Tag Archives: war

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Is violence an essential part of life.

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I was musing on all the wars and skirmishes in the world at the moment. We all know about Ukraine and Gaza, and the fallout from those conflicts. We now have Finland wanting nuclear weapons! 

Image by Welcome to All ! ツ from Pixabay

There is also a civil war going on in Sudan, Turkey is fighting the PKK, China is threatening Taiwan, North Korea is building rockets that can carry nuclear warheads, border conflicts between Venezuela and Columbia, as well as between Armenia and Azerbaijan. Other conflicts in Africa. Military coups. In Haiti, gangs, or a gang, vowing to remove the government with violence.

That’s just a few. Then there is violence that doesn’t come from governments. Criminal gangs, football hooligans, fights outside pubs, schoolyard fights, fights with police at demonstrations, etc. Sometimes even in a sports match, it breaks down into fighting. And, of course, people love to watch a boxing or wrestling match.

In the past, people (men) fought duels over perceived wrongs.

Then of course, there’s domestic violence. 

Everywhere there seems to be people willing to hit first.

When I’ve heard interviews with football hooligans, they claim to enjoy a ‘good fight’. I’m sure some soldiers enjoy shooting the enemy. 

I looked at the animal kingdom. Violence abounds. There is a saying about ‘nature red in tooth and claw’. What do the animals fight about? Mainly food, mates and territory. And dominance, too, of course, but the dominant animal gets the food, mates and controls more territory. Controlling more territory gives him (usually him) access to more food.

Image by Chris Stenger from Pixabay

Even fish fight. Ever heard of Siamese Fighting Fish?

Image by Natthapat Aphichayananthanakul from Pixabay

I don’t think protozoa fight, but mammals, birds, crustaceans, fish and insects certainly do. Here is a picture of some stag beetles fighting.

Image by Emilian Robert Vicol from Pixabay

Even some plants ‘fight’ by producing chemicals that inhibit the growth of others close by. Dandelions, for example.

Fighting is competition in the extreme, but we don’t balk at seeing red deer fighting for dominance, or capercaillies fighting for the attention of the females.

We accept seagulls squabbling over a packet of chips, and that we must not put two male hamsters in the same cage.

Image by Ruth Archer from Pixabay

Now, we humans like to think we are ‘above’ the animals, but are we? Russia and Ukraine, China and Taiwan, the Falklands War are over territory.

The civil wars everywhere are over power, or, if you like, dominance.

Not so much fighting over food that I can see, though.

But men and boys still seem to think that they can fight over women and girls.

So is there any hope? 

I think there maybe, but only if people can use the brains they have to think logically, and not with their instincts.

Fingers crossed.

What do you think about this? Are you optimistic about human ability to dispense with violence? And what happens if we can’t?

Poetry, World War 1

WAR. A Poem.

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It is a year since Russia invaded Ukraine. Can’t understand it. Here’s a poem. !

WAR

Why must humans go to war?

What do they hope to gain?

I think that most of us deplore

That it started again.

Why do the leaders think it’s right

For many folk to die?

And make people resort to flight

And bid their homes goodby?

Two world wars in years long past

Brought much pain and grief.

The numbers dead were so vast

It is beyond belief

That it could all begin again

With Russia entering Ukraine

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The 4 Horsemen of the Apocalypse.

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Image by Gordon Johnson from Pixabay

Recently I’ve been watching the news, as have most of you, I suspect, with increasing anxiety. The world seems to have gone completely mad. We no longer consider anything but the short term. Even things that threaten our own existence.

I think that the 4 Horsemen of the Apocalypse is a great analogy as to what is happening.

‘What are these Horsemen?’ you ask. Well I’ll tell you.

They first appear in the Old Testament in the prophetic book of Zachariah and Ezikiel. Then they re-appear in the New Testament Book of Revelation.

They are named as War, Pestilence, Famine and Death, and will ride at the End of Days.

Let’s take them one by one.

War.

Image by 849356 from Pixabay

There seems to be a lot of fighting around the globe at the moment. It’s not only Russia and Ukraine, although if you watch solely the news in the UK, you might think so. There are wars going on in Africa, (including Rwanda where the British Government has thought fit to send illegal migrants!). Have we forgotten about Syria’s civil war? And what about the Israeli/Palestinian conflicts?

I’m also going to include here the civil unrest in many parts of the world that have not completely turned into civil wars, but there are violent protests everywhere it seems.

Peaceful protest has gone. Take the Maillot Jaune in France, the storming of the White House in the USA, Sri Lanka, Equador, India, Hong Kong, I could go on.

People are turning to violence almost as a first resort.

So wars everywhere.

The first Horseman has ridden.

Pestilence.

Image by Vicki Hamilton from Pixabay

We can’t forget the pandemic of the last three years. The lockdowns, the deaths, the seriously ill.

Now there’s Monkey Pox. And before that, AIDS. What next?

