war

Day 2970, how to catch a war.

Daily picture, My thoughts

I don’t write much about politics and what’s happening in the world. I try to understand it by studying history and philosophy, but that’s more about the mechanisms of wars and other pains we humans like to inflict on each other. Maybe liked is not the right word, but I still think that in 5000 years, history books will precisely write that about us humans in the pre-civilized age; they loved to make each other miserable, why else would you poison the environment, don’t feed the whole population and start wars for vanity, pride and money. 

The thing is that most people just want to live their lives, and for most of us, that’s already enough of a task. But a smaller group inherited the trades that make them frontrunners and not followers like the rest. Putin and a handful of people have the power to steer a whole country and large parts of the world into ruin. Bush and his clique did the same, and the list goes on and on. Democracy is supposed to be the cure, and in some sense, it does a good job, but that’s only because all the other forms of government fail even harder; it still can’t stop dictators from rising to the top.

In Holland, we just had our yearly Memorial Day, and we stand still by what happened during the Second World War. At the same time, a quarter of the people voted for a racist party that had, til not so long ago, a point in their party program that promised new voters that all Muslims would be banned from Holland and their religion criminalized. Most people can only listen to the drummer and goosestep the direction ordered, and the drummers know that. 

I don’t see a solution. We are all different, and most people are still not seriously interested in the reason why they do the things they do. Most people can be talked into reason, but that’s part of the problem; they can be talked into all kinds of ideas. My motto for the future would be: don’t believe your own thoughts and those of others, at least not at firsthand. 

“Naturally, the common people don’t want war … but after all it is the leaders of a country who determine the policy, and it is always a simple matter to drag the people along, whether it is a democracy, or a fascist dictatorship, or a parliament, or a communist dictatorship. Voice or no voice, the people can always be brought to the bidding of the leaders. That is easy. All you have to do is to tell them they are being attacked, and denounce the pacifists for lack of patriotism and exposing the country to danger. It works the same in every country.”
Hermann Goring

Göring was the second highest-ranking official tried at Nuremberg, behind Reich President (former Admiral) Karl Dönitz. The prosecution levelled an indictment of four charges, including a charge of conspiracy; waging a war of aggression; war crimes, including the plundering and removal to Germany of works of art and other property; and crimes against humanity, including the disappearance of political and other opponents under the Nacht und Nebel decree; the torture and ill treatment of prisoners of war; and the murder and enslavement of civilians, including what was at the time estimated to be 5,700,000 Jews. (Wikipedia)

Day 2770, childish.

Daily picture

They are killing each other again in the Middle East. I hear people talking about how many people are killed by the other side compared to their side as a measure of who is worse. But is there really a difference between one unnecessary death or two unnecessary deaths? Doubles your grief if you see four family members die in front of you instead of two?

Maybe only a nonbeliever in any system, nation-state, or religion wonders about these questions. Can you imagine what the world would be like if everybody lived where they are without the feeling that they have a right to live there, that they own the land? I guess mankind is still in the phase of a child, one that screams if you take away the toy they grab on to. 

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Day 2179, victims.

Day's pictures

Albert Camus

Neither Victims nor executioners

…For my part, I am fairly sure that I have made the choice. And, having chosen, I think that I must speak out, that I must state that I will never again be one of those, whoever they be, who compromise with murder, and that I must take the consequences of such a decision. The thing is done, and that is as far as I can go at present…. However, I want to make clear the spirit in which this article is written.

We are asked to love or to hate such and such a country and such and such a people. But some of us feel too strongly our common humanity to make such a choice. Those who really love the Russian people, in gratitude for what they have never ceased to be–that world leaven which Tolstoy and Gorky

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Day 2162, alone.

Day's pictures

Iron Maiden

The Trooper (1983)

 

The horse, he sweats with fear, we break to run

The mighty roar of the Russian guns

And as we race towards the human wall

The screams of pain as my comrades fall

We hurdle bodies that lay on the ground

And the Russians fire another round

We get so near, yet so far away

We won’t live to fight another day

~

We get so close, near enough to fight

When a Russian gets me in his sights

He pulls the trigger and I feel the blow

A burst of rounds takes my horse below

And as I lay there, gazing at the sky

My body’s numb and my throat is dry

And as I lay forgotten and alone

Without a tear, I draw my parting groan

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Day 2125, peace.

