Ugly Choices

By David Simmons

“War is ugly,” US Defence Secretary Leon Panetta said in the Pentagon’s latest damage-control effort following troops’ misbehaviour in Afghanistan.

Well, why do it, then?

My parents were veterans of a “just” war, the one that tore Europe apart in the 1940s. Although they rarely spoke of their experiences in World War II, and certainly never pretended there was any glory or honour in it, my early life was nevertheless immersed in the concept that war is sometimes necessary, and that good can be done by it – but only as a last resort.

Like many of my generation, I found that line of thinking challenged by the Vietnam War, a harsh awakening to the possibility of a “war of choice” and, more broadly, the illogic and disingenuousness of the Cold War itself. It turned out that wars were not necessarily waged to defend home and hearth or to protect our “freedom”, but to maintain global economic imbalances at best, or at worst for no sounder reason than ideology.

During that period, we also were forced by the My Lai scandal to wake up to the fact that, in the heat of war, “atrocities” are not always committed by the enemy, but by the good guys too. It should have been obvious, but a lot of us had let the mythology of the “just” wars in Europe, the Pacific and Korea cloud our logic. War films have had a lot to do with that distortion; a notable exception, of sorts, is Saving Private Ryan, in which a German machine-gunner who killed one of their colleagues is captured by US Captain John Miller and his team. Some of the men want to kill the German in revenge, but Miller lets him go.

I seriously doubt that in real life, a real Captain Miller would not have let his men slaughter the German. Would you? Would I, in such a situation, when I had been sent to a foreign land where people were killing my friends and, when we managed to catch one of them, we had the chance to blow his despised head off? With no repercussions? How many such “atrocities” by the Allies were covered up?

Even 30 years later, My Lai–type events rarely came out in the open. It took more than a year for independent journalist Seymour Hersh to break that story; how many other atrocity stories died with their perpetrators? The very word “atrocity”, derived from Latin atrocitas (“cruelty”), is a propaganda tool, implying that such things are not the norm.

Nowadays independent journalists are practically a thing of the past; nothing is reported if there is no money to be made. But at the same time we journos were selling our souls to the corporations who paid our salaries, we were being replaced by cell-phone cameras and the Internet. And so the Abu Ghraibs and peed-on corpses and grinning soldiers posing with body parts go viral, stripping us of any excuses we have left to deny that “war is ugly”. That it should be avoided at all cost.

Yet self-delusion is a powerful thing, and we won’t learn from the Afghanistan horrors any more than we learned from those in Iraq, Bosnia, or Nicaragua or Vietnam or Korea or the Ardennes.

Sometimes, the facts are just too ugly to face up to.

The Roundness of Time

By David Simmons

The trouble with timelines is that time is not linear but circular. That’s why we have news cycles and boom-and-bust cycles, and why history repeats itself. What goes around comes around.

Progress is the unbending of time, the often fleeting escape from the vicious cycle that is the natural order of things. It almost never happens by accident, but takes a lot of effort and co-operation, which is why progressive movements such as democracy and poverty reduction are so hard to keep from curving off track.

Innovation is a tool humans have used since the invention of language and the greatest circle of them all, the wheel, to progress technologically. It took thousands of years for technology to progress in a major way, but like all things, without tremendous effort, it too becomes little more than a circular argument.

The first technological marvel I can remember getting excited about was the “flicker”. That’s what my parents called flashing car turn signals. Our first Volkswagen Beetle had semaphore turn signals that popped out of the B-pillar, but our brand-new 1957 model had real flickers, just like “grown-up” North American cars.

But the flicker was soon to be superseded on my excitement scale, because this was the 1950s, when time was in the early stages of an unprecedented spurt of linearity. That same year, the Soviets launched Sputnik 1, and I would stand in our yard in the evening and watch in awe as it tracked across the sky. It was the birth of the space age, and we thought it would change our lives.

But much smaller innovations around the same time, which didn’t make the headlines or heat up the Cold War, turned out to be much greater world-changers. Even as the Russians fired their rocket into space, full of sound and fury, a few bespectacled scientists somewhere quietly invented the first computer languages, and in 1958, the integrated circuit.

The thread that has run through the often circuitous, sometimes marvellously progressive timeline of human development is the one thing that really makes us different from all the other animals, the mastery of complex communication. That technology reached an apex with the printing press and the newspaper. Back in the 1950s, of course, we all knew that the newspaper was dead. Sure, it had survived newsreels and radio, but there was no way it would survive television.

