I am normally a very happy, cheerful person but as a teacher who loves children (other people’s) I have a very raw spot when I see unpleasant things involving children. I dislike violence by nature, I think, so this is not a happy letter and I have to thank a close friend for his knowledge of history, particularly military history.
100 years ago this year saw the onset of World War I. It began the tragedy of four years of ripping apart the bodies of the young men of Europe and the Commonwealth; the use of increasingly sophisticated ways of killing, blinding, choking, disfiguring, maiming and inflicting on fellow humans, pain and horror to destroy the very minds of those that took part. It is not hard to believe that an unmentioned casualty of that dreadful conflict was the human soul in military decision making, if it had ever existed.
Less than 20 years later saw the bombing of civilians in Spain as represented in Picasso’s “Guernica”. The British invention of the concentration camp during the Boer War for civilian populations was given a new and fundamentally evil life in Auschwitz and the other death camps. The aerial bombings of London and other British, German and other European cities was total war between military and civilian. Conflict between army and army was conducted at the periphery - North Africa, individual campaigns in the Mediterranean and in the Atlantic where the main target was still the civilian Merchant Navy.
The dropping of the atomic bombs on Japan really confirmed that civilians were a legitimate target in military activities, subject to certain conditions e.g. actually winning the war; while the use of guerrilla forces and civilian militia has also seen an increasing involvement of civilians in the exercise of force between warring factions.
And so to 2014.
Like most of the world, I followed the tragic mystery surrounding the disappearance of Malaysian Airways Flight 370. I even read the varying theories as to how a whole plane full of people can disappear, in a world where satellite surveillance can read a newspaper on the ground; a world where civilian and military radar tracks (we thought) every movement in the sky, whether benign or threatening; a world where it seems everyone has a mobile phone to call home or the authorities if your plane is hijacked. Despite the technology, including, it seems, engines that talk to satellites, the plane vanished and remains a topic for conspiracy theorists, military and engineering experts.
To say I was shocked in July to hear that a Malaysian Airways Flight had crashed, probably shot down by a missile in the Ukraine is an understatement as I only partly heard the TV report on the incident. I was aware that a possible “Northern path” had been identified which could have placed MH370 in the general area and if you say “MH 3 seventy” and “MH seventeen” there are similarities, especially if heard from a different room. For the best part of an hour, I believed that MH370 either lay undiscovered in some remote Ukraine field since March or had miraculously reappeared in the skies over the Ukraine only to crash to earth.
The thought of yet another airplane plunging to the ground with hundreds of passengers helpless on board is upsetting. Reports that the plane had been shot down by Ukrainian Militia were initially incredible despite reference being made to a previous shooting down of a military plane about to land in eastern Ukraine. My incredulity turned to conviction that someone had shot down a civilian flight carrying passengers totally unrelated to either side in the war.
My tears started when details of those passengers began to appear and details of the children on board announced. My shock, amazement and sorrow swiftly turned to horror and loathing as Russian thugs in the Ukraine backed by an equally unfeeling Russian dictator began interfering with the crash site and denying investigators access to the site and delaying the recovery of the bodies. I then came across a picture of three of children; there were 80 children on board including at least 3 infants’ I wondered if their little bodies have yet been recovered as not all the bodies have been accounted for and the search has been discontinued due to renewed fighting and there are still search areas to be covered.
“Mo, Otis and Evie Maslin from Perth, Australia travelling home with their grandfather Nick Norris, after a family holiday.”
The callous disregard for life displayed in the Ukraine was more than matched by the savage assault on what must be the biggest refugee ghetto in the world. Although normally invisible to and ignored by the rest of the world, the four million people of the Gaza Strip were again subjected to invasion by tanks and heavy weaponry as well as aerial bombing. Homes, hospitals and schools seemed to be the main targets as the Israeli military apparently re-opened Himmler’s master-plan for Warsaw with a chilling echo of the double-speak of that time.
I wept as Israeli spokesmen earnestly stressed the need to destroy the tunnels and Hamas rockets to a backdrop of dead little children being carried FROM a shell shattered hospital. My heart ached for mothers who wailed with grief as they pointed to the pile of rubble that was once home and line of bloody bags that was once their family. I sobbed as a news reporter in a protective jacket spoke to us about the casualties while behind him stood a small boy, smeared with what I hope was dirt and dust, clothing ragged, eyes dark and beautiful as he gazed around at the devastation, seemingly uncomprehending and alone. He has seen too much, too young and with no sign of a change in the immediate world around, it is not hard to see a potential recruit into the legion of the damned and as he follows a path created by a brutal and brutalizing world
I became angry when the rising casualties revealed that the huge and rising number of Palestinian dead consisted almost entirely of civilians and a proportion of children among the dead which even monsters would surely found unacceptable. I confess I am glad there are few Israeli casualties but despite the persistent attempt to portray the Palestinians and Hamas in particular as terrorists the Israeli dead are almost all invading soldiers.
By LittleMo
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