Joshua's Corner

The poet Paul Valéry once said, war is “a massacre of people who don’t know each other for the profit of people who know each other but don’t massacre each other.” Hardly has a clearer truth ever been uttered. One billion people in the history of humanity have died from war. More than 100 million were killed in the last century alone in senseless slaughters at the hands of petty and deluded tyrants who used people as pawns in their mad claims to power.

To justify such murder, these tyrants have fostered fear and anger and hatred. For thousands of years, people have been sent off to their deaths with the notion that they were defending their country, or fighting for the honor and glory of their nation, or their race, or their religion, only to die alone in the trenches, covered in the blood and guts of their fellow human beings, far from their families and far from hope in an arena where death is the equalizer. Those whose bodies survive the fighting endure a lifetime of pain and suffering, their minds and spirits broken by the ugliness of war.

Throughout history, certain actors in our society have sown discord and despair, sparking enmities that would not have existed otherwise and then exploiting them for their own gain. In gilded palaces, these architects of sorrow and destruction, blinded by the trappings of power and corrupted by greed, with no care even for the angry sentiments they muster to rally people to their cause, see the millions of men, women, and children–human beings, under their rule as nothing more than disposable tools in their twisted games.

Where humanity ought to be united by the simple truth that binds all of us, a truth more profound and universal than the flags we fly or the borders we draw or the faiths we espouse, that we are all part of the human family, that we are all children of this great green Earth, and that by extension we ought to live in harmony and peace as friends and fellows, these manipulators tear us apart along artificial and arbitrary lines.

Nationalism, religious superiority, racism, gender discrimination, these are all such unnatural concepts created to divide and weaken, to foster discord and create chaos from which these bad actors can seize power out of a manufactured need to fight against so-called “outsiders.” And then, even if they don’t truly care about the divisions they are creating, their poison takes on a life of its own until it pushes society into a downward spiral fueled by hate and contempt and prejudice until the one who created the lie is lost to history but the cracks they made in the tapestry of humanity have festered into dark and monstrous chasms that threaten to swallow us whole.

Nazi Hate

The demonization and dehumanization of Jews by the murderous, genocidal and inhuman Nazi regime is a good example of this, fostering hate and fear and painting a section of humanity such that it became acceptable, encouraged, necessary to murder men, women, and children and throw their bodies into mass graves and incinerators.

The disturbing and soul-shattering horrors the Jews of Europe and other victims of the Holocaust were subjected to under Nazi tyranny came about because of their savage attempts to galvanize the German people and rally support. Through propaganda and misinformation of the most extreme sort, the Nazis blamed the Jews for Germany’s woes, stoking people’s basest emotions to awaken the monsters of racism and nationalism which they believed outweighed common humanity. Through these diabolical methods, the Nazis labelled the Jews, together with the Roma, gays, lesbians, people of color, the infirm and the mentally challenged as “subhuman.”

Our souls wince in agony at the sound of that term because of the cosmic fault of that monstrous argument. The Nazis cast entire groups of people as less than human and engineered and carried out the systematic brutalization and genocide of 6 million men, women, and children, not to mention the millions more who were targeted out of an ideological and racial drive to kill outside of the organized Holocaust.

Much can be said about the events that led to such devastating tragedy, such as the insidiousness of the propaganda that resulted in the savage atrocities, beginning with divisive rhetoric, and then sporadic violence in the streets, to tightening propaganda that was presented as truth and casting aspersions on reality and those who dared speak out against their evil.

But today the focus is on the fact that the divisions and the hate and fear that Hitler and his cult sowed were out of an extreme sense of the need to control and rally the people. Presenting the Jews as an existential threat and that any and all action needed to be taken to protect Germany and Germans’ way of life from this supposed danger motivated and energized many to fall in line with Nazi policy and to carry it out. Replace “Jew” with any other group, and one realizes it all sounds the same.

Neighbors turned into enemies. Anger and hatred and fear, fired up by the divisive rhetoric of Hitler and his stooges led to violence in the streets that no one cared to stop, and then to mass murder.

There were Nazis who didn’t even care about Jews one way or the other. Even Hitler is known to have, early on in his life, not even had opinions one way or the other about Jews, according to his one-time close friend during their teenage years, August Kubizek. The timeline of his seizure of power show how he co-opted common antisemitic sentiment and sent them into overdrive, showcasing the kind of deluded, cruel, and heartless manipulation of society that those too caught up in their own gain to be aware of the people and things around them employ to benefit themselves in the extreme.

Ultranationalist Poison

In Imperial Japan, similar dehumanizing strategies were employed against the Chinese and all non-Japanese peoples by the ultranationalist, militaristic government that had arisen in the wake of the Meiji Restoration. The brutal devastation the Empire’s forces would go on to wreak across the Far East from Mongolia, China, and Korea in the north to modern-day Malaysia and Indonesia in the south, were inspired by the same kind of artificial lies that drove the Nazi Holocaust. 23 million ethnic Chinese were brutally murdered in ways horrifying beyond measure. Reflective of dehumanization which is the only thing that can make one group of people treat another so hellishly, the idea of Japanese supremacy was identical to the twisted notions of Aryan supremacy the Nazis promulgated, and to the terrorist groups of ISIS and the Taliban, to the white supremacist organizations such as the KKK, in that they were all manufactured lies meant to create divisions and crises from which opportunities for power and control appeared.

The Sin of Slavery

Another example – an even larger one, of the kind of baseless and unnatural lies that were stirred up in the interest of greed and corruption was the creation of the idea of racial superiority in the Middle Ages to justify the enslavement of Africans. One of the most horrific scars on our collective human history, slavery was one of the most brutal, inhuman, and savage institutions ever to curse this world with its presence. Millions throughout history have been subjected to this cruel and unforgivable institution – a monument to some of humanity’s darkest demons.

