Category Archives: Ahimsa

The dilemma of trying to maintain integrity in a war to the death

When I was very young, and first learned that Switzerland had been neutral in World War Two, I took that as a good thing.  They fairly didn’t take sides, the Swiss loved peace, I reasoned in my childish brain (they also made delicious chocolate, as I knew very well).  By the time I was eight, and saw nauseating film clips of what the Nazis had been up to not long before I was born, I understood that Swiss neutrality was essentially an acceptance of Nazism.   With friends like fair and balanced Switzerland, who needs Franco’s Spain?

How do we negotiate a world that demands a black and white taking of sides in so many cases?   Nuance is the weapon of obfuscating, timid pussies, we are told over and over by those with an interest in division and the loudest megaphones on earth.  The criticism of liberals and progressives often focuses on their presentation of detailed nuance rather than fierce, no holds barred, smashmouth, simple to grasp angry political rallying cries.  The right is not afraid to act like Nazis, including threats of violent reprisal against political opponents, why are the good guys so “principled”? 

There is something brutal about all politics, especially if one side is out for actual blood.   How do you discuss poisonous subjects with integrity?   The difficulty of this is hard enough to stop us from even trying, most of the time.   Can you actually come to a compromise with a Klansman, unless you somehow agree that their point of view is somewhat justified?  A separate question: why would you want to?

As I watch the unfolding horrors in Israel and Gaza I also watch the clannish response of so many.   Israel, as a haven to long persecuted Jews, has a right to exist.   The people of Gaza and the West Bank, Palestinians, have a right to exist.   May I go so far as to opine that all people, all creatures, have a right to exist?

There is an extreme right wing/religious fundamentalist government in Israel, the most extreme and divisive in its history.  The government is so extreme that hundreds of thousands of Israelis regularly march to protest Netanyahu’s ongoing plan to curb the Israeli Supreme Court, an institution that has long been Israel’s protection against anti-democratic and inhuman practices.

This fight between Israeli democracy and religious and ethnic autocracy provides the perfect historical moment for a murderous group, purporting to represent the persecuted, to attack Israel and inflict a grievous wound in horrific fashion.  No need to propagandize, Hamas provided the torture, burnings, slow death of parents in front of terrified children and vice versa.   They bragged about it themselves and took two hundred plus hostages.  No secret, Hamas said, we went to your villages to terrify you, make you feel vulnerable, enrage you, provoke the bloodiest possible response to make you look like the blood thirsty mass-murderers you are.

Now the world is divided into two simple camps on this awful question, as on most questions today.  The Jewish state has a right to exist, and to do anything necessary to survive, particularly after the Nazi-style atrocity on October 7.   The other side points in outrage to Israel’s long oppression of millions of Palestinians, to the open air prison conditions in Gaza and the impunity with which violent settlers dominate the West Bank, and demands that this oppression end now.

There is a moral core, and righteousness, to each argument, to both sides in this violent dispute to the death.  What does a person who sees both sides do?  In my case, I look up the history of the creation of the State of Israel, a country I’ve spent a lot of time in, whose language I speak.  

Nothing clean about that moment of international guilt, when, in the shadow of death camps for Jews, the Jewish state was “created” as a haven for a historically despised and persecuted minority.  Read about Mandatory Palestine, it was a shit show.  The British, as the Ottoman Empire was being defeated, were given control of newly created Palestine and all the inhabitants thereof.  There was also the “creation” of Lebanon, Jordan (Palestine was part of Transjordan), Iraq and the rest of the current Middle East, national boundaries drawn by the victorious European nations who had ousted the Ottoman Empire in World War One.  

The British Mandate was won in a war.   The winners imposed the rules, the local inhabitants had nothing to say about it.  Nations in the former Ottoman Empire were created by drawing lines on maps, in some cases combining, in the old British practice, warring tribal and ethnic groups in the same national boundaries.  The better to control them, if the newly created Iraqis themselves were fighting and killing each other, so much the better for ruling them.  European colonial powers had perfected this technique in Africa.

You had Jews displaced by Hitler’s plan to kill them arriving in Palestine, intercepted by the British, who were also fighting Hitler.  You had the “illegal immigration” of thousands of such persons.   You had Arabs who had lived on the land for generations and owned over 90% of the land.  You had the Jewish claim to the land rooted in the Old Testament, when God promised the land to His people.   That biblical claim, one must concede, is as problematic as any claim made in any holy book anywhere.   You had violence and killing, including by Jewish terrorist groups intent on ousting the British by any means necessary.  You had Arabs occasionally killing Jews, many of whom had escaped Hitler’s death machine.  There was a decade or more of desperate dealmaking, dealmaking that rarely included local poor people, Arab or Jew.

