ANCIENT ENEMIES

Watching the live TV broadcast as airliners disappeared into giant buildings, which then collapsed consuming thousands of lives, I felt the full impact of the despairing words of a sage speaking over the distance of many hundreds of years:

"Alas and woe! Because this ocean of ongoing existence is ablaze, completely flaming, really burning, totally blazing, not even a few remain undefeated by it. What is this raging inferno? It is the fire of aggression, passion and stupidity, the fire of birth, ageing and death, the fire of sorrow, lamentation, distress and unrest. As these fires are constantly raging and blazing, no one escapes them."

For anyone preoccupied with the inherently arrogant attempt to make the world a better, more compassionate place, September 11 was a truly humbling experience - we are so tiny, our attempts at improving the world so fleeting and fragile, beside the vast and enduring power of anger and hate to devastate compassion and love in an instant.

One thing has been made clear this week - anger and hatred are the true enemies of humanity. As we have seen, when hate has completed its work of annihilating all compassion in the mind, anything is possible - innocents can be slaughtered and mutilated with a feeling of satisfaction, even great joy. And when hate has done with selling its lethal product to one side then, like the very worst of arms salesmen, it commences trading with the other side. Today, hate (for the moment, at least) no longer directs knife-wielding maniacs to fly and smash and kill; instead, now, it calls for a "war against terrorism", a crusade, a Western jihad no less, and ensures that any attempt to even discuss the causes of disaster is perceived as vile and despicable apologetics.

Hate, the ultimate propagandist, says 'Though I have cruelly slaughtered thousands already, I will now see to it that that you do not find, nor even seek, the understanding that might undermine me.' Bloated with death, but very greedy for very much more, hate persuades us that seeking the causes of hate is a very great evil, is a justification of evil - rather than the only solution, the only thing that actually works to end evil. And so by persuading us to act out of ignorance, hate ensures that we put every ounce of strength in our arms and shoulders into spinning the wheel of suffering ever faster.

Hate, the eternally faithless betrayer of humanity, tells us that the best way to honour our dead is to act in ways that +guarantee+ we will bury more dead in the future; in effect it persuades us, quite amazingly, to lay down the lives of the future dead as an offering to the past dead. It persuades us to imagine history up to, but not for one moment beyond, our great moment of revenge. It persuades us that the next can of petrol cast upon the flames will at last bring a cool peaceful extinction of the fire.

It has never worked before, not in all of history, but this time it will. The only response to this insane rationality is indeed to cry "Alas and woe!" - for this life truly is "ablaze, completely flaming, really burning, totally blazing" with the ancient enemies of aggression, passion and stupidity.

Eighteen months ago I interviewed Denis Halliday, former Assistant Secretary-General of the United Nations. Over some 34 years, Halliday, a transparently honourable, kindly and intelligent man, had built up a career with the United Nations, to the point that he was second only to the Secretary General, and responsible for the UN's humanitarian programme in Iraq. Some months before I interviewed him Halliday had dramatically resigned from the UN declaring the policy he was responsible for administering "genocidal". Armed with first-hand experience and a depth of knowledge that made a mockery of the arguments of politicians and press, Halliday told me how Western sanctions had been truly, actually, directly responsible for the deaths of 500,000 Iraqi children - he was in no doubt about it:

"Washington, and to a lesser extent London, have deliberately played games through the Sanctions Committee with this programme for years - it's a deliberate ploy... That's why I've been using the word 'genocide', because this is a deliberate policy to destroy the people of Iraq. I'm afraid I have no other view at this late stage."

Halliday had no ulterior motive for his words or actions, they cost him everything: his career, his prestige, his reputation. It was clear to me that he was acting out of a sense of moral responsibility, he struck me as an innately conservative, cautious man astonished to find himself suddenly in the role of a 'radical'. He talked to me of the horror of children dying from malnutrition and lack of medicines, of cancer patients confronting terminal illness with aspirins - it was a tale of grieving mothers, of devastated families and lives. Most ominously, considering last week's events, he talked of conditions ripe for the generation of unimaginably malignant hate, of whole generations of Iraqis and neighbouring Arabs growing up with a visceral loathing of the Western powers that had inflicted such suffering on them for so long - something must be done to ease their suffering he warned, or great suffering would one day be visited on the West.

Five months after Halliday resigned, his successor, Hans von Sponeck also resigned, asking, "How long should the civilian population of Iraq be exposed to such punishment for something they have never done?"