It has existed since the earliest days of human civilization, and can be traced back to the days of Babylon and Akkadia in ancient Mesopotamia. In more modern times, European slavery can be traced back to the time of the Roman Empire. Throughout all these ages, the practice was no less unforgivable, but there was a distinct element of post-16th century slavery that did not exist before. And that was racism.

Nationalism and its follies were the drivers of much of the ancient world’s projects, and the enslaved included people of all races and faiths. But being white didn’t mean being free, just as being black didn’t mean being a slave. It is difficult to make this distinction without sounding like this mode of slavery was any better than the later one, for it certainly wasn’t, but there is still an important point to be made.

Ancient and much of Middle Age slavery stood apart from race. Even Rome was once ruled by a Moorish emperor of darker complexion – Marcus Opellius Severus Macrinus, in the 3rd century AD. There were no prejudices against people for the color of their skin. And in fact, as time went on and the peoples of Europe emerged as powerful nations of their own after the fall of the Roman Empire in the kingdoms of France and Germany and Italy and Britain and so on, slavery began to fizzle out. The Church prohibited the enslavement of Christians and a culture formed against the enslavement of Europeans, no doubt giving rise to the idea that enslavement on all accounts, of any group, was wrong, if even on a small level.

Of course, medieval Europe was still one of the most backward places in the world as far as concern for human rights went, and some popes even advocated for the enslavement of non-Christians in another example of the creation and exploitation of division between one group of people and another.

Nonetheless, slavery was rare in medieval Europe, but the disconnect between race and slavery collapsed in the 15th century with the start of the Atlantic slave trade and the propaganda that justified it later in the 16th. Over the course of this dark and disturbing part of history, between 12 and 12.8 million men, women and children were kidnapped from their homes, their families, their lives, and were shackled, beaten, whipped, and crammed into the holds of trading ships to be brought to Europe and the shores of the Americas.

2 million died in the dangerous journey from Africa to the New World and the Old alone, while those who arrived faced horrors and savage injustices beyond measure. Children were ripped from their parents, never to unite again. Men and women with lives and hopes and dreams and souls were doomed to a life of torture and servitude, to die by the crack of the whip, to be treated as lower lifeforms. One group of humans enslaved and brutalized another, sickeningly believing their actions to be just, inspired as they were by unforgivable notions of the supposed un-humanness of those whose skin happened to be of a darker shade.

These notions grew and festered, gnawing at the spirit of humanity, voiced by the screams of the enslaved that accompanied the joys of the enslavers. Long after this brutal scourge has ended, we look back at one of the darkest moments in our history and think that while extremely horrible, that’s just how things were in the uncivilized age. It is forgotten that the very twisted notions which led to the disturbing institution of racism and the subsequent evils that have resulted from it, many of which we are still struggling with today, began with a convenient tale spun for the sake of enrichment at the expense of humanity and the fellowship that binds us.

The Scourge of Racism

Race as a concept that divides us, if at all, has only been around for 600 years. In the 15th century, the enslaver Prince Henry of Portugal, the Navigator, as he is known, financed and set up numerous voyages to West Africa for the sake of exploration and spreading religion, with the goal of converting those they came across through any means necessary, including force.

His investments saw the colonization of the Canary Islands, now part of Spain, the Azores, and the beginning of an ocean-spanning presence that would make Portugal a maritime empire. One of Henry’s ambitions was also to get into the slave trade, in which he found a lucrative business whose blinding glare like light bouncing off a coin made him callous to the vast and immense suffering it caused.

At the turn of the 15th century, when Europe was still confined to the continent, its countries and its people differed greatly from its modern self. The age of exploration was only beginning, and to the monarchical, aristocratic, feudal, and autocratic governments of the region, it was time to expand trade and conquest beyond the continent to gain far greater profits than the old systems of trade yielded. The amassing of great wealth from such ventures would strengthen political power in their own countries and increase their influence in Europe itself.

Portugal played a key role in this expansion, and, dragged by the nose by the monster known as greed, looked for any and all ways to minimize cost and maximize profit, even if it was at the expense of human beings. Slavery and extracting unpaid labor was a major cost reduction for Portugal, as it would also come to be for the Spanish, British, and French.

As mentioned earlier, ideas regarding slavery in Europe before the transatlantic slave trade were universal and constant. The enslavement of Europeans was a repugnant thought to many. In theory, this was limited, because it did not care to consider non-Europeans and their rights as human beings, but in practice it actually meant slavery was rare on the continent. They might have fought each other endlessly and engaged in bloody struggles that defined their history, their politics, and their society, employed indentured servants of all nationalities and sent them in droves to their colonies for labor, but their enslavement was out of the question.

Things took a dark turn when, in 1453, two decades after Prince Henry the Navigator had begun the African slave trade, King Afonso V of Portugal commissioned the nation’s chief chronicler, Gomes de Zurara, to write a biography of the prince. This book would weave a twisted, false, and obscene narrative that characterized the people of Africa as animals who needed to be saved and civilized, and that their supposed savagery made them fit for enslavement. It drew special attention to their skin color, their languages, their ethnicities, and made a connection between blackness and non-whiteness on the one hand and slavery on the other, deeming them inferior to Europeans.

Gomes de Zurara, the architect of modern racism, created the lie and the excuse Portugal needed to justify the mass enslavement of the diverse African people and usher in an era of suffering more painful than words could ever describe. People with darker skin were portrayed as dangerous and crude, and that their enslavement was not cruel, but just.

The manuscript was a detailed and thorough work, crafting a completely fabricated image. This narrative caught fire across Europe, and before long, the different kingdoms and empires of the continent were racing to enslave the people of Africa and put them to work on their farms and fields, to extract as much profit as they could.

