Bombing farmers

I remember when I was young, there were a couple of kids in class one year who spent their summer break on a kibbutz in Israel. When they told us about what it was like, I remember thinking how cool Israel seemed, evincing an almost hippie ethic. (It was the seventies, what can I say.)

When a friend was telling me how she spent a few weeks on the Catholic equivalent just outside of Ottawa (I don't remember the name, but it was a semi-monastic communal farm somewhere around here), I remembered the warm feelings I had once had for such a lifestyle. I am sure it is romanticism, since I know that farming is a hard life. But there's always a grain of truth to any nostalgic feeling.

My nostalgic self gulped in terror reading about how today Hezbollah bombed a kibbutz.

As much as we try to design orderly processes for the world - diplomacy, negotiation, world bodies - a darker side of humanity always manages to smash through the pretty edifices we construct. War, it turns out, is a brutal and desperate thing, and in some respects, it almost seems absurd that there are rules for war, for it never takes long for someone to cheat, and do things like target innocents deliberately. Certainly you even expect that from terrorists.

I remember in school learning about the battle of the Plains of Abraham. It may be apocryphal, but I remember learning that the French soldiers lined up in a pretty formation, as per the rules of war. In war, your line was to fire a volley in unison, pause for the opponents to fire, and then return fire yourself. All very civilized.

And then the British blasted their line in half, roared up the hill like madmen and shot them all.

I think that's why I have such a hard time with war, although I can't say I am a pacifist in the sense that I oppose self-defence. But once you unleash war, it metastasizes, and has to be fought with brutal passion - it is very difficult to tame it, civilize it, or put a veneer of humaneness on top of it. It is why armies such as the one in Iraq, or the Canadian force in Somalia a decade ago, struggle with issues like torture and brutality, all the while facing an enemy that doesn't even pretend to observe rules of war.

What needs to happen is a sea change in the way our species thinks. There needs to be a broader consensus, and not just nodded-to pleasantries, that war does tend to dehumanize us. It may not always be possible to avoid war, but we can certainly become better attuned to the warning signs, and more acutely aware of the costs.