suffering. No one comes in contact with the improvised
and starving indians with sensing that knowledge of suffering.”
In yet another enormous crime against hapless and innocent people
was committed by the political leadership (not the people) of the
United Kingdom. Who in 1944, near the end of World War Two, fearing
the Assamese and Bengalese in countries to the west of India and
bordering on Burma, might welcome the Japanese-who were close to
victory in Burma- cornered the rice market with the collaboration of
Muslim rice dealers and stored the rice in warehouses. While 6
million Assamses and Begalses men, women and children starved to
death. There is ample documentation of this atrocity in the files of
Calcutta University to prove that British the colonial empire was
involved in a in a crime so terrible that it rivaled Hitler’s
Holocaust.
In the Vietnam War-another fiasco by the politically demented-
another small tragedy is told by an North Vietnamese soldier: “The
worst memory I had was seeing a woman whose legs had been blown off by
a shrapnel bomb. She was lying in the road alive. She was beyond
pain, but she knew she was going to die, and I knew there was nothing
I could do for her. She asked me to kiss her. I did. I will never
forget that.”
The catastrophes of the last century are written in the blood of
millions and millions hapless and innocent people. Currently
President George W. Bush is carrying out a fiasco in Iraq that is
responsible for 3,600 dead Americans and at least 160,000 Iraqi men,
women and children.
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