The heinous lie that one group of human beings were superior to another group of human beings, the justification of the torture, punishment, murder, and suffocation of an entire population, the denial of rights, of life, of liberty, of justice, of freedom, of happiness, and of family, had been created to enrich the kingdom of Portugal.

It was carried on and promulgated further by the other nations that participated in the slave trade. The practice and the sickening psychology behind it festered and developed into a disgust for people of darker skin, a hate that enabled the greatest of atrocities horrible enough to make even God weep.

Similar narratives were spun in the Americas about the natives, or “negros da terra,” or “Blacks from the land,” as the Portugese called them. They, along with the Spanish colonizers of the New World, and later the British, would brand the Natives who lived in nations of their own, complete with government and civilization and culture, some even being democracies, such as that of the Iroquois Confederation, long before the creation of the United States or the advent of popular sovereignty in Europe, as barbaric savages, justifying their enslavement and the genocide of an entire people.

The demons of racism would go on to haunt and define the modern age, giving rise to many of the divides and sources of hatred that wound our societies today. Race-based politics and fearmongering about one group of people displacing and stealing from another plague many nations and are amped up by politicians looking for the easiest way to get into power.

Manufactured Divisions

Like the fallacy of racism, nationalism, religious superiority, even gender superiority, and every single one of the supposed divisions between people have also been manufactured to sow discord and anger and turn us against ourselves.

In the vein of nationalism, the commendable virtue of patriotism has been co-opted and corrupted by schemers to form extremely exclusionary platforms and policies. The concept of nation, of the more artificial notions we harbor, has been used to drive a wedge between the very real bonds of humanity that unite us all. We have been driven to get caught up in the national origin of a person and to use that to define them.

The weaponization and politicization of religion is another one of the most tragic occurrences to befall our species. All faiths, from Christianity and its many sects to Islam and Judaism, from Buddhism and Shintoism to Hinduism and Sikhism, and the myriad others that fill our world, and even the absence of religion, or agnosticism – all of these represent our human longing for answers and a sense of understanding of the world around us and the forces that shape our lives.

Since the dawn of civilization in ancient Mesopotamia, people have looked up at the stars in wonder, trying to decipher the beautiful mystery of where we come from, why we’re here, and what our place in this world, or even more so, in this universe, is. We as human beings are the only species on Earth who have had the capacity and the curiosity to want to know what gives our lives meaning. Different cultures and different people have tried to answer this fundamental and eternally relevant question and their journeys on the path to understanding have taken different roads, revealing different perspectives and opinions.

None are right and none are wrong. And at the center of all these diverging notions, is the common human desire to understand, and to know. That alone unifies the many faiths and religions that we subscribe to. And in that light, religion represents one of the most beautiful elements of humanity. Where it all goes wrong is when it is hijacked and corrupted by those looking to control for the sake of their own power.

Throughout the history of medieval Europe, religion was used to justify the murders of countless people, many times including men, women, and children innocent of any wrongdoing except in some way challenging the power or legitimacy of the Church. In many ways, the Church acted no differently from the government of a nation, but through its autocratic and tyrannical control of religion and what it meant, it brought Europe to its knees.

Opposition to monarchs or certain policies were deemed as heresy and their advocates were cast out as enemies of the Church, who, of all institutions, commanded armies and waged wars against entire peoples and forced them to choose between death and conversion.

In a disgraceful mutilation of the words of Christ, the Church justified the killing of non-Christians as carrying out God’s will and sanctioned tortures and modes of execution that petrify the soul. In the name of religion, and supposedly in virtue and service to God, the Church instigated the devastating Crusades that saw, over the period of nearly two centuries, brutal and bloody wars between the nations of Europe and Arabia that resulted in nearly 2 million dead. The massacres, the killing, the brutalization and dehumanization that power figures such as the pope applied to the Muslims forced the people of Arabia to take up arms and defend their very existence.

It is forgotten that the enmities created to justify these wars and the very real animosities that resulted from them were not the norm of East-West relations. Before the Crusades, trade, cooperation and co-existence could be abundantly found between the two realms. Jerusalem, for instance, which until 1099 was under Muslim control, was a uniting point for Jews, Christians, and Muslims alike, where all were welcome. And then even throughout the two-hundred year course of the Crusades, there were episodes of peace and cooperation that challenged the dominant narrative of the so-called struggle between the Christian world and the Islamic world.

Conveniently ignoring this part of history, combined with the actual devastation these wars of religion caused and the hate-driven agendas of the wrongly named “warriors of Christ,” a term that is itself a revolting contradiction to the inclusive and humane teachings of Jesus and the resistance the Muslims put up against this, the history of the Crusades has been twisted by the modern world to form the basis of modern jihadism and Western Islamophobia.

Opportunistic fiends greedy for power in the Middle East have crafted deadly and inhuman ideologies around a hatred for the West and a desire for revenge, as equally opportunistic fiends greedy for power in the Western world have built degrading and violently biased views of Islam and its believers around the tragedies that unfolded in the Crusades. They try to paint a picture of a world where the East and West simply cannot co-exist and that these two cultures are bound to forever be in a clash of ideologies, destined for conflict. This rash and sensational narrative drums up fear, spurring anger and hatred to the point that it either justifies bad acts or it makes people not care when their supposed “destined enemy” is subjected to injustices.

The atrocities of the Crusaders, many of whom didn’t care in the least for the religious sentiments of the war, but only focused on the plunder and tainted glory that it brought, as well as the promise of forgiveness for their sins from Pope Urban II who called for the First Crusade in 1096, awakened jihad among the Muslim defenders, energizing total war against the Europeans. The cycle of violence grew, and skipping forward a few hundred years, the people of the Middle East viewed the colonizers of the modern age as simply new versions of the Crusaders.