We got our first TV in the early 1960s. Dad worked for a hardware store that was the town’s distributor of Electrohome, then Canada’s primary maker of state-of-the-art entertainment gizmos like stereophonic record players housed in beautiful wooden cabinets. Because of his employee discount, we were able to get both a stereophonic record player and a “portable” television set. It was called portable because it wasn’t housed in a beautiful wooden cabinet, and it had a handle on top for carrying purposes. But I don’t remember seeing anyone actually carry it alone.

At first we could only get one channel, the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation affiliate in Kelowna, a city about 70 miles (we hadn’t heard of the metric system yet) south of our village in British Columbia. Dad would rush home from work to watch the 15-minute news broadcast. I liked Saturdays, because the Bugs Bunny Show preceded Hockey Night in Canada. That was when the National Hockey League had only six teams; I lost interest in later years when it expanded and became too much work to keep track of.

But funnily enough, by the early 1980s, television had still not managed to kill off the newspaper. And so I became a print journalist. Still am, even though the people who know about such things have said the Internet will make the newspaper a thing of the past, as television and radio and movie newsreels didn’t before.

But although newspapers today look a lot like they did when I got started writing for them and later editing them, or even how they looked in the late 1950s when I first learned to read them (though mostly the funnies), the way we make them has changed in ways no one could predict 30 years ago.

And yet the changes, in a way, have been circular.

When I started in the business, newspapers were only just starting to use computers in a big way. The first paper I worked at for any length of time used a big computer to assist in the typesetting, but the stories themselves were written and edited on typewriters in noisy newsrooms.

Fast-forward to 2012, and I’m sitting all alone in my room in my boxer shorts, a cold beverage at the side, in Bangkok, editing stories for a newspaper in Hong Kong, 1,700 kilometres away. One of the stories is about the Chinese government doubling the trading range of the yuan versus the US dollar. I tap out the headline on my MacBook Pro, and send it at the speed of light. The next morning, I’m watching BBC World on my flat-screen TV, beamed to me from far overhead by a descendant of Sputnik, and there, on the newscast’s wrap of the day’s headlines from around the world, is my headline, about the yuan.

It had come full circle.

The McDonald's at the End of the World

By David Simmons

There’s not much evidence any more of the many battles fought around Megiddo Hill in northern Israel, most recently in 1918 between the British forces of General Edmund Allenby and the dying Ottoman Empire. Still, it was a worthy inspiration for the author of the Book of Revelation, who used its Greek name – Armageddon, from the Hebrew Har (Mount) Megiddo – to describe Earth’s coming final battle.

The hill – having grown up surrounded by genuine mountains in British Columbia, I wouldn’t call any of the geographic protrusions in Palestine “mounts” – overlooks the Jezreel Valley, popular among warmongers ancient and modern for its broad, flat expanse near a pass on an important trade route. The first recorded major Battle of Armageddon was in the 15th century BC, between the Canaanites and the forces of Egyptian Pharaoh Thutmose III.

More important to the author of Revelation, possibly, was Megiddo’s proximity to the birthplace of monotheism, whose three main faiths have been central to many of the world’s bloodiest wars, and have made the New Testament writer’s prediction of a true “war to end all wars” seem increasingly likely during the course of the 20th and 21st centuries AD.

It’s unlikely Thutmose’s beef with the Canaanites had anything to do with religion. It was an imperialist struggle; the point was to shore up Egypt’s hegemony in the Middle East, not to impose Egypt’s gods on its residents and certainly not, as the Israelites did later, to punish the Canaanites for being “heathens”. The Israelite kingdom was immersed in its monotheistic religion, which by its founding nature is utterly intolerant of rival belief systems – the Second Commandment is “You shall have no other gods before me.” Thus the Old Testament is strewn with blood.

Reformers over the centuries have tried to purge Judaism and its offshoots of their warlike nature, with dubious success. Jesus of Nazareth – a town about 18 kilometres from Megiddo – was one of the most important of these figures. But instead of reforming his religion he got himself killed by the imperialist Romans, and his followers started a whole new faith that eventually fell into the same warlike mode as its Judaic forebears. This was exacerbated by a third monotheism, Islam, which despite its name deriving from the Arabic root slm that also gives rise to saalam (“peace”, cognate Hebrew shalom), has always resisted serious efforts to divest it of intolerance and violence.