Be in no doubt, these were extraordinary events - diplomats at the +highest+ imaginable level were openly declaring the West responsible for nothing less than genocide. What happened? Nothing - the import and gravity of Halliday and von Sponeck's words and actions were not allowed to truly impact public consciousness because they were all but ignored by politicians and editors.

In June of this year I did a search of the Guardian, Independent and New Statesman websites. On the Guardian website I found 12 mentions of Halliday since September 1, 1998. These mentions included four letters to the editor, an announcement of John Pilger's film, 'Paying the Price - Killing the Children of Iraq', and an article by Pilger on the subject of the film. That is, since September 1998 there had been twelve mentions of Halliday's name in the country's flagship 'liberal' newspaper - twelve mentions of a credible voice accusing +our+ government of genocide, of literally slaughtering hundreds of thousands of children. By contrast, submitting 'Big Brother' generated 1029 mentions, the vast majority relating to the Channel 4 game show of the same name. Searching the Independent website generated 4 stories mentioning Halliday since Jan 1, 1999. He had been mentioned 9 times in the New Statesman - 8 of them in John Pilger's fortnightly column, and once in a letter. Pilger aside, not +one+ New Statesman journalist or editorial had mentioned Halliday's name. The words 'Big Brother' generated 59 records.

After interviewing Halliday, I approached all leading liberal British newspapers in an attempt to publish an article based on the interview. Halliday was so credible, what he had to say was so urgent, so damning of what my own country was doing to innocents abroad, that I felt I had to publish it somewhere. It was not that my article was treated with contempt, not that the quality of my work was dismissed - the very idea of the article was dismissed. The Guardian, having published one article by John Pilger some months earlier, rejected it, saying that the story had already been covered. When I asked if perhaps the extraordinary nature of Halliday's accusations justified more than one article per year out of a sense of moral responsibility, the editor raged at me and insisted that that was how they did things at the Guardian - there were many other issues to cover. The Guardian's response should be considered in the light of the fact that in the last ten years the media have afforded the victims of Iraq's tragedy a fraction of one percent of the coverage afforded to the tragedies in New York and Washington in the last week.

The Independent left me breathless, saying, "Halliday is yesterday's man". The Observer said, "Iraq's not flavour of the week this week", suggesting that what was needed was for the US and British governments to change their policy on sanctions - "Oh, that's what you think +we+ should be trying to push for..." the section editor said, catching himself. The Herald in Scotland eventually accepted a much-reduced version of the article but didn't use it. It was never published in the UK press.

It is impossible to believe that Western policy on Iraq was not a factor in generating the murderous hatred that engulfed New York and Washington. Honest commentators have also pointed to Western support of oppressive regimes in the Middle East, to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict fought with US weapons and money, and so on - these issues have to be discussed honestly, and understood, if more suffering is to be averted.

While I too am consumed with horror at the suffering in the United States, I ask myself why the media have failed so utterly for so long to feel and communicate the suffering in Iraq and elsewhere in the Third World. Why is it such an unbearable tragedy when 'we' die, but somehow bearable when we bomb Serbia (already long forgotten) or Iraq (ongoing but unreported), when the children of people we consider 'not us' die? Why did we not care when the US hit back after the 1998 attack on the World Trade Centre, destroying half of Sudan's pharmaceutical production capacity, costing thousands, perhaps tens of thousands, of lives? How much will we care when Afghanistan, a country with 6 million people already on the edge of starvation, is bombed? As Denis Halliday has said, "Iraqi kids don't count, apparently." In the Independent, Robert Fisk has written of "a familiar, weary pattern of biased reporting", in which extent and tone of coverage give the impression that Israeli and Palestinian deaths are not equally important and tragic.

In John Steinbeck's novel, The Grapes of Wrath, a tractor driver explains why he is obliged to clear farmers and their children from their homes on the orders of his boss. He needs the money from the job, he says - he has to feed his children. And after all:

"You got no call to worry about anybody's kids but your own."

Two thousand years before this fictional character 'spoke', a great Indian philosopher pointed out to a king of the time that it is exactly this attitude that is the source of so much of the horror in our world:

"Nothing prevents you from loving the young people of other kingdoms as your sons and daughters, even though they do not dwell under your rule. Just because one loves one's own people is no reason not to love the peoples of other kingdoms."

Now, as the moment of vengeance draws near, as the wheel of suffering begins to spin ever faster, there is only one lesson we need to learn, and we should all hope and pray that we learn it fast:

"Hatred can never put an end to hatred; love alone can. This is an unalterable law."

David Edwards, September, 2001


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