It is important to remember that this isn’t a Christian problem or a Muslim problem, but the result of unaware and deluded tyrants who care only for their own gain at the expense of their fellow human beings. On the side that happened to be Christian, oppressors justified murder, wars, torture, and enslavement as part of the will of God. On the side that happened to be Muslim, while the Qur’an forbids wars of conquest, and only permits fighting to defend one’s home against aggressors, rulers twisted the message to excuse wars of expansion against people who happened to be non-Muslim.

In this narrative, the names Christian and Muslim are merely placeholders for any dogmatic view that is exploited to divide us and set us on ourselves. The people who stirred up these animosities and hatred are long gone, but the devastating effect of their actions remain with us today and are the cause of so much unnecessary, senseless, and tragic suffering.

The notion of gender superiority, a plague that our collective human society has struggled with for thousands of years and continues to fester in the 21st century is yet one more example of the division and discord sown between us and our fellow human beings to create bases of support and springboards to power and control.

The historic persecution and repression of women by nations all around the world were just one of the ways to maintain a specific social order built on division that made it easy for a ruler to control society. A people divided along artificial and arbitrary lines of rightful place, of who serves who and who’s superior and who’s inferior allows for despots to keep all the people from resisting and claiming their right to freedom, for only united can a people affirm their own rights as human beings and, if their government is unjustly refusing to honor them, to challenge their government. Divided, and the will of the people are steamrolled over.

The discrimination against women is exemplified most terrifyingly in the 21st century by the emerging monster of so-called “incel” subculture which the Texas Department of Public Safety warned in a report recently in January 2020 that the cult was an “emerging domestic terrorism threat” that “could soon match, or potentially eclipse, the level of lethalness demonstrated by other domestic terrorism types”. This group has built themselves around hate and violence and anger, perpetuating the very hardships they have been subjected to and blame on women against men, creating a self-sustaining cycle of pain and hatred that is leading the boys and men of the world down a very dark and twisted path while subjecting women to malicious and violent rhetoric and more importantly, actions.

This terror threat deserves a proper explanation of its own, and it is absolutely urgent that this issue is highlighted by mainstream anti-terror forces and addressed holistically by society before it erupts into full-blown horror, and thus cannot be justly discussed here. But like the mutilation of religion, the cult of nationalism, and the sin of racism, this madness is just one more way that politicians move us around like pieces on a board with no care for the harm it causes, and the people who are swept up in these tides of insanity have no idea of the hand that controls them.

The Tragedy of War

An element of human history that has been with us since before the dawn of civilization, when our evolutionary ancestors were still spreading across the globe and moving in bands of hunter-gatherers, conflict has haunted us like a disease. For millennia, humans have battled each other and killed each other for resources and land, and before long for power, for deluded notions of superiority, and most importantly, for money.

The divisions that exist in our society purely by the design of some of us who have been sadly driven mad with greed have paved the way for devastating conflicts between us. From ancient history through to the present, almost every war ever fought has been the result of manipulation borne from a selfish desire that some allow to overpower their humanity.

The most poignant examples of modern times are the two world wars that shook the very foundations of humanity and the immeasurable amount of suffering that was perpetrated by the monstrous regimes that drove it. A hundred million people were slaughtered in these wars, half being civilian in the first and even more at 62% in the second.

But in these wars, in fact in any war, it is not the civilian death toll that alone should alarm us. For the soldiers who die on the battlefield, sent into war against their will, to kill people for no other reason than they have been ordered to, are no less human, and their deaths are an equal part of the tragedy of war.

Before World War I, the peoples of France and Germany and Britain and Russia saw each other as comrades. The technological and scientific advances of the late 19th and early 20th centuries had united all Europe around the flame of progress. Germans and French lived side by side, and there were many Franco-German families to be found as the peoples of these two nations lived together in peace and harmony. But the designs and petty machinations of their so-called leaders did not want to accept the state of tranquility that existed between their populations, obsessed as they were with their own power. In the war that would ensue, families were torn apart. Germans in France, for one, were forcibly removed from the country, where many of them had wives or husbands and children, and the men were subsequently drafted, stuffed into a uniform, and sent back into a place they had come to know as a second home to kill those they had come to love as brothers.

The young men sent to the trenches of the Western and Eastern Fronts suffered horrors beyond imagination for the deluded whims of their oppressive rulers who dreamed of extending their borders on a map, blind to the torrents of blood that outlined whatever meaningless territorial gains they made.

The Christmas Truce of 1914, when soldiers up and down the Western Front, and even in a few places on the Eastern theater – it is perhaps out of place to mention their nationalities, because they were united in a common humanity, when on Christmas Eve they, of their own volition, in fact in opposition to the wishes of their commanders, stopped fighting, demonstrates the stark difference between those who scream about enmities and the rest of humanity.

Throughout Christmas Eve and Christmas Day, these men cast off the reins of war that had been wrapped around them and recognized their fellow people. They drank, they ate, they talked, they laughed, and they played soccer in the snow. None of the petty animosities and rivalries that existed between the leaders of their nations were to be found among the men who saw past their differing uniforms and instead cared only for their comradeship and brotherhood. Tragically, once Christmas was over, they were forced to start killing again, and we have no idea how many who had become friends on that fateful day were forced to take each other’s lives in the bloodshed that followed.

Four years later, the war ended with nearly twenty million dead, many lost in unmarked graves. And for absolutely nothing. The Battles of the Somme and Verdun symbolize the cold and brutal extent of the deadliness of the war, with over half a million men perishing in both clashes combined. At Verdun, a thousand boys and men were killed daily. Fathers and sons fell side by side as the French government sent scores of its people into the hell on earth that land had become. For 9 months, 3 weeks, and 3 days, the men on both sides of the battlefield suffered through constant shelling that tore up the land and split the sky with deafening roars that blasted away their spirits, leaving them paralyzed with shell-shock as they languished in the cold, muddy, rat and disease-infested trenches, and faced the waves of machine gun fire that mowed them down in droves.