Recently British Prime Minister David Cameron, on a visit to the world’s most populous Muslim nation, held that country up as an example of how Islam could stand side by side with democracy, and “offer an alternative to the dead-end choice of dictatorship or extremism”. Indeed, urban Indonesians largely reject the violence and intolerance of their religion, but who really are the “extremists”? There is seething anger among that country’s devout fundamentalists. And in Bali in 2002 they lashed out in defence of the intolerance they cherish, and which is rejected by so-called moderates, who to them are the real radicals.

This dichotomy exists throughout Southeast Asia, and not just in the five countries of that region that have embraced Abrahamic faiths (Islam in Malaysia, Indonesia and Brunei and Roman Catholicism in the Philippines and East Timor). In all cases the predominant religions here were imported, yet they have adapted, and been adapted, to conform with the ancient cultures that predate them. Thai Buddhism includes aspects of primitive animism and superstition that would likely get Siddhartha Gautama’s head a-shakin’, and the love of life and sexuality prevalent in Indonesia and the Philippines are constant frustrations for their clerics.

Back in their birthplace in the Middle East, though, the philosophical roots of the Abrahamic monotheisms are alive and well. Given this history, nothing would seem more likely to bring on Armageddon than throwing all three of these faiths into the same Jezreel Valley. And yet that is what has happened.

The main catalyst was the establishment of the State of Israel, a pocket of Jews deliberately inserted by Christians in the middle of a pack of Muslims, who were already fighting among themselves because of their own religious disagreements, primarily the rift between Sunnis and Shiites. Israel should have collapsed days after it began – and there is historical evidence that the British, the former occupiers of Palestine and the main enemies of Zionism in the mid-20^th century, dearly hoped it would. But the incompetence of the Arab dictatorships succeeded in shoring up Western support for the fledgling state, particularly in the newly powerful United States. That state of affairs exists to this day.

Nowadays the West has largely abandoned religion, which has opened the door to a widespread hope for global peace. However, not enough people have entered that door, and secularism has in turn given rise to rampant consumerism that must be fuelled by petroleum – much of which lies in the sands of Muslim-dominated countries of the Mideast. The result is twofold: Western nations meddle in the Middle East in the name of energy security, while their overarching secularism makes them ignorant of the religious forces in that region they inevitably have to deal with.

Currently the microcosm of this ugly picture is not so much Israel but Syria, a short jog east of Megiddo. Like most of the countries of the region, Syria did not arise naturally but was drawn on a map by occupying Christians, in this case the French. It is primarily a mixture of Sunni and Shiite, with significant minorities of other faiths, or sects of the main ones. The most important sect, because of its political power – and not because of its numbers, who are relatively few – is the Alawi, a branch of the Shia. The Assad clan that has ruled Syria since 1970 is Alawite.

Syria is also closely allied with the most powerful non-Arab state in the region, which is also predominantly Shiite: Iran. Meanwhile the powerful Arab states are predominantly Sunni monarchies and dictatorships, mostly with strong links to the US. As the US is also the most loyal and lucrative supporter of Israel, despised by Sunni and Shiite alike, yet another seed of end-of-times conflict is sown.

Over the past couple of years we have seen yet another poison thrown into the mix, the collapse of Western capitalism. In all imperial downfalls, the most dangerous time is not the ultimate demise itself but the interim period when the emperor still thinks he wears clothes, and lashes out indiscriminately in what he refuses to recognize as his own death throes. His decisions are inane, such as the European suicidal ban on Iranian oil imports, which the emperor’s propagandists tell the little people is aimed at ending Iran’s unproven nuclear-weapons program but is in fact all about the hegemony of the petrodollar.

Secular Westerners look at the blood currently pouring on to the streets of Homs and cry for a new crusade, to rescue the innocent from the evil Alawites. But even if they were properly informed by their media of the complex nature of the Syrian civil war, they would likely remain largely ignorant of the motives driving the foreign interests in that country: the hugely powerful empires of Europe-America, China and Russia battling – diplomatically, for now – for the spoils of the larger region.

One could go to Megiddo to educate oneself, but it probably wouldn’t help much. I went there in the early 1980s; I doubt much has changed since then, though I don’t think the McDonald’s pictured above was there yet. Unlike much of the rest of the Middle East, Israel is a modern quasi-Euro-American state, and it’s easy not to see the Horsemen of the Apocalypse lurking in the wings.