These things spread because we can travel around the globe so easily nowadays. Jump on a plane and within a few hours you can be in most parts of the world. Once, if someone was ill, they would have recovered, or not be infectious when travel was slow. If it takes a week to cross the Atlantic, a person who is infected would be known before arriving, and quarantine could be begun. But now, they arrive in a few hours and contact many people (maybe even thousands, certainly hundreds) before even knowing they are ill.

So the second Horseman has ridden.

Famine.

Image by Yuri_B from Pixabay

Climate change is having a devastating effect on agriculture. We recently heard about the farmers in the Po Valley in Italy having crop failures because of lack of water in the river. This river is fed from the snows in the Alps, but those snows are melting and are not there any more.

Glaciers are retreating. They are the source of many rivers, and rivers are where agriculture gets its water. Lakes are drying up, causing the death of wildlife who have nowhere else to go to drink.

Now you might think that that’s not a problem. We can desalinate the sea water as they do in Dubai, and use that to irrigate the crops, but it’s not that simple. We are an integral part of life on this planet. We aren’t separate. Insects need water, too. We’re already destroying many of our pollinators with indiscriminate use of pesticides, and their food plants, by indiscriminate use of herbicides, all in the name of maximizing profit. If the wildlife dies, ultimately, so do we.

Then there’s the grain shortage brought about by the Russian invasion of Ukraine. We’ve been told that will cause famine in Africa, and maybe elsewhere.

Here in the UK, the cost of living is rising, and more and more people are living in poverty, not able to afford to buy food for their families. They are relying on food banks. Food banks in a comparatively rich economy in 2022!

The third Horseman has ridden.

We are just waiting for the fourth. Death.

Image by Reimund Bertrams from Pixabay

He may not come soon, but unless we do something to ameliorate these things, come he will. The human race will not survive. It’s not just being too hot that climate change causes, but all these other things too.

The British Government has, I understand given the go ahead for more north sea gas exploration, and I just read that one of the candidates for the leadership of the Conservative Party is promising he will allow no more onshore wind farms. So much for cutting carbon emissions!

Economic considerations come first, before the life on this planet, which will die unless we do something about it NOW.

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Again

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A moving piece by Andrew Joyce. One that should teach us all something the world seems to have forgotten.

I went off to war at the tender age of sixteen. My mother cried and begged me to stay, but my country needed me. I would not see my mother again for four very long years.

Due to my age, I was assigned to field headquarters as a dispatch courier for the first two years of the war. However, by the beginning of the third year, I had grown a foot taller and was shaving. And because men were dying at an alarming rate, I was sent into the trenches.

They say that war is hell. I say hell is peaceful compared to living in a muddy trench with bombs exploding around you at all hours of the day and night, although there were periods of respite from the shelling. Those were the hours when the enemy had to let their big guns cool or else the heat of firing would warp them. I lived like that for two years.

I was at Verdun where I saw the true hell of war. After eleven months, we fought to a standstill. When the dead were counted, almost a million men from both sides had given their lives and not one inch of ground had been gained.

By November of 1918, we were out of food, out of ammunition, and almost out of men to send to the slaughter. The people at home had had enough of seeing their sons and fathers and brothers shipped home in boxes. There were marches and protests against the war. Near the end, the dead were not even sent home, but buried in the fields where they had fallen.

At last, the war was over. I am told that nine million men died in those four years, and another twenty million were wounded. I was there and those numbers seem a little low to me, but what do I know? I was only a private.

CONTINUE READING HERE

Poetry, Winter

A Plea for Peace. A poem,

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I have been very concerned by, and, yes, afraid, of the war of words between Kim Jong-un and Donald Trump. They both seem to be wanting a fight. This I can’t understand as it would be a war that cannot be won, and could be the end of humanity. Certainly it would be the end of society as we know it.

It would not end with the cessation of attacks. Such a war would leave a legacy of radiation and sickness for those left behind, and without the resources of medicine, millions more, who survived the blast, would die horribly. Think of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Those bombs are as children’s toys compared with what is available to the nuclear powers today’

Then there’s the ‘Nuclear Winter’ that would follow. Without the sun, plants would fail and there would be massive starvation. How can world leaders even consider such a dire possibility?

In the 1960s, people were afraid that a nuclear war was a very real possibility. After all, in 1960,it had only been 15 years, since the USA dropped a hydrogen bomb on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. It was also the era of the ‘cold war’, and everyone was afraid of Russia, or rather the USSR as it was then, a vast empire ruled by Russia. It was in this climate I wrote the following poem.
It is the only poem that exists from that time. It is also the only poem of mine ever to have been published before as a poem and not as part of a novel. It was published in the student magazine of UMIST, in Manchester.

statue-of-liberty-2629937_1280
A Plea for Peace

Now we have created something
That threatens to destroy.
One error, one mistake
And what is left for us
But Death.

I see the ruins of a country
That once was powerful.
Now it is nothing but
Ruins, dust, decay
And Death.

I hear the cries of suffering people
Many people, old and young
They cry in agony to God
Please give us peace
Through Death.

But

The only true peace we can have on Earth
Is through remembrance of our Saviour’s birth.

 

If you liked this poem, and have an opinion on the views it expresses, please add a comment in the comments section.