WAR: My Elegy

This was written on March 17, 2003, 12:08AM, by Paul Whelmer Alforque 

Iraq was attacked by the United States with high explosives that cost the lives of many innocent men.

                       “Oh War, drink our blood and our tears; consume all our flesh and our memory”

At this moment, indeed, this world is threatened by the ideals and aspirations of the civilized barbarians of the era. Although claiming to be an intelligent being, our warriors prefer to grasp their desires with no valid reasons at all – they eagerly justify warfare by employing the logic of passion and anger and hatred and unestablished fabricated causes. This is an undesirable nightmare of man – war is an insult to the human intellect; this is a clear devotion to arrogance and a blasphemy to the harmonious and civilized society of man.

Instead of searching the formula of joy in peace and good life, we are in fact personifying the image of hell.

Oh god of war, my ordinary understanding and mind cannot give me the reason why these highly educated war-lover animals could not find any remedy for the avoidance of disaster BUT would rather choose the most dirty of all the games – war.

To the casualties of war, search one’s own god and if an actual peace could not be attained – let there be peace in your mind, the only best remedy, indeed.

War has become a phenomenon of human affairs; a phenomenon which was created by the iron hands of aggressions AND nurtured by the nutrients of foolishness and passion; war is the biggest game played by the bullies.

WAR, how awful you are! You are killing hens which lay golden eggs! Nothing we can do for thou art real, and easily be provoked by public expectations.

Now, by our mistakes, we will be flourishing in the air all our bad histories to be displayed in the heart of the all future generations, mistakes that will be engraved in the walls of human memory – allowing them to tell tales of all our unbearable whims and caprices printed in bloodshed.

So be it.

MODERN ETHICS – MODERN PROBLEM: CRITICISM

The tales of human circumstances, tragedy, war,  love, politics and religion has been a common venue of human history. Perhaps, problems are always included in every human life; and some problems would involve ethical issues that which could only be resolved through the existing ethical standards.

But by what means this so-called ethical standards attained its reliability? It is a fact that there are instances in our law wherein some forms of killings are not considered as crime such as the justifying and exempting circumstances in our penal law books.

Also, there is an instance whereby a professional killer or whose occupation is to kill a person is not ethically sanctioned by the society, example of which is an executioner of verdict.

So, how reliable is the ethical standard? Who determines the suspension of morality towards brutality and hostility during a war? War losers are always the victim of persecution.

To remember some incidents of our history, the deaths of innocent lives during the Vietnam War was termed by the American government as “Collateral Damage”; and in the World War II, the Nazis called the death of 6 million Jews as the “Necessary Evil”.

In my honest opinion, the term “ethics” and “morals” were just a semantic interplay for “human will”. It is natural in human behavior to maintain silence when the unpleasant event does not affect our interests or to tolerate unpleasant situations when it brings us favorable benefits. There are parents, to exemplify, who kept silent on the “immoral” acts of prostitution of their daughter on the reason of benefits caused thereby.

Now, what is ethics? What is moral? Who declares what it is? And what authority shall make it binding?

Indeed, it is a funny tale, human fears – worries – concerns crafted the term “ethics”, “morality”, “sin”, and “retribution” as a mechanism of our godly attitude.

One significant feature that man behaves like god is the maxim “vox populi, vox dei”, whereby, he invented a more or less godly concepts of ethics and morality with a more or less godly authority. Defining ethics and morality is an attempt to unmask man from his godly appearance.

Besides, ethics and morality are matters within the property of reason. Without the reason, no one can assert the reliability of the standard.

To supplement this criticism, let us observe the gesture of this statement:

Inflicting injury to a person or killing him is justified or morally acceptable when it is made IN THE NAME OF PEACE, IN THE NAME OF GOD, IN THE NAME OF JUSTICE, IN THE NAME OF THE LAW, or IN THE NAME OF A JUST and DIGNIFIED CAUSE.

The statement herein mentioned is a clear and explicit proof of human manipulation on the so-called ethics and morality to fit his particular purpose… and to note, it has been proven a long way back to the ancient history of man.