‘The Worst Are Full of Passionate Intensity’
By Sukumaran C. V.
20 July, 2014
Countercurrents.org
People are being killed every day in the Middle East either by the U.S. military or by the fanatics. The region has been a veritable inferno ever since the U. S. invasion of Iraq. Iraq was devastated both by the U. S. and by the terrorists. I wonder how people are living in that country. I was nauseated to see and hear the news related to the devastation of the land of Euphrates and Tigris, the cradle of the ancient civilization called Mesopotamia.
Now I see such devastation in Gaza. People are killed by air strikes! People flee for their lives. Even little children are killed. I have seen a photograph in which the dead bodies of many little children are dumped together. One of the children is of my daughter’s age and her face is turned towards you and me. It seems that she is sleeping, but the sleep is eternal. She might have been playing while she was killed. She might have been in school with her friends while she was killed. She might have been running to jump on to her mother's lap while she was killed. Not only she, but every child who is killed and all the children who are killed by the U. S., by the Hamas, by Israel, by al-Qaeda, by democracy, by fascism, by Communism, by fanatics and terrorists.
We are in 2014 and it is the 70th anniversary of the victory of the ‘democratic’ forces over the Nazi Germany that exterminated millions of European Jews. The dead bodies of the children who were killed by the Israel airstrikes reminded me of the Jewish children who had been killed in the Nazi concentration camps, especially of a 16 year old girl who died in the Bergen-Belsen concentration camp in March 1945. The name of the girl is Anne Frank.
12 year old Anne Frank (1941) at her school desk in Amsterdam, the Netherlands
On July 15, 1944, the hardly sixteen year old Anne Frank wrote in her Diary named Kitty: “It is utterly impossible for me to build my life on a foundation of chaos, suffering and death. I see the world being slowly transformed into a wilderness, I hear the approaching thunder that, one day, will destroy us too, I feel the suffering of millions.” After that she could confide to her Dearest Kitty only on July 21 and August 1, 1944. She, along with her father, mother, sister and others, was captured from the ‘Secret Annexe’ where they had been hiding for two years, by the Nazi secret police Gestapo on August 4, 1944. She was sent to the Bergen- Belsen concentration camp and died there in March 1945, three months before her 16th birthday, and barely one month before the Bregen-Belsen was liberated by the Allied Forces.
We would shudder to think the misery the girl might have suffered during those terrible seven months. Before being captured by Hitler’s secret police, on 19th November 1942, Anne told Kitty: “Night after night, green and grey military vehicles cruise the streets. They knock on every door, asking whether any Jews live there…I often see long lines of good, innocent people, accompanied by crying children, walking on and on, ordered about by a handful of men who bully and beat them until they nearly drop. No one is spared. The sick, the elderly, children, babies and pregnant women—all are marched to death. On 25th May 1944, she tells Kitty: …our only choice is to eat fewer… We are going to be hungry, but nothing is worse than being caught.” And the ‘worse’ happened on 4th August, 1944.
Posterity could know the poignant story of Anne Frank, because she was such a gifted girl to write it down. In each war, there are innumerable Anne Franks who perish. In each communal riots there are people like Anne Frank who perish for the reasons that are not theirs and not known to them.
In the 1947 Partition of India, in the 1984 Delhi, in the 1993 Mumbai, in the 2002 Gujarat, in the 2012 Assam, in the 2013 Muzafarnagar, there might have been many Anne Franks and families who were annihilated. Among the Tamils of Srilanka, among the Adivasis of Central India, among the Palestenians suppressed by Israel, and in all (civil) war torn countries of Africa Anne Franks and families have suffered and still suffer.
Why does this suffering of the innocent continue unabated? Are we the humans basically too narrow minded to accept our plurality and diversity? Are we the humans too bigoted to live and let live. Are we the Homo sapiens too inhuman to stop wars on the innocent? Wars are always fought on the innocent. No war is a good and justifiable war. No riot is a good and justifiable riot. No terrorist is fighting for a good and justifiable cause. No nation that kills the innocent people in the name of fighting the terrorists is waging a war for ‘infinite justice’.
Whenever I hear the term 'war crimes', I am shocked and surprised. While war itself is a crime, what does war crime mean? We have heard people who were brought to trial for war crimes, but no nation has ever been trialed for the wars it has waged on the people. The Nazis were brought to trial and punished for committing 'war crimes'. But who will bring the U. S. and other 'democracies' including ours, that relentlessly wage war on the less privileged to rob them of their resources, to trial?
Still, even seventy years after the 'democratic' victory over the Naziz, we can’t answer the pertinent questions asked by the little girl called Anne Frank. On 3rd May 1944, she asked: “Why are millions spent on the war each day, while not a penny is available for medical science, artists or the poor? Why do people have to starve when mountains of food are rotting away in other parts of the world? Oh, why are people so crazy?”
Why don’t we, the grown-ups of the world, who write and talk theoretically on everything under the sun incessantly, fail to understand the plain truth the girl tells us? She says (on 3rd May, 1944): “I don’t believe the war is simply the work of politicians and capitalists. Oh no, the common man is every bit as guilty; otherwise, people and nations would have rebelled long ago! There is a destructive urge in people, the urge to rage, murder and kill. And until all of humanity, without exception, undergoes a metamorphosis, wars will continue to be waged, and everything that has been carefully built up, cultivated and grown up will be cut down and destroyed…”
It is a pity that humanity hasn't still undergone the metamorphosis a fifteen year-old girl referred to 70 years ago. The ‘destructive urge’ still leads us and we still ‘rage, murder and kill’.
On 5th April 1944, Anne told her Dearest Kitty that she wanted to go on living even after her death. Anne Frank lives even after her death and it is doubtless that she will continue to live as long as the human race exists. But what is doubtful is how long the humans will be there on the surface of the Earth with their ‘destructive urge to rage, murder and kill’
As the corporate onslaught against the Environment in the name of progress and development, and the war against humanity by the so called democratic States and by the fanatics all over the world sideline and marginalize people’s movements that try to build a sustainable and pacifist world without having wars and riots, fanatics and terrorists; I see, as Anne Frank saw 70 years ago, the world being slowly transformed into a wilderness.
I see ‘everything that has been carefully built up, cultivated and grown up’ being cut down and destroyed. I see the grim reality the Irish poet W. B. Yeats has expressed in the following lines, enveloping the world:
"The blood dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere
The ceremony of innocence is drowned;
The best lack all conviction, while the worst
Are full of passionate intensity."
Sukumaran C. V.is a former JNU student. He can be reached at — [email protected]
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