RORY MCGOVERN
<Contributor>
Propagandizing war through social media is a total and utter disgrace. Why would anyone show the world their ugliness by putting their sadism on display? I mean, Twitter? The same platform used to find out how many wontons Bieber ate for dinner as comfort food after him and Selena broke up?
The Israeli Defence Force (IDF) posted a video on Twitter of a car being destroyed by aerial ordinance. The leader of Hamas’s military operations was in the car and was killed, along with an 11 month old, a 3 year old, a 5 year old and others in the immediate vicinity. Is life cheap enough to pretend these innocents were collateral damage in a video game?
Developing love for fellow man is certainly not easy. We are programmed not to. We are programmed to discriminate between allies and enemies. Everyone and everything outside our immediate sphere of interaction or influence seems foreign, strange or potentially dangerous. Accepting outsiders when we roamed the plains of the Serengeti or lived in city-states 3500 years ago would have been to accept potential threats into our lives. It was stupid and oftentimes it brought about the end of great civilizations. The only men who ever moved freely between societies were philosophers, men exclusively concerned with knowledge and not the base gratification of empire and wealth.
We like to think that we have advanced past this fearful state of xenophobia, but alas the ancient beast that man once was lurks behind the façade of civility and reason. The arbitrary and foolish lines we draw on maps and in our hearts serve to feed this creature and give it power in an age where we should be collectively moving forward and erasing lines.
The greatest lesson we learned from the Second World War and the multitude of international treaties, agreements and declarations that followed it was that, even in the midst of a war, we must never forget our common humanity. We recognized that sometimes war is necessary, but that it is always ugly. Consequently, we set the standard of “necessity” very high, that is, until Kissinger tipped the first domino that eventually led to Bush. To delight in war is to delight in the ugliest part of man. To display ugliness to the world and boast of your own inhumanity is base, distasteful and worthy of punitive condemnation.
We revere heroes because they are forced to do things out of necessity that most of us would neither have the courage nor the desire to do. Heroes do not display their weakest human moments because it displays a part of themselves that they desperately wish did not exist. Ignoring the beast is the best way to kill it!
This is not exclusively aimed at the IDF’s Twitter feed. Islamic militants are guilty of similar offences to human dignity. Don’t lose your own humanity by choosing a side. When it comes to the moral high ground in any conflict, it is likely that both sides have opened the “gates of hell” and made their way down to the deepest part of the inferno where the light of justification’s fire no longer burns. It is time to turn our backs (morally and politically) on the fields sown with barbarism and hate, and let the farmers reap the rotten crops of their own disgrace.