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Olek Netzer, "Real Causes of War Discovered"OlekNetzer writes: "Real Causes of War Discovered" In July 1970, on the Syrian front, the army ambulance I navigated to a UN outpost was hit and all my companions were torn to pieces. Traumatized, I could not erase the sensory experience of those moments from my inner vision, as if it were happening in the present and projected on my mind's screen again and again. I wanted to get over it, but I became convinced — perhaps obsessed — by the thought that I would not be able to go on living without coming to understand, but really understand, why it had happened.I could not find the real causes in anything I had learned about the causes of war. My conceptual maps pointed in directions that stroke me as erroneous and irrelevant. Historical causes, economic causes, complex causes: two peoples clashing over the same territory, the Arab belligerence, occupation of that Syrian territory by my country Israel, all those together... None of them directly caused the very real effect I experienced that afternoon. In addition, all those causes and myriad others seemed arbitrary, chosen arbitrarily, each an effect in an endless chain of earlier events, earlier "causes".
The 9/11 terrorists did it in full consciousness, feeling justified in face of their conscience, morality, history, religion, society. Otherwise, they would not have done it, would they? If all other contributing factors remained equal but people would just not conceive shooting and bombing and burning and killing as an option to solve their problems with other people, there could be no war. Thus, by only describing events taking place in the nonverbal world, we arrive at an awareness that is very uncommon in our and other cultures: the real causes of wars are not abstract but living people.
As long as we do not act consistently upon that simple truth, we could see or experience endless horrors and suffering, unable to touch their real causes. |
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