CIVIL WAR
" it is written,
Thou shalt worship the lord thy God, and him only shalt thou serve."' (Luke 4: 5-8)
I do not believe in prophecies regarding the destruction of the world in a certain year, devised by knotty theology or reverence for round numbers. Neither do I believe in a sharp, gloval point of time, at which the world one day is like we knew it, but the next day extinguished, like in a cheap American movie about the Meteorite, the Virus, or the Crazy Politbureau. On the contrary, the end of the world (seen through human eyes) is a laborious piece of construction, resting upon the fight between Good and Evil (like a play by Ibsen, or a final vector account for myriads of actions carried out within the ethical universe mankind is bound to).
A thousand streams filled with human motives are trickling through the historical landscape, and circling around greed, materialism, insensitiveness, egotism and the inner logic of this water is forcing it with increasing power down towards the mighty flood of the future.
The few voices of personal courage, inner strength, and dearly bought integrity may be the only proofs of God I can believe in, but regardless of their purity .....,.against the masses of power of the rushing water, they are transformed into boundary stones, edging the riverbanks.
For nearly fifty years (since 1945) the world lived in a forced polarization between East and West. It created its own Machiavellian and moral universe which subordinated thousands of local, ethnic, and historical conflicts. These "streams" were restrained, piped, tamed, and transformed in the greater play.
To me,"Civil War" stands not only for the abominable excesses of violence in Bosnia, Rwanda, Caucasus etc., but also for the increasing social difference and injustice which the so-called "ripe" economies are going through, in order to adapt to the global market and competition situation. If you ask the growing crowds of unemployed, homeless, of no rights, and of no future, for example in Paris, Why? -- they will be able to sum up their lot as the result of a willed policy, an escalating civil war.
This is happening in a rapid and merciless way in all the "ripe" economies -- in western Europe, in Japan, in U. S. A., and Canada etc., and is due to the fact that the economical systems no longer are nationally based, but instead are actors on an increasingly monopolized and global level, where welfare and social program are destructiv to competition.
Previously, the saying went,"What is good for General Motors is good for the US.
That is a thing of the past, so also are golden moments of Keynesian politics, New Deals, and an ideology compressed to the surveyable You and Us. The great growth in South - East Asia and China are, among other things, based on cheap labour, and the absence of the welfare arrangements and infrastructure that the "ripe" until now have pointed out as the alter ego of the system; even as making legitimate the development, and a condition for the stability and social consensus which gave the phenomenal postwar growth.
In some years, today's "tigers for growth" will be up against the same problems it is only a question of time: The growth will create new attitudes, expectations and it will be impossible to ignore the demand for an increased standard of living, a better infrastructure, health service, increased purchasing power Gradually, capital will withdraw, and find the next suitable field with a maximum of advantages for competition.
Accordingly, we are living in a global economic system which is keeping us hostage, and by its inner logic is forcing upon society a norm for social responsibility, common culture and safety which successively is being downgraded.
The question (however naive it may be) must certainly arise: Does the economic system exist for man's sake, or is it the other way around?
Large crowds from the population are forced out from social life because of new technological developments, but the increased productivity is not reflected in social security networks .... on the contrary, national feelings are splintered by superior solidarity towards an increasingly aggressive labelling system, where the line of demarcation between "those who are contributing" and "those who are not contributing" is being re defined from a structural problem, to a moral classification, and then you are no longer a victim of the blind power of forces, but on the contrary, you are a bad man, a parasite on society, with a selfinflicted fate. The step between being passively and actively expelled may be short.
While I sit writing this I am still sick; filled with disgust and a sense of destruction after having watched a prize documentary film about the killings in Rwanda 1994. (Else de Temmermann).
[Scene 1.) From a ridge nearby a small street with a few houses on the right side there is secretly being filmed. In front of the building a large group of people is standing. They are curiously immoveable. On the left side ... with a wood behind them, two Tutsi women are sitting, one with her arms stretched forward, imploring, on a pile of dead bodies. Then two young men, each with their own machete, come out from the group in front of the buildings and quickly walk the 5 or 6 metres over to the women .... and with one strike part her head from the body of one of them, before the other one is cut up.
Scene 2.1 De Temmerman is sitting in a French military jeep on its way to a mental hospital run by French monks, in order to evacuate these. On their way they go through village after village where the inhabitants are standing along the roadside smiling and waving. Everywhere ... around a corner ... lie killed and cut down Tutsis; children, women, men. In one place the camera is zooming in a woman lying, still alive, she is crushed and maltreated with clubs -- her mouth
still moves in a shapeless face, and you suspect what a hell she has still left to live
for some hours before death comes.
This is the last stage of Civil War; the genocide carried through in the quickest way the world has ever seen until now. Where did it start? What previous history underlies this violent barbarism? An increasingly economical and social unfair sharing, staged at first by the Belgian colonial government, thereby breaking the balance between the nomadic cattle drovers (Tutsi), and the resident farmers (Hutu). Injustice, abuse of power, and force is accompanied by its own fermenting shadow, which at some time will build up into an inferno of dreadful revenge. Refugees from Bosnia who still hold the idea of a multi - ethnical society to be necessary and desirable, say that something of what was the most appalling to them was how quickly people would change from Yugoslaves to ethnic - mythical chauvinists, and how the propaganda could wallow in histrical events from the Second World War, from the Crusades..... to stir up hate.
The essence of Civil War is fighting for territory, for resources, and for vital necessities. Civil War may seem to be man's permanent social system, where only some short, blessed historical moments consisting of some decades at a time, will drown the grumbling, the din of battle, and the killings.
Civil War has its sociopathic leaders, its blustering masters of war, and released criminals with their carte blanche to kill, but it is carried out, supported, and encouraged by the country's ordinary, hard working, law - abiding population, who love the children, and who for opportunist reasons cut out their God given pity, their ability to identify themselves with others, and the wonder of the night, at eternity and stars, and replacing it with grimaces, shaking of fists, florid faces, big gestures, imbecile adventures, social Darwinism, and action.
This opportunism may be understandable as momentary "self - defence"(like in Rwanda, where a restrained Hutu without a bloody machete, would be liquidated by the Hutu extremists), or as the looting and revenge of the hopelessly poor, but as a rule it expresses what the Norwegian poet, Overland sharply condemned in a poem,
"Not so terribly well
shall you stand the wrong
which does not befall yourself"
I fear that the proceeding, global paradigmatic change within the economy will break open all dams, dig up all pipes .... and let these thousands of streams reach their "historical" goal and become a flood overtaking us all. The victims have long since tried to warn us.