On both sides, the losses were immense, and the battle serves as a painful example of the kind of deluded mentality that possessed their so-called commanders. The general Erich von Falkenhayn had written a memorandum to Kaiser Wilhelm II in late 1915 only months before the killing started in which he stated that the only way the war would be won was if they inflicted massive casualties on the opposing forces. His goal was to “bleed the French white,” as he put it, to kill so many of them as to break their spirits.

He did not care for German lives either, hundreds of thousands of whom he would send into the hellscape of Verdun and throw their bodies against the French lines like cannon fodder. Rather than designing a strategy to outmaneuver the French forces or to break through their lines, Falkenhayn deliberately orchestrated a trap to lock both sides into a deadly meat grinder. He called this savage and disturbing plan, Operation Gericht, which loosely translates to “judgement,” or “place of execution.”

Over the course of 300 days and nights, sixty million shells bombarded Verdun ceaselessly – one shell every two seconds. And amidst the iron rain, 2.3 million soldiers battled each other in the hills of the Meuse département, leaving 400,000 wounded and 300,000 dead. That’s one death every ninety seconds. And when the war ended more than nine months later, the front line was virtually the same.

“I arrived there with 175 men,” one Frenchman wrote of the battle and the bombardment they endured. “I left with 34, several half mad…not replying anymore when I spoke to them.”

At the Battle of the Somme, over 300,000 were killed. And in the first three days alone, more British soldiers had been killed or injured than all American soldiers who died in World War I, Korea, and Vietnam combined; whole towns throughout England lost their entire generation of young.

The following year, 110 kilometers, or 68 miles northeast of Paris, the devastating Second Battle of the Aisne unfolded as part of the Nivelle Offensive which made grand promises of pushing back the German forces and bringing an end to the war, but fell tragically short in its objective while taking the lives of hundreds of thousands. 163,000 were slaughtered on the German side, and the French lost in 5 days the number they lost in a month at Verdun – over 18,000.

The brutal bloodbath broke the spirits of the French soldiers who had been fighting for three long and savage years. And they couldn’t take it anymore. All the killing and the shelling, and now their commander’s rabid insistence on sending them over the top to be cut down before they could even stand by machine gun fire, sent them over the edge. Mutinies broke out all across the front. And of the 100,000 who rebelled, forty-nine were executed by the government for which they had sacrificed their lives, their blood, and their souls.

In the East, at the Battle of Osowiec Fortress, Russian soldiers battled through chlorine gas, their lungs scorched and leaking out their noses as their skin burned and their eyes watered. A deadly weapon that was deployed on both fronts during the war, chlorine gas symbolized some of the darkest elements of the conflict, and the pure carnage of it is enough to make our stomachs churn and ask how some among our human species were capable of meting out such wanton death and destruction. And then we realize that these orders were given by commanders far removed from the horrors of war, coddled in their war rooms, who never see the pain and suffering that their decisions wreak upon the world, blinded as they are by their greed.

The ace Manfred von Richtofen, the legendary Red Baron who died after being shot down near the Somme River only a matter of months before the slaughter came to an end, wrote of the sentiments in the cities that starkly lacked any understanding of the reality of the war, “I am in wretched spirits after every aerial combat. I believe that the war is not as the people at home imagine it, with a hurrah and a roar; it is very serious, very grim.” For one of the most successful fighter pilots in history, he seemed to not rejoice at the glory those unacquainted with the horrors of war believe is to be derived from it.

Years later, as the storm clouds of the Second World War were gathering around the globe, similar twisted fabrications and then manipulation of divisions unfolded, giving way to atrocities beyond the count of disgust and fear, and to a number of dead four times that of World War I. The stupidity of the hate that was stirred up by the Nazis, by the ultranationalists, and the fascists caused millions to die for no other reason than the gains that these schemers believed were necessary for their own glory. In their wake, they created monstrous lies and left irreversible wounds upon humanity that have spurred many other episodes of violence and suffering, even into the modern age.

Today, thousands still perish from war every year – more specifically, from the treacherous lies of power-hungry bigots and despots who create divisions and splinter society along fake and tragic lines, causing suffering for their own personal gain. In the last approximately thirty years alone, between Rwanda, Bosnia, the Yemeni Civil War, the Afghanistan War, the War Against Boko Haram, the Syrian Civil War, the Iraq War of 2003 to 2011, to Nigeria, to Ethiopia just two years ago where 600,000 civilians were killed, and now to the Russo-Ukrainian War which escalated in 2022, and where already 190,000, not even counting civilians, have lost their lives, at least six million, nine hundred and sixty-thousand people have been killed, with more than half being civilian in several instances. 7 million dead in the last thirty years.

And all of these senseless and mad conflicts were the result of pure greed with no care for human life.

So many of these bloodbaths have been started by dogmatic and tyrannical destroyers who turn neighbor against neighbor and friend against friend by stirring up pointless and meaningless tensions aimed at securing more resources and money and influence at the unforgivable expense of human lives. The so-called differences between our communities around the world, be it our skin color, our nationalities, our religions, our cultures, which in fact brings us together as a symbol of our nature as humans to explore and think and create, and are all built on the simple truth that we are all people, are turned so stupidly against each other in a gross and obscene twisting of the principles of justice and duty that these tyrants, obviously or not, invoke.

They have somehow taken such intangible parts of our society as culture and race and used it to hide the very clear and undeniable truth that stares us right in the face – that we are all human. And once we are turned against ourselves in a tragic and blind fury fuelled by fear and misconception, we are used like pawns in this sick and twisted game, and witness, if not take part in ourselves, horrible and horrid acts done in the name of righteousness.