Daily picture

 

Friedrich Nietzsche

Human, All Too Human II

The Wanderer and His Shadow

284 The means to a genuine peace. -No government at present concedes that it maintains an army in order to satisfy occasional desires for conquest; instead, it is supposed to serve the purpose of self-defense. The morality that justifies self-defense is called upon as its advocate. But that means: reserving morality for ourselves and immorality for our neighbor, because he must be thought to be aggressive and imperialistic, if our state has to be thinking about the means of self-defense; moreover, our explanation of why we need an army declares him, who denies his aggressiveness just as much as our state does and for his part, too, supposedly maintains an army only for reasons of self-defense,

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Day 2042, phosphorus.

Day's pictures

Film, 1992, Netherlands.

I joined the Marines in 1992; the draft ended that year, so I was one of the last that had to go into military service. If I had stayed at school, I would have gotten an exemption, but I wanted to leave, but I also didn’t want to join the regular army. I had never really thought about joining the military, not because of some special reasons; it just didn’t seem so excited. Until then, most men in Holland had been drafted into the army for 12 months, and I had only heard stories about boredom and that it was a waste of time. Only if you got lucky could you get some kind of education out of it that is useful later in life, like medical training or getting your truck driver’s license. I don’t know how I got the idea to join the Marines, but probably because I still went to school in Rotterdam, and Rotterdam is the Marines’ spiritual home, so I guess that’s how I came in contact with it.

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Day 1998, broken.

Day's pictures, Poetry

I’ve seen a dead body

before me

~

not taken by time

but in a second

by order

an excuse

This week I watched a documentary called “5 broken cameras” from 2012 in a local theater. Before I talk about this, I have to say that now the Corona restrictions are loosened it is nice to meet people again. I know that a lot of people have problems with these restrictions or don’t even believe that Corona is real but please respect the people that take it seriously. I am happy to live in a country where mask mandates are lifted but people still wear them because it is recommended. Another reason I mention this is because of the subject matter of the documentary I want to talk about, it goes about the conflict between the Israeli state and the Palestinians. People that have a problem with Corona restrictions should realize that living in fear in Gaza is a problem, not doing what you want to do to protect vulnerable fellow citizens is NOT a real problem.

The documentary 5 broken cameras is a film about a small town, where people live their lives as good as possible and then they get confronted with Israeli settlers that slowly eat away the farm land they have used for generations. Emad Burnat was one of these farmers that had a chance to film the birth of his latest son and he discovered that he couldn’t let go of the camera. He took it with him wherever he went, also when the villagers started demonstrating against the barriers that were put In front of them. The protest looked no different then any protest you might see in your own country, and were more or less tolerated in the beginning by the occupying forces (I use occupation as a statement, it is heavily debated and in theory you can go both ways but in practice it is clear who is in charge). The reaction of the Israeli forces, they don’t look like police in riot gear, become more extreme the longer these protests go on. That it becomes more extreme you can tell by exceedingly violent methods his 5 consecutive cameras are being destroyed, at the end you see him filming a sniper in the distance aiming at his camera (or him?) before the camera goes black again.

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Day 1927, why.

Daily picture, Poetry

I think life

is a serious

hallucination

 

Imagine the first persons that could put one and two together. Who woke up one day not living life, but asking: “why living life?” You might wonder what the point is, me thinking about that, we have a lot of answers, our problems need to be solved, what do I care what our ancestors thought millennia ago.

The smartest way of solving a problem is normally to start at the beginning, you go over all the necessary steps to make something work and see if one of them is not… working.

Imagine you are one of the first humans that started asking questions. You no longer see the sun rising in the morning, you wonder why it is rising. If that is a problem, it would be wise to start at the beginning and see what you can explain and what not. Eventually we figured out why the sun rises from our perspective, and we figured out a lot more. But have we ever figured out why we live?

Most wars and conflicts are fought over premature answers of that question. We all see our world in colourful details like in a hallucination. But did we put enough effort in answering that first question? If you could answer that question with yes, we would not have all these unnecessary problems in the world like wars and starvation.

Can you answer that question? I don’t know, but it would be a nice experiment if everybody stopped believing what they do and starts learning how to think and loose their fear of uncertainty. Maybe we should start by finding out what all of our hallucinations have in common.

   

 

 

New life

Society

CVG_6650

The grownups of this world decided to go to war again, people still hate each other and don’t understand that we only have this life, and that we shouldn’t discard it so easily.  The people in power are as ignorant as we all are the only difference is that they are in power. The air of knowledge and certainty hanging around them is a mirage originating from our own mind. What can we do? Not much. I read books to learn and think about it, write about it. But that’s about it, or not? Walking outside you don’t realize that the human world is a rotten place, it’s quite nice and the little lambs are walking around already, would the warmonger feel something when they see something like this? Natures clock is just ticking on regardless it’s children that don’t see its beauty.