Does poverty have any reddeming features?,
it shows us how good it is, not to be poor.
Does sickness have any redeeming features?, it reminds
us of the blessings of health. Does
child abuse have
any redeeming features?, it makes us glad that we can
rear children who are unabused.
No I don't buy this line of reasoning. I have no experience of war, nor do I wish to. It is tragic when we loose our humanity. I can't see the great horror of war being
a good way to remember our humanity. It is nessecary
to remind ourselves that we are human and to cease the killing, else we would extinguish ourselves. So
the processes of rediscovery must happen. War is
so deeply affecting that it's memory can last in a population for generations, the resentment can remain.
Wars end not because people have rediscovered their humanity but because people are too tired, too hungry to kill, are tired of being killed. There might be moments for individuals in the carnage, they realise the sanctity of life, such realisations can be found by looking at the world
from outer space, by delivering a child, by seeing someone you love pass away. In all the latter examples the chance for inducing madness, shell shock, the fear of destroying the core of a person through what they have witnessed
is far less than on the battle field. That such moments of clarity can be seen by people is a testament to the human will rather than to the glories of camaraderie or the
epic of battle.
The First world war had a victor, but the vanquished did not forget their defeat, and the lessons were not learnt.
In the north of Ireland the ramifications of pitched street battles still run through the provence 25 years later.
The Balkins have been stewing for almost a thousand years.
War is blood and death and hate and dimemberment, and rape,
genocide, the stealing of futures, the disasembling of the past, it is all that is not that which we would have be human, it is a call to terrirory and to thoughtlesness.
It is yet inevitable and if there is anything that can redeem it it is the simple fact that we have yet to find a
way to end it.