As the poet William Cowper wrote in his The Task, Book II: The Timepiece, published in 1785:

“There is no flesh in man’s obdúrate heart,

It does not feel for man; the natural bond

Of brotherhood is severed as the flax

That falls asunder at the touch of fire.

He finds his fellow guilty of a skin

Not coloured like his own, and having power

To enforce the wrong, for such a worthy cause

Dooms and devotes him as his lawful prey.”

While originally written as a critique of the vile institution of slavery, this poem, one finds, applies to all of humanity and wherever one group of people have been ridiculously outcast for some difference that inexplicably matters more than their common humanity with their accusers who label them as threats, or enemies, or poisons. It captures the reality of how prejudice leads to the dehumanization of others, and the imagery of the flax falling apart at the touch of fire puts special and much warranted emphasis on the scarily fragile bonds that unite us. 

In the verses, “He finds his fellow guilty of a skin Not coloured like his own,” Cowper effectively highlights the pure folly of prejudice and bias against people who simply share different features from each other, and indeed the definition can be extended to include both cultural and such superficial and meaningless differences as skin tone.

Continuing, Cowper writes, “and having power To enforce the wrong, for such a worthy cause Dooms and devotes him as his lawful prey,” points out how oppressors who wield power – in the modern world not just of the state, but any power at all, use that power to carry out discriminatory actions. The expression “for such a worthy cause” is ironic, referring to how tyrants and divisive figures rationalize their exclusionary, painful, intolerant, bigoted, and unjust crimes as being for a noble cause. In reality, a concept that tyrants such as these will forever try to distort and take control of, often going unnoticed by their supporters, there is no justifiable or worthy reason for any person or people to be treated as “lawful prey,” a phrase Cowper uses to draw to attention to how unjust legal frameworks themselves discriminate and enable prejudice to be translated into action, and more dangerously, when discrimination or persecution of an entire group is seen as just and proper.

There is no justification for division and injustice and cruelty. Not security. Not differences. Not so-called preservation. Nothing.

As Oscar Widle said, “I can oppose vulgar power, but I can’t stand vulgar reasoning. There is injustice in vulgar reasoning.” Corrupted power is wrong in so far that it is destructive. But vulgar reasoning, as Wilde puts it, is the twisting of reality to justify such corrupt acts.

Hope & The Human Constitution

In the wake of everything that has been said, the most important point to remember is that we are all human, and that beyond any seeming difference, our common humanity should take precedence. The divisions we think keep us apart are nothing more than poison in our ears meant to hold back the power that unity and friendship imbues us with when we regard our fellow human beings not just with tolerance, but with love. Everything from our minds to our hearts tell us this. For some, these voices are sadly drowned out by the corrupting effect of those who would seek to gain from our suffering, disunity, and unnatural hatred and fear of one another.

In scripture too we find many calls for kindness and friendship with our fellow people.

John 15:12 – “This is my commandment, That ye love one another, as I have loved you.”

Leviticus 19:18 – “You shall not take vengeance or bear a grudge against any of your people, but you shall love your neighbor as yourself: I am the Lord.”

Qur’an 17:70 – “Because everyone is created by God Almighty, the Maker of all, humans must treat one another with full honor, respect, and loving-kindness.”

Bhagavad Gita 12:13 – “Those devotees are very dear to Me who are free from malice toward all living beings, who are friendly, and compassionate. They are free from attachment to possessions and egotism, equipoised in happiness and distress, and ever-forgiving. They are ever-content, steadily united with Me in devotion, self-controlled, of firm resolve, and dedicated to Me in mind and intellect.”

These are just the major religions that populate our world, but in every faith one finds emphasis on the need for kindness and fellowship between us. Those who do not subscribe to a religion for themselves also find this truth on their own path, which only goes to show the universality of this principle.

In the beautiful story of humanity, many issues about our collective wellbeing have tragically been politicized and polarized. Those who speak out against war and militarization are accused of being unpatriotic and/or cowardly. Those who challenge social or institutional injustices are branded as alarmists and agents of anarchy. Those who criticize the dangers of organized religion and those who advocate for its merits find themselves sucked into conversation that quickly devolves into trading insults while the true merits of both arguments get lost in the maelstrom of partisanship and one-upping. It is likely that even this very article you are reading now will get branded somewhere by someone as Communist or anarchist propaganda and that I hate tradition and culture.

In light of all this, I hope to present to you a testimony I believe is removed enough in time from the present so as to avoid all the drama of politics.

In 1870, an anonymous German soldier serving in the Franco-Prussian War wrote a song called Ich bin Soldat, or “I am a Soldier.” The war, which had been triggered on one hand by the expansionist aspirations of Otto von Bismarck who did not care enough for human life and on the other by French fury at the perceived insult to their ambassador, a misinterpretation that had in fact been manufactured by Bismarck so as to provoke that exact reaction, saw approximately 430,000 people killed – nearly half a million, including both civilian and military. The war’s underlying causes were political manipulation and its most immediate spark was misunderstanding and blind nationalism.

This man lived in a time when German and French political leaders alike played on the historic rivalry that had defined their two nations’ relations and indeed much of European history, a rivalry that many now have looked back on as a completely fabricated and manufactured rift that was exploited simply to justify their actions against each other.

Here are the lyrics in English as well as in its original German:

English Translation

I’m a soldier, but I don’t want to be one,

When I became one, I was not asked.

They dragged me away, into the barracks

I was captured, like a hunted game

Yes, away from home, away from the dear hearts of the loved ones

and away from my friends.

Whenever I think of it, I feel the pain of sadness

Feeling the warmth of wrath filling up my chest.