The vote for the creation of the state of Israel in the newly created UN was hotly contested, as was the map of the new state.   There was no worldwide recognition of the need for this Jewish state, in spite of Hitler’s heroic efforts to demonstrate the need for such a nation and our collective memory of this rare moment in history when support for Jews overcame long hatred.  Israeli independence squeaked through, with all kinds of compromises.  The British couldn’t wait to get out by then. 

Soon after Israel announced its independence the new country was attacked by a huge force of its Arab neighbors.  The war went on for months.  Israel’s existence was touch and go.  During the war 700,000 Palestinians became refugees.

We have the Israeli story of this exodus: Arab nations broadcast messages to the Palestinian Arabs to leave so that the Jews could be forced into the sea.  Once all the Jews were gone, they could go home in peace.  There were such broadcasts, but that was not the only reason Palestinians left.  

There was a war raging.  There were forced expulsions of Arabs from their villages in what was now Israel, war crimes, documented (see Deir Yassin) that terrified Palestinians and made them flee.  There was the usual displacement of any war.   There were multiple compelling reasons Palestinians fled.

At the end of the 1948 war Israel had expanded its borders slightly and the new status quo did not include the reintegration of Palestinians who had fled.  While understandable, from an Israeli point of view, that unaccomodated mass of refugees, which has lived in poverty for generations now, planted the seeds for what has followed.

The Israeli government’s position has long been that those refugees are Arabs and should be taken in by other Arab nations.   The Arab position was a hard “fuck you.”  The Palestinian refugee crisis was too good for Egypt, Syria, Jordan, Saudi Arabia and friends to pass up.  Nobody likes impoverished refugees, so how about a resounding, righteous international “Fuck Israel” instead?

Not to say that the Israeli position on Palestinian refugees being the responsibility of other Arab nations made much sense.  All of these talking points, if you take them one at a time, are easy enough to debunk as bullshit.  The practice of partisans on both sides is to have a few self-serving, one-sided talking points ready to deploy when needed, to make a complicated problem the sole responsibility of the enemy.

We cannot talk about these things calmly.  The killing of children, of old people, always rightfully enrages us.  I heard a journalist I love and respect (Amy Goodman) point out that Hamas had treated the 85 year-old Israeli hostage they later released humanely, even kindly.  Really, Amy, Hamas gets points for not beating and raping an 85 year-old hostage?

So back to the question: how to talk about what an Israeli fascist/theocratic government is doing in response to a hellish masterpiece of terrorist strategy in a world where Putin and Trump are the biggest beneficiaries of this kind of explosively divisive war.  If you have any idea, I’d love to hear it. 

Chapter 53 negotiating with terrorists

There are people, imbued with righteousness forged in unbearable injustice, who believe that their suffering allows them to do unspeakable things.   They inspire terror by their willingness to behave viciously, in the name of never being wrong.  When someone in your life makes it clear that they will behead someone you love and force you to watch the video, your prospect of reaching a mutually acceptable compromise with them is pretty much done.   

“If you don’t accept what I tell you to accept, my personalized version of history, and accept all blame, then I will rain holy hell down upon you and everyone you love, I will fucking destroy your world,” is an inauspicious starting point for a productive conversation.

If someone is truly willing to kill you, destroy your good name, your friendships, trust, throw away years of loving mutuality, in the name of never being in the wrong, accept that there is no fixing that.  You are dealing with a damaged, destructive soul, too desperate and determined to make peace with.  You cannot make peace with someone willing to kill anyone who makes them feel in any way bad about themselves.  These people are terrorists and are absolute in their demands.

This impossibility of solving problems with someone who cannot be wrong is a painful, but important, thing to digest.   If your best efforts to be patient, kind, fair and honest are met with dismissal, anger, recriminations, you’re not going to find a way to fix things with that person.  

It may seem impossible to imagine that someone you love, someone who loved you, can become an implacable enemy, but it sometimes happens.  When it does, you need to look at it without sentimentality, realize you are no longer dealing with any form of love, and get away from it.

The therapist asks “what do you think your role in these recurrent situations is?”   It is an important question.

In my case, maybe it is no more than my infuriating insistence, in the face of irrefutable evidence of incapacity in the other, that an old friend must be as vulnerable as needed to feel somebody else’s pain.  And my belief that empathy, and the ability to put yourself in a hurt person’s shoes, always leads to a desire to help heal that pain.   This belief turns out to be tragically, masochistically misplaced when dealing with someone who cannot be wrong.

My insistence in the face of their inability must be fucking maddening to the point of violence to them.  I suppose it is that stubbornness in the face of implacability that marks me for the violent endings, the displays of rage and idiotic denial I sometimes have had to face at the end of long relationships.

A person who reserves the right to rage, with or without reason, and never to concede fault or responsibility for harm they may cause, who needs to control others and be viewed as perfect, especially when they act destructively, is not a good partner for peace talks.   

