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 Oh, you Masters of War
by Jamie McKenzie |
During 2017 I lived in Sochi in Russia for 6 months and watched the "Victory Day" parade which commemorates the defeat of Hitler and the Nazis. There was no big show of military equipment as is typical of the parade in Moscow. It was mainly families marching to honor those relatives who served and died in the war. I took the photo of the young girl above while watching the parade. Watching the parade inspired the poem below. I did not realize at the time that the attack on the Ukraine that began in 2014 would expand to a full blown war a few years later. With Putin acting much like Hitler in attacking the Ukraine, it is a shame that so many will die on both sides. There is no honor to be found for Russians in this horrible criminal act. It is shameful. Hear me read this poem from 2017 on YouTube at youtu.be/I61Knre6ijE
Atrocities and death in Gaza and Israel"On October 7, 2023, the Palestinian Sunni Islamist group Hamas (a U.S.-designated foreign terrorist organization, or FTO) led surprise attacks against Israel from the Gaza Strip. More than 1,200 Israelis and foreign nationals (including at least 35 U.S. citizens in Israel) were killed. Hamas and other groups also seized 253 hostages on October 7."As with Putin's cowardly and criminal attacks on the Ukraine which have killed more than 10,500 civilians (according to OXFAM), the Hamas attack killed many innocent men, women and children. It was by any definition a terrible atrocity. With such a barbaric attack, it was not surprising that Israel would retaliate, but eight months after the October attack, the war and the death continues. According to a Reuters May report, "Palestinian health authorities say Israel's ground and air campaign in Gaza has killed more than 35,000 people, mostly civilians, and driven most of the enclave's 2.3 million people from their homes." The article goes into considerable detail explaining how this number was calculated. "Last week Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said 14,000 Hamas fighters and 16,000 Palestinian civilians had been killed in the war." According to Reuters on May 14. The price of war Unanswerable QuestionsIn 2008 I published the book, Leading Questions, with Chapter Sixteen devoted to Unanswerable Questions.http://questioning.org/jun08/unanswerable.html Even though unanswerable, most of these questions are essential questions worth our study and devotion. In the case of endless warfare, we must continue to ask how we might break the chain. Could we form a League of Nations? (Tried that!) Could we create a United Nations? (Tried that!) Could we try something new and different? Even though many questions may be unanswerable in the sense that no definitive, clear conclusions can be reached, those same questions are often crucial. Their resistance to analysis makes them no less important. A team’s success may depend upon wrestling with elusive, frustrating questions and issues. In some cases, survival may require such skill. |
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