There is a myth amongst politicians and philosophers that Civilisation, or at least modern civilisation, equals civilised people.
I think the word civilised is a fraudulent word. Is it possible to be a civilised person? Certainly there is no such thing as a civilised people. I consider myself an intellectual person, I think a lot. I know a lot, I understand a lot, yet I have a thirst for violence. I am not a violent man, I attempt to avoid it within my life as much as possible but I cannot deny that the one time I truly lost my cool and punched someone, I enjoyed myself.
I in fact have a need for violence. I hate hurting people but there are times when all I want to do is punch someone's head in and I wouldn't care who. I deal with this by going clubbing, dancing. Usually I have to go dancing at least twice a week to give my subconcious something to focus on, take my frustrations out on the dancefloor. Quite often I come home with bruised knuckles from punching walls while I dance.
Humans are violent, not all of them, but we are animals, animals kill for food, they fight for territory, they fight for a mate. All that is great and good about humanity has tried to eliminate this instinct to fight, to kill. Will we ever eradicate this instinct? I doubt it, I think it is indeed naive to believe we can. The Romans had human bloodsport to quench their bloodlust. Other cultures hotwired it into their religions. This was blood for the sake of pleasure. Knowing that the normal instinct for death could not be followed, they invented fun ways of inflicting it on people who could not retaliate. Today most of the world considers itself civilised, that it is wrong to kill, to maim, to injure for the sake of pleasure.
Yet executions in America are public to all who have an interest. Hangings were public to all and sundry in Britain barely seventy or eighty years ago. only in the past half century have we sanctified death, sanctified blood, mainly because of the sheer numbers of those lost in the great war, a pointless war, when we realised that blood for the sake of blood could never be worth it.
Yet we have not learnt the lesson, let us not be stupid. We did not send troops half way round the world to give freedom to a people in a country on the other side of the world. We did it for oil and our own safety (whether illusory or not). We did it for our own power. We did it because we could. The lives don't matter, the number of soldiers killed on either side don't matter. The number of civilians killed don't matter. We cannot put a number on how many people we are willing to kill before an objective becomes too great, that 5000 deaths is acceptable but 5001 is too many. Governments are run by the rich and the clever or alternatively the feared and the worshipped, whichever country we may be in, whether America, Iran, Britain, North Korea, Australia, Zimbabwe, Russia or Syria.
And the clever wish to become rich and the feared wish to become worshipped.
And still we want blood, we want to be better than, we want to be defended from, we want to have their resources, we want our freedom, we want them to be free, we want the money, or the fear, or the worship, essentially, we want the power. And because we cannot have six billion clever, rich, feared, worshipped dictators on this planet, because we pretend that we must live in a bloodless world, where, despite our instincts we cannot ever be violent, we coldly accept the violence that is put in front of us as some sort of substitute.
We have killed tens if not hundreds of thousands of people whom we were trying to save from a dictator that we ourselves armed. The people marched, protested, and the rulers took no notice. But this was for our own army. If any of us truly cared about human life, if any of us wished to call ourselves civilised we would bring the nation to a stop with our cries until the leaders had no option but to listen. Until then, we are as equal to the charge of murder as either Saddam Hussein or George Bush.
George Bush recently rushed back from holiday to pass legislation on a woman, who, in a vegetative state, has had her feeding tube removed and so will starve to death, which, although a stark choice, has to be marginally more humane than being left, essentially braindead for the rest of her life. I find it ironic that Bush, whose actions and decisions have killed countless, should fight to keep alive a woman without a life.
A person may consider themselves civilised, their actions may be reasoned, logical, even morally correct, if there is such a thing. But humanity will never be civilised, debate will always fall into violence, ego's will always erupt. It takes just one blow. And lets be truly honest, we all enjoy being the victor, no one wants to lose, in anything. We will always fight, we will always die, those who survive will say how terrible, and if they won, will be glad, and if they lost, will want revenge. And others will complain about the violence around us and blame it on tv or computer games or rock music and forget that it is inherent in this race of ours. We will never outlive it to gain some great nirvana. I do not excuse violence, do not endorse it, do not believe in it, but it is programmed in our genes. The strongest survive, this tenet applies to our structures, our countries, as well as our immediate circle.
Therefore, we must stop evolution, in our base terms, occuring in the political world. If we remove competition, we remove the need to fight. Violence will be bred out, eventually. There are two drawbacks to this; a> Without evolution there is stagnation and death, b> it'll never happen. The Human Race is aptly named. Currently our countries fight over beliefs. Soon we will fight over resources, we already are in some cases. Then, when too many are subjugated, and the supplies again run low, we will begin to fight each other. This too is happening. We forget that power and freedom are also resources.
I punched someone once and I immediately regretted it. I scared myself, not because I threw the punch, but because I enjoyed myself immensely while doing so.
Long Live Aslan Maskhadov.
Long Live Mahatma Gandhi.
Long Live Che Guevara.
Long Live Yasser Arafat.
Long Live Owain Glyndwr.
Long Live William Wallace.
Long Live Michael Collins.
Long Live Martin Luther King.
Long Live Spartacus.
Long Live Crazy Horse.
Long Live all those who have fought and died, whether remembered, or unheralded, in the pursuit of the greatest resource of all, a freedom that they would never see.
If violence is inherent in us, let it only be used in a noble cause. Where we can, let us follow Gandhi or King, in nonviolence, but it must also be recognised that it is possible to fight in two different ways. Honourably and dishonourably. It is the way of the world that honour has become so blatantly distorted.
This is not about religion, this is about oppression. If Osama Bin Laden and Islam were genuinely oppressed by America then they too would earn a place on the above list. They do not for they do not fight for freedom but for power. Islam is as betrayed by it's own worshipped religious leaders and rich political leaders as anyone in the west. This does not leave America in the right.
And no one can find a solution except in violence, not because there isn't one, but because deep down, we enjoy violence, we enjoy the power we have over another person. We enjoy creating fear and terror.
If we enjoy the violence we do to another person we destroy the reason we are forced to resort to it, for it should always be a last resort if at all.
Osama Bin Laden and George Bush, both enjoy this violence too much, and whatsmore, we as a people also enjoy it, or at the least believe in it, even if it is at a primal level. We cannot call ourselves peace loving. We should have ousted our leaders before we allowed them to condemn us.
We are not civilised. We never will be.
