This is with reference to the article “The year of living dangerously” (June 19) by Aijaz Zaka Syed. Homer, Shakespeare and Virgil have all written about heroism, courage and ethnic pride in war where opposing armies battle against each other. But in today’s industrial war, it is the civilians who bear the burden both before and after the war. In the event of a nuclