War, adolescence, empathy, decisions

Matthew Parris has been reading a diary, the diary of an adolescent girl writing in interesting times. A German girl writing between 1940 and 1945. He gets involved in her life, feels something of what she felt, sees things for a moment through her eyes. Her diary does for him what what good books do: it broadens his sympathies.

Yet the context given to the article by the headline (Hilke’s diary: Anne Frank with a difference) and by Parris himself is one of surprise that this girl, like Anne Frank, should feel and say all these normal things at such a time, and yet still be German. Parris, like some of his commenters, seem to assume that Anne Frank has cornered the market on wartime adolescence and that all such experience is summed up in hers. That therefore we should be amazed that a girl living under the Nazis should capture our sympathy.

He finishes with this.

I went yesterday to a memorial service for one of my great predecessor sketchwriters on this paper, Frank Johnson, at St Clement Danes Church in the Strand: the Air Force Church, restored after German bombs reduced it to ruin. Outside is a bronze statue of Sir Arthur “Bomber” Harris. Inside we sang: “I vow to thee my country”. Hilke’s diary was in my briefcase.

I’m not suggesting an answer. I don’t even know the question. But is there a better way?

This is the sort of sentimentalism that makes us unable to deal with the world. Is there a better way than war? Yes, and most people most of the time choose it. There's an Orwell essay in which he asks what Britain, shorn of all its imperial power, can offer the world. He answers, "the habit of not killing each other". And generally, that's what people, almost everywhere, almost all the time, opt to do: not kill each other. They talk, make rules, bend the rules, break the rules, look the other way, close their eyes, ears and noses rather than kill, or even be placed in a position where killing becomes a little more likely.

But sometimes, there isn't a better way. Sometimes, a decision has to be made that will lead to men, women and little girls like Hilke having bombs dropped on them. The people who have to make those decisions cannot do so in the state of mind in which Parris found himself after reading the diary. It would render them impotent, incapable of action. Who but the pathologically damaged would kill someone for whom they felt such sympathy?

When the time comes to make such decisions, it is not the Hilkes but the group, your group, you are thinking of and the question is one of survival as a group. Individual lives matter insofar as they matter to the survival of the group. It would be nice to pretend it could be otherwise, but it never has been and I can see no reason why it would ever be.

Hilke didn't die under the bombing. She survived and married. I'm very glad. But I'm also glad we killed enough of her countrymen to destroy the regime that they fought for.

The weapon of choice

Why there's a wall

From a peak of 44 suicide bombings in 2002 they have fallen to just three in 2006 as Israel becomes increasingly stringent in its border control with the construction of the security wall.

Why concessions are retrograde

Rubin estimates Hamas has launched more than 2000 Qassams over the past five years, but almost half that total havebeen launched since the Israeli withdrawal from Gaza.

Suicide bombings are out so...

"This rocket, which was previously looked upon with disdain by many, will serve as the weapon of choice in the coming period of time, as the acts of suicide martyrdom served as the weapon of choice during all the previous years."
Hamas website

... a new tactic is required

Islamic Jihad, which has claimed responsibility for the most recent Qassam attacks, says they are being fired in retaliation for raids being conducted by the IDF in the West Bank on Islamic Jihad to prevent more Qassams being manufactured. Without the raids, Qassam rockets could then be fired into the most heavily populated cities in Israel....About 70 per cent of the Israeli population lives along the densely populated coastal strip of central Israel, within firing range of the West Bank.

(via This Ongoing War)

Nothing new

Arthur Koestler writing in 1953:

"It is to be hoped that this speech will be taken everywhere as a sincere and well-considered utterance....There are no greater enemies to the peace of Europe than those who would spread an atmosphere of suspicion..."
The Times, May 21 1935, on a speech by Hitler.

The scapegoat of the deluded was at that time not the United States but the 'militarism' of France. When Hitler marched into the Rhineland and the French Prime Minister came to London for consultations, he had the same type of welcome that American generals have nowadays in Europe, for it was obvious to all peace-loving enlightened men that the real danger to peace came not from Hitler but from the aggressive French.... It was the same unconscious desire to evade reality which we observe today; it is so much easier to stand up in a manly way to 'French militarism' in 1936 and to 'American imperialism' in 1953, than to the Nazi and the Soviet Empires.
The Invisible Writing, 1954 (Vintage), p232

Like us or like them?

Mark Bowden in The Wall Street Journal.

Any nation is, at heart, an idea. Once people started organizing themselves in groups larger than their own blood lines, they had to invent reasons for considering themselves part of something bigger--tribes, city states, feudal kingdoms, nations, empires. Language, customs, religion, ideology and geographic proximity have all served. The idea of a state that accepts as equal citizens people from all corners of the globe, a nation founded on abstract principles, is a relative newcomer. We have been trying to get the people inhabiting a large swath of land between and on both sides of the Tigris and Euphrates to embrace the concept. It is an ongoing struggle with less-than-encouraging results...

Nine years ago, in the epilogue to "Black Hawk Down," I quoted an unnamed State Department official (he was Michael Sheehan, ambassador for counter-terrorism) as follows: "The idea used to be that terrible countries were terrible because good, decent, innocent people were being oppressed by evil, thuggish leaders. Somalia changed that. Here you have a country where just about everybody is caught up in the fighting. You stop an old lady on the street and ask her if she wants peace, and she will say, 'Yes, of course, I pray for it daily.' All the things you would expect her to say. Then ask her if she would be willing for her clan to share power with another to have that peace, and she'll say, 'With those murderers and thieves? I'd die first.' People in these countries . . . don't want peace. They want victory. They want power. Men, women, old, and young. Somalia was the experience that taught us that people in these places bear much of the responsibility for things being the way they are. The hatred and killing continues because they want it to. Or because they don't want peace enough to stop it."

I, too, have always assumed that most people, given the choice, would choose to have the things that I have had. But I have forgotten the conditions that need to be met for those things to be possible. A functioning economy, a stable and just (or at least accepted) political system, a (comparatively) large degree of freedom. When the Lebanese forebears of my father arrived in Australia, they cast off the baggage of their homeland within a generation and then married out. It was natural. But all those conditions were present, handed over by the British colonial administrators at the turn of the century. The ethnic identity that so many now insist on maintaining at all costs was cast off and a new one adopted without any trauma, as far as I know. This is very rare. So few peoples have the choice to strike off in a new direction; the road that history has laid for them is bordered by high walls and they must repeat what has always been done without deviation or hesitation.