Over time you can understand how badly they are damaged, how violently they feel compelled to react when criticized, but, sadly, that understanding gives you no tool to help fix anything broken in them.   

No amount of patience, kindness or understanding can help them change anything about themselves.   The only change possible is your own point of view, and learning to make yourself scarce as soon as you see that you are locked in a conflict with this type.   Any conflict with this type, no matter how seemingly easy to resolve, must end in death, as it is written.   Save your own life by learning when it is time to walk away.

Cancelled

Like it or not, we are all now living in a black and white world where irreducible moral sides must be immediately taken, to the death. Whose side are you on, freedom or tyranny? Who is good and who is evil, Israel or Palestine? Who is mostly perfect and who is an irredeemably sick fuck with no right to speak who must be silenced forever? Take a view I find hateful, after hearing just the first few words? CANCELLED!

As I recently wrote to a righteous old friend who had no intention of ever talking to me again:

In talking there is always the chance of accidentally rescuing our friendship.  In silence, only the grim certainty of continued death during life, a true shame on both of us, to share the short remainder of this brief moment when we are both alive and waste it in mutual anger.

In righteous anger you instantly, satisfyingly cancel the motherfucker who makes you angry. Boom — dead! Then, that person being dead to you, you have eliminated the risk of being infuriated again by someone who keeps maddeningly insisting there are at least two sides to a story you already wrote the fucking ending to.

The great virtue of buying into a belief system is that you don’t have to be blindsided by so-called facts, cause and effect and the rest of the exhausting, caviling so-called nuances you already firmly believe are bullshit.

Reading about the recent cancellation of a book-related event by an author who wrote a nuanced book about Palestinians and Israeli settlers in the West Bank, and the firings and forced or protest resignations of others who made points about the horrific conflict in a way that was deemed indelicate, I had a creepy realization. What a cohort of old, dear friends did was cancel me. I’ve been cancelled.

Back to Israel and Palestine, for a flaming example. It is apparently a deadly sin, to some, to observe that Hamas behaved like blood-crazed Nazis, 100%, when they went on a murderous pogrom, and that Israel is behaving now, even if understandably in some ways, not like non-Nazis. To slaughter a Jewish baby is a Nazi-type war crime. To slaughter a Palestinian baby, in revenge for inhuman Nazi atrocities … what do you want to call it, boss?

The conversation is apparently taboo now, you have to be very, very careful how you phrase your opinion on the ongoing civilian slaughter in Gaza as Israel pursues the demons who hellishly rampaged recently. Israel has every right to protect herself, many people believe. But if you justify the murder of children on one side, you justify it on both sides

Got to be so fucking careful these days that you may as well say nothing about raging controversies that make people ready to kill each other. Your silence, of course, is assent. Whatever is going on, whoever is holding the noose, and pitchforks, and spewing hatred with veins popping on their necks, the torch bearers, the ones outside the makeshift jail chanting “bring him out!”, by standing among them silently you are part of the lynch mob, my friend.

That’s my basic problem with the righteously silent. Fuck those putos. You may cancel me now, asshole. And happy birthday, dear.

The difficult art of making amends

Ask your spiritual advisor what true repentance is. They will tell you that it is sincere regret for a wrong that you did to someone and a determination to make it right in whatever way is possible.  

Repentance contains an acknowledgment that you’ve hurt somebody, with an admission that what you did to them would have badly hurt you too.  Key to repentance is a willingness to help in the healing and the promise not to do that thing, or anything like it again, to that person, a soul just as precious as your soul.

The opportunity to be forgiven is a gift a hurt person can give to another, but the words “I’m sorry” and “I accept your apology” are meaningless formalities much of the time, as many of of us have experienced.  

Most of us know how easily a formal apology can be turned into a club to beat your victim with “I fucking apologized to this unforgiving asshole ten times, it’s never enough!”

The heart of repentance is atonement, the true determination of the person being given the gift of forgiveness to return that kindness in kind.

The human propensity for cannibalism

Given the right horrific circumstances, every human being is capable of eating another human being. We live with this hard to digest fact the same way we live with the certainty of our own death: by putting it out of mind as much as possible.

We are social creatures, human babies are more helpless than most baby animals and need the most care if they are to survive. We feel tenderness toward babies, even if they are strangers to us, and most of us have a reflex to leap to their defense if we see one toddling into traffic. At the same time, we are also programmed to survive.

In my first semester in law school we read a British case from the height of the British empire, Regina v. Dudley and Stephens. Dudley and Stephens, sailors, had survived a shipwreck with two other guys, one being the teenaged cabin boy. There were four of them, barely alive in the lifeboat in a remote area of the ocean, day after day. The kid was close to death, but hanging on. Reasoning that the boy was going to die very soon anyway, and that they’d all die if they didn’t eat him, two, Dudley and Stephens, voted to kill the boy. They killed him, over the moral objections of the third, and all three men ate and were eventually rescued. The principled cannibal gave evidence in the criminal case against Dudley and Stephens, who were sentenced to be hanged by the neck until dead.

