I thought I had written everything I needed to about war and dehumanisation. Shortly after the start of the Gaza war a year ago, I tried to write down my thoughts. Even longer ago I wrote about the Ukraine war, which is now in its third year. And I have not yet mentioned the forgotten wars in Sudan and eastern Congo, which may well be worse than the other two combined. But it just goes on and on.
Putin
Vladimir Putin, obsessed with the delusion of a Greater Russian Empire, stops at nothing and has hundreds of thousands of deaths on his conscience. Not only in Ukraine, but also on the Russian side, where a new mobilisation order is imminent. This ice-cold ex-spy and mafia boss learned his tricks during his KGB years, in the St. Petersburg mafia and in the partly or entirely Russian-orchestrated wars in Syria, Chechnya and Georgia (read up on Putin with Catherine Belton). His specialty is poisoning his opponents (which he learned in the KGB) and bombing schools, busy markets, residential areas and hospitals. No war crime is too horrible for him to commit. Russia with its rich culture, the country of Chekhov, Tolstoy, Borodin and Tchaikovsky, has become a rogue state thanks to him.
Although Ukraine still defends itself bravely and hopefully will turn the tide, other former Soviet republics are holding their breath. The war front is sometimes described as a meat grinder, which applies to both sides. I still hope, perhaps against my better judgment, that the Russian people will finally turn upon the warmonger in Moscow and his acolytes as soon as another mobilisation is declared and more thousands of young men are sent to the front as cannon fodder. Change only comes from within, but when comes the breaking point?
Netanyahu
Then there is Benjamin Netanyahu, who is facing a criminal trial for corruption if he has to resign, and is therefore trying to prolong his existence as the figurehead of the state of Israel as long as possible, now with a new war front in Lebanon. You’d expect Israel to remember what was done to the Jews during the Holocaust and not commit genocide itself. It isn’t for nothing that an international arrest warrant is to be issued against Netanyahu and his Minister of Defense Gallant. But they and their ultra-right-wing allies Ben-Gvir and Smotrich have conveniently forgotten the horrors of the Holocaust. That is, unless they are criticised, when they suddenly assume the victim role.
A Palestinian farmer on the occupied West Bank, whose olive trees are cut down and whose house is torched by the colonist scum supported by Smotrich and Ben-Gvir, will feel the same as a Jewish shopkeeper, whose windows were smashed and whose merchandise was destroyed in 1938. Kristallnacht seems to be repeated on the West Bank, only the descendants of the victims of 1938 have now become perpetrators themselves. I am sure some people will object to my saying this, but I will do so anyway: as a human being and as an author, I have a duty to speak out and I see no difference between one gang of criminals and another.
Under Netanyahu, Israel has become a rogue state that is constantly at odds with the international legal order and the United Nations. In Israel itself there is enough protest against this man, who only stays in the saddle by stoking the fires of war. He has the blood on his hands of tens of thousands of men, women and children, ‘collateral damage’ in the extermination of Palestinian rebels. Israel uses criteria for the number of innocents that may be slaughtered when killing one suspected terrorist. Is it 50 to 1, or 100 to 1? I forgot. When four Israeli hostages were liberated some time ago, hundreds of innocent Gazans were slaughtered. Palestinian lives matter, to coin a well-known phrase. Any self-reflection on this is lacking.
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The Norwegian cartoonist Morten Morland drew this appropriate image of Netanyahu hitting Gaza, as ayatollah Khamenei blows out the match he used to light the fire. |
Khamenei
The ‘freedom fighters’ of Hamas and Hezbollah aren’t nice people either - the horrors of the massacre of October 7, 2023 speak for themselves. The militants are supported by or even controlled from Tehran, where another hateful old man is in absolute power, a man in his eighties who has never tolerated contradiction and executes women’s rights activists. The Axis of Resistance, that is what he calls himself and everyone who opposes the state of Israel. They act out of a vengeful ideology, no less than Netanyahu.
According to Human Rights Watch, about 80% of the population in Gaza is of Palestinian origin. In Lebanon there are about half a million, and the same number are in Syria. Most (2 million) live in Jordan. Lebanon in particular is a patchwork of cultures and religions, although they usually live in separate towns and districts.
The usual tactic of Hamas and Hezbollah is to hide among the civilian population, who serve as human shields, potential ‘martyrs’ in their warped jargon. It is difficult to determine how much support there actually is for Hamas and Hezbollah among the Palestinian refugees and their descendants and whether they are happy for these fighting groups to hide in their midst. But perhaps they are given no choice. In some parts of Beirut, as we can read in the news, support for Hezbollah is high, but the line between militants and civilians is not always easy to draw. But all those women and children slaughtered by Israel, are they also militants?
Let me be clear: both parties have enough reason to hate their opponent as a result of all the injustice and cruelties committed. But the spiral of violence can only be broken by a ceasefire and negotiation.
The US and Trump
In the Middle East, effectively a proxy war between the US and Iran is enacted. The United States preaches peace, but meanwhile supplies Israel with billions in military aid. Netanyahu consistently sabotages every peace initiative, under pressure from his extremist friends. The only way to force him to a ceasefire is to immediately stop American arms supplies to Israel. Only then can a peaceful solution be found. But with a faltering president in the White House and risky elections in prospect, US policy is frozen and Netanyahu can do as he pleases. If Trump is elected president - yet another offensive old man who plays the public - all hell will break loose. Not only in the Middle East, but also in Ukraine.
Conclusion
Who will rid the world of all these hateful old men? Democracy, the legacy of the 20th century that we should actually cherish, is under pressure everywhere. Also in the Netherlands, where attempts are now being made to undermine constitutional law by calling an emergency, portraying every refugee as an enemy. An asylum crisis? Nonsense. It is the consequence of decades of deliberate neglect, which is now being exploited to push through a populist agenda.
I am no longer young, an old man if you will, and I fear for the future of my children and grandchildren. Will they live in an authoritarian state? A banana republic on the North Sea? Where are the statesmen, wise women and men who we need to turn the undemocratic tide? Those vacancies are still open.
As James Freeman Clarke wrote long ago: the difference between a politician and a statesman is that a politician thinks about the next election while a statesman thinks about the next generation.