I am a soldier, but only with reluctance

I do not love the blue royal uniform

I don’t love it, the bloody weapon life

to defend myself, a stick will be enough

O Tell Me, Why do you need soldiers?

Every folk loves peace only

Only from the lust for power and to harm the people

And they tread, ah, o’er the golden fields

I am a soldier, and I must March day and night

instead of working, I have to stay at my post

instead of being free, I must salute

and must see the arrogance of naughty boys.

And if I go into the battlefield, I must kill brothers

but none of whom has ever harmed me

and as a cripple, I wear a ribbon and a medal

and then, starving, I cry:

I WAS A SOLDIER!

You brothers all’, whether German, whether French

whether Hungarian, Danish, or from the Netherlands

whether green, red, blue, or white your uniform is

greet each other with a brother’s hand

Come on, to our homes, let’s march back

and free our people from the tyrants

because only tyrants wage wars

Soldier of freedom I want to be

SOLDIER OF FREEDOM I WANT TO BE!

Original

Ich bin Soldat, doch bin ich es nicht gerne

Als ich es ward, hat man mich nicht gefragt

Man riss mich fort, hinein in die Kaserne

Gefangen ward ich, wie ein Wild gejagt

Ja, von der Heimat, von des Liebchens Herzen

Musst’ ich hinweg und von der Freunde Kreis

Denk ich daran, fühl’ ich der Wehmut Schmerzen

Fühl’ in der Brust des Zornes Glut so heiß

Ich bin Soldat, doch nur mit Widerstreben

Ich lieb’ ihn nicht, den blauen Königsrock

Ich lieb’ es nicht, das blut’ge Waffenleben

Mich zu verteid’gen wär’ genug ein Stock

O sagt mir an, wozu braucht ihr Soldaten?

Ein jedes Volk liebt Ruh’ und Frieden nur

Allein aus Herrschsucht und dem Volk zum Schaden

Lasst ihr zertreten, ach, die gold’ne Flur!

Ich bin Soldat, muss Tag und Nacht marschieren

Statt an der Arbeit, muss ich Posten steh’n

Statt in der Freiheit, muss ich salutieren

Und muss den Hochmut frecher Burschen seh’n

Und geht’s ins Feld, so muss ich Brüder morden

Von denen keiner mir zuleid was tat

Dafür als Krüppel trag’ ich Band und Orden

Und hungernd ruf ich dann: Ich war Soldat!

Ihr Brüder all’, ob Deutsche, ob Franzosen

Ob Ungarn, Dänen, ob vom Niederland

Ob grün, ob rot, ob blau, ob weiß die Hosen

Gebt euch statt Blei zum Gruß die Bruderhand!

Auf, lasst zur Heimat uns zurück marschieren

Von den Tyrannen unser Volk befrei’n

Denn nur Tyrannen müssen Kriege führen

Soldat der Freiheit will ich gerne sein!

Soldat der Freiheit will ich gerne sein

Beyond just mere lyrics and a charming melody, “Ich bin Soldat” stands as an evocative and poignant tapestry of humanity woven with threads of resistance, pain, and hope. Sadly relevant to us today, this is not just a song, but a visceral exploration of the human condition, a plea for understanding, and a stark reminder of the devastating consequences of war.

This person who wrote this beautiful ode to humanity and the bonds that unite us, bonds that are more important and foundational than our governments and our nations, has perhaps captured the tragedy and madness of war better than anyone else. War, that festering and revolting spectacle septic of suffering, destroys countless lives and countless more for generations to come. It is an unnatural and disgraceful act that violates the principle truths that we are all imbued with as human beings – our humanity.

Many times throughout history, we have been forced to take up arms to defend ourselves against forces that would seek to tear down our freedoms and our liberties. Those struggles are called just wars because they were in defense of something whose value is beyond measure, but they were devastating struggles nonetheless, brought on in the first place by antagonists who create suffering and pain between us where there should be friendship and love.

In reality, there are no winners in war. As Bertrand Russell said, “War doesn’t determine who is right — only who is left.” When we can rise beyond the artificial and fabricated divisions that our oppressors would seek to use to weaken us, we will recognize war for the senseless and barbaric thing it is. Like the veteran Dwight D. Eisenhower said, “I hate war as only a soldier who has lived it can, only as one who has seen its brutality, its futility and its stupidity.”

War, and the divisions that lead to it, are an insult to everything that makes us human and that we base our very civilization on. In denying the humanity and rights of another person, we are denying our own humanity, for are we not all people? By discriminating against any group or person for such frivolous differences as race or gender or religion or nation, and dehumanizing them for that, are we not saying that our own humanity is only based on a specific set of such components, without which we too are less than human and not worthy of rights and justice and love?

To recognize and affirm the humanity of our fellows is to recognize and affirm our own.

While the one who wrote “Ich bin Soldat,” referred specifically to Germans and French and Hungarians and Danish and Dutch, for they were people whom his government often made war upon, I believe they meant their message to encompass all people, and indeed it does apply that way. We are all brothers and sisters and friends.

We are all human.

In light of that, we must strive to always remember that one simple and vital truth of existential proportions, and everything we do ought to be centered around it. We are all the same, and the diversity that we find among us in our cultures and our faiths and our backgrounds are in fact what bring us together, rather than drive us apart. They symbolize our ability to think, and through this diversity we learn from what everyone has to offer. And everyone has something to offer if we are willing to look.

We have advanced so much. We have created technological marvels — everything from economics to government to the ideals of democracy and freedom, from railroads and telegraphs and phones and planes and massive ocean-liners and vessels that brave the seven seas, to monuments of art and literature, fiction and poetry and stories that reflect our ability to imagine and wonder. We’ve peered into the building blocks of life and studied the cells and molecules and atoms that comprise us and our world, unlocking the secrets of the universe with powerful telescopes and delving into the mysteries of our own minds.

