In my nation (Australia), I have a sense that many people can be a bit glib about the reality behind a news headline - and I suspect the same applies in other nations as well.
On the war against Ukraine, I have seen some of the (sanitised) videos on YouTube, and they bring to mind reactions of horror in Denmark some years ago when a documentary showed Danish soldiers (who had been attacked - i.e., had enemy combatants trying actively to kill the Danes) tracking - on the Danes’ then high tech kit - the death by loss of blood of an enemy combatant ... and celebrating.
Well, that is what war involves: a contest for life where the loser dies (or is wounded, possibly crippled) and the winner lives - as has been written about, including the mental anguish, at least as far back as “The Odyssey”.
I have written about some of my families’ experiences with such matters in “Reflections on War”.
People - soldiers and civilians - are traumatised by war because it is traumatic.
Even in the sanitised YouTube videos I have seen (sometimes with the gorier events obscured) Russians killing (and worse) Ukrainian prisoners, a Ukrainian soldier telling (according to the closed captions) a Russian “oh you thought you could come here and didn’t have to die?” before shooting the Russian (who was clearly not trying to surrender), an event similar to that of the Danish soldiers, and Ukrainian drone operators and special forces getting Russians to surrender.
I am going to include a chunk of text from my previously mentioned post, largely about my Uncle Clive (emphasis added):
He had a joke about his time in the CMF as well. After they finally got tin helmets (they were underequipped and undertrained, partly because they were initially allowed to go to PNG only for non-combat purposes - so they were meant to build roads, defences, etc, but they were not supposed to actively fight, but that decision was taken away by the Japanese invasion of PNG), he said they should have two, because when they went into combat, their face was buried so deeply in the mud their backside was what stuck up most, and it should have a tin helmet of its own.
He was, in my view, a lovely man, and we kids all loved him.
He also told me that they “didn’t always bring back prisoners” during their time fighting in the jungle.
It was a shock to try to reconcile this gentle - to us - man, now long dead, with war crimes, but there it was.
There was a lot to understand - depths beyond the pleasant presentation, depths which reflect the trauma of the war he and others were thrust into, unprepared, the savagery of war generally - and of that particular campaign.
On that, anyone who wants to understand those times should see the film “Kokoda”, and read Peter FitzSimons’ book “Kokoda”. It was jungle warfare, which compounded the horrors, as would later become clearer to the world in the first “television war”, what we call the Viêt Nám War, what the Vietnamese call the American War.
War is traumatic - it always has been, for millennia, and it always will be.
The scenes in the YouTube videos about Ukraine look like World War One battlefields; the scenes from cities there look like World War Two.
It is easy to look at those and think about what is required to physically rebuild, but it is also essential to remember the human cost and what will be required to heal or manage that ...
And this applies also to other conflicts - including Sudan, which is the world’s largest humanitarian catastrophe, Gaza which is probably more severe & intense than anything else, but is smaller than the conflicts in Ukraine and Sudan, and all the other conflicts mentioned here.
Do you, Dear Reader, have experience of interpersonal violence? Perhaps you have been attacked in one of the many ways that violence can be committed - as I have been.
War is more intense than most of those (although probably not murder [which happened to a niece of mine] or some of the more extreme incidences of abuse, torture, and violence), and is widespread, and often for long periods of time, and the damage can carry over in to the afterlife and future lives, as I mentioned here.
The hate, harm and violence of war is terrible, but peace MUST be genuine and BPM in order to be both lasting and healing - peace at any price simply shifts the suffering war through time, it does NOT end it nor heal it.
So ... we must work for a good peace, and to manage/constrain the horrors of war, and to heal (as much as we can) those affected by wars, which may well include us - self care is vital.
Possible flaws
Where I can, I will try to highlight possible flaws / issues you should consider:
- there may be flawed logical arguments in the above: to find out more about such flaws and thinking generally, I recommend Brendan Myers’ free online course “Clear and Present Thinking”;
- I could be wrong - so keep your thinking caps on, and make up your own minds for yourself.
If you appreciated this post, please consider promoting it - there are some links below, and there’s also other options.
Note that I am cutting back on aspects of my posts - see here.
(Gnwmythr is pronounced new-MYTH-ear)
Remember: we generally need to be more human being rather than human doing, to mind our Mӕgan, and to acknowledge that all misgendering is an act of active transphobia/transmisia that puts trans+ lives at risk & accept that all insistence on the use of “trans” as a descriptor comes with commensurate use of “cis” as a descriptor to prevent “othering” (just as binary gendered [men’s and women’s] sporting teams are either both given the gender descriptor, or neither).#PsychicABetterWorld and may all that I do be of value and actively BPM used for and by the nonphysical BPM
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