The verdict was designed to send a message to the civilized British navy. You cannot eat the cabin boy until he is dead of natural causes. Once that lesson was imparted, the queen (Regina) quietly commuted the death sentences of Dudley and Stephens and that was that.

In real life, recently, I have seen this impulse toward cannibalism among friends I’ve had for decades. When you are under enough stress, and feel desperate enough, you will believe any lie that makes you feel alive, part of a loving group and righteous in your shared fury. It is a short trip, step by step, from angrily denouncing someone, based on an ugly lie, to hating them, to hanging them from a tree, to eating their barbecued corpse.

We are all capable of this kind of abominable group behavior, in an extreme enough situation, but some are able to do it even when there is no direct threat to their own life. I don’t want to sound judgmental, God forbid, but my best advice is to avoid this kind of grimly transactional motherfucker, once you see that hungry gleam in their beady eyes.

The Fundamental Terror/Beauty of Life

The most terrifying thing humans are up against is the erasure of our right to exist.   This is why my grandmother used the phrase “screamed bloody murder” so often, why she drank so heavily as she got older, why she got tearful when her vodka-fueled gestures of affection toward us made us uncomfortable.   She had good reason to feel this way, her entire family had no doubt screamed bloody murder, though their screams were drowned out by drums, out of tune brass and drunken catcalls, in the ravine where they all met a nightmare end.

Death is one thing.  We can be philosophical about it, since it is inevitable, but until we find ourself in unbearable, unrelievable pain it is not an option anyone finds palatable.  Life is the precious, irreplaceable thing, and feeling grateful for our place in this ongoing miracle, breathing and loving for the wink of an eye that we exist here.

The most painful thing, as far as I have experienced, is having your feelings erased, contested, fought to the death by people who claim to love you.   It is a pain I recall well from my childhood, it is a pain I revisit every time something I say is met with silence, dismissed, contested, fought to the death.  I don’t want to fight to the death, but many cannot restrain themselves, they must fight to the death, these clueless gladiator fucks.  The alternative is the humiliation of being wrong, admitting imperfection, which is unbearable to this type. 

I can fight as well as any clueless gladiator fuck who has ever come against me with a sword or ax.  I have had to fight, from my earliest memories.  My life has been a long, slow journey away from the need to fight these senseless, idiotic battles with people who profess to love me.  I spent decades learning to control my temper, with some success, although never enough sometimes.  For example, I still suffer from instant Tourettic outbursts whenever I am buggered by technology.

Having a supportive social network is one predictor of longterm health.  Sadly few people have these networks in our modern, corporate world.  There is an epidemic of loneliness in America, which expresses itself in deaths of despair.  If nobody gives a fuck about you, after a while you conclude “what the fuck?” and whatever you must do to answer that question seems legitimate, even if it kills you.

The only antidote to this life threatening isolation is talking to someone who cares.  It is a true horror that so few get this chance to be heard when they need it.

If you have a painful medical procedure and find yourself abandoned by your social network, amid recriminations and expressions of your unworthiness to be loved, your recovery will be slower than if you are visited, checked up on, wished well, sent jokes and funny videos.  As Martin Luther King, Jr. observed “in the end it is not the words of our enemies that we remember, it is the silence of our friends.”  Dig it.

An anguished soul can be a heavy burden to carry from day to day, even for people who love you.  I have to be sensitive to Sekhnet’s frayed nerves and her endless worry for me.  I isolate myself today and tap here, speaking silently to the universe of anyone who may stumble on these words, instead of troubling her.  We all need a day off.

This is where imagination and creativity come in.  I noticed at a very young age that I was closing myself in my room with the intent to set my dismissed feelings out on a page.  My drawings were often disturbing.  My writing was grandiose and rambled, trying to cover every subject in the world at once.  Sixty years on my drawings are often oddly cool, my writing focused and somewhat compressed.

The beauty of writing is that you can go back as many times as you like, comb through ambiguity and weak expression to make your writing as clear and elegant as possible.  A piece of writing is as perfectable as our delicate, malleable human souls. 

The phrase neuroplasticity is used to describe the ability of a pain damaged brain to heal itself.  It doesn’t happen without hard work, but what better work is there, during the wink of an eye we get to participate in this ongoing, if often tragic, miracle?

Morality is not theoretical, it’s practical

In talking there is always the chance of accidentally rescuing a broken friendship. In silence, only the grim certainty of continued death during life, a true shame on both of us, to share the short remainder of this brief moment when we are both alive and waste it in mutual anger.

Given the choice between redemption and condemnation always choose redemption when it is within reach.