We have created medicine to defeat diseases, we’ve physically transformed the land around us, we’ve split the atom, we’ve sent rockets into space and a human to the Moon and rovers to Mars, a whole other planet, and probes to the farthest reaches of our solar system and beyond. On Earth, we’ve harnessed the power of the wind, sun, and water to generate electricity, we’ve created artificial intelligence, and built intricate networks of communication that bridge our cultures and continents. From the massive and awe-inspiring architecture of the pyramids to technological marvels like the Internet and smartphones that bring us together, human ingenuity has left an indelible mark on this world.

We are capable of so much. Imagine what we can do together. As Helen Keller said, “Alone we can do so little; together we can do so much.”

In the last nearly ten thousand years of the history of civilization, we have gone from distant and suspicious warring states to connected and close warring states. In the decades since the Second World War, we have achieved levels of integration and connection between our peoples beyond anything our ancestors from even a hundred years ago would have been able to imagine. From the advent of the telegraph to the rise of the internet, we have been brought closer and closer together. We live in a world where people halfway around the globe are not strangers from an alien land, but our fellows, and are merely a message or an email way.

Thousands of people travel back and forth between different countries everyday, and the beautiful cultures that form the captivating picture of humanity are plain to see, and we delight in learning from them. We listen to music and watch movies and savor cuisines from around the world all the time. We have friends not just among our neighborhoods but also online, connecting us to people from distant lands. Indeed, we have moved too far beyond the era of suspicion and separation to justify anymore animosity or fear of one another. As even François Fénelon said as early as the 17th century, “All wars are civil wars, because all men are brothers.”

Without realizing it, we have in fact already laid the foundations for a just and humane world, and we’re almost there. We don’t need to create human rights. We just need to recognize them, because they are already here.

We just need to take a few more steps, and that is undoubtedly possible if we stay forever aware of the humanity of all those with whom we share this great Earth with, and indeed the universe. We must not let the poisonous words or distorted reality of those who try to turn us against each other, whose words seek to make us afraid and alone in their grasps for power, corrupt our own souls and twist our view of our fellow humans, and indeed ourselves. The divisive rhetoric that makes one group fear another of displacement or theft of resources or anything like that is ultimately nothing more than a politician or a demagogue’s easy path to power. For fear and anger can be devastating forces. But love and compassion and understanding is stronger, as every evil cause that has fallen throughout history can attest to.

The words of the soldier found in “Ich bin Soldat,” I believe, perfectly encapsulate everything that should be about humanity. We are all truly friendly and neighborly folk who only want peace. Let us not be waylaid by the tyrants who we must feel sorry for, for they themselves do not see the inalienable truth that binds all of us.

As people, we should be thriving and striving for better. We should be building and learning and creating, not wallowing in the bitterness of force and destruction and not being slaves to those who care only for power but nothing for good. From one human to another, I implore you, remember this. Recognize our shared humanity, and go with kindness. And when you can, lend your ear to the fellow human who wrote “Ich bin Soldat.” Hear his song. I promise you, it will change your life.

Words to Remember

“In recognizing the humanity of our fellow beings, we pay ourselves the highest tribute.” – Thurgood Marshall.

“Love and compassion are necessities, not luxuries. Without them humanity cannot survive.” – Dalai Lama.

“Like it or not, we humans are bound up with our fellows, and with the other plants and animals all over the world. Our lives are intertwined.” – Carl Sagan.

“War is not inherent in human beings. We learn war and we learn peace. The culture of peace is something which is learned, just as violence is learned and war culture is learned.” – Elise M. Boulding.

“If we have no peace, it is because we have forgotten that we belong to each other.” – Mother Teresa.

“To err is human, to forgive, divine.” – Alexander Pope.

“During bad circumstances, which is the human inheritance, you must decide not to be reduced. You have your humanity, and you must not allow anything to reduce that. We are obliged to know we are global citizens. Disasters remind us we are world citizens, whether we like it or not.” – Maya Angelou.

“World belongs to humanity, not this leader, that leader or that king or prince or religious leader. World belongs to humanity.” – Dalai Lama.

“Every one of us must respect each other’s rights and feelings, be tolerant of each other’s religions, customs and habits, for in diversity we can truly find real unity.” – Tunku Abdul Rahman

“The greatness of humanity is not in being human, but in being humane.” – Mahatma Gandhi

“Kindness is the best form of humanity.” – Doris Lee

“Without feelings of respect, what is there to distinguish men from beasts?” Confucius

“Mankind must put an end to war before war puts an end to mankind.” – John F. Kennedy

“All wars are fought for money.” – Socrates

“It is my conviction that killing under the cloak of war is nothing but an act of murder.” – Albert Einstein

“It isn’t necessary to be anti-national to be deeply suspicious of all nationalism. Nationalism of one kind or another was the cause of most of the genocides of the twentieth century.” – Arundhati Roy

“No one is born hating another person because of the color of his skin, or his background or his religion. People learn to hate, and if they can learn to hate, they can be taught to love, for love comes more naturally to the human heart than its opposite.” – Nelson Mandela

“All religions must be tolerated…for every man must get to heaven in his own way.” – Epictetus

“Tolerance implies no lack of commitment to one’s own beliefs. Rather, it condemns the oppression or persecution of others.” – John F. Kennedy

“Our ability to reach unity in diversity will be the beauty and the test of our civilization.” – Mahatma Gandhi

“We need leaders not in love with money but in love with justice. Not in love with publicity, but in love with humanity.” – Martin Luther King Jr.

“We share the same air, the same water, the same good earth. In diversity we can achieve unity.” – Tunku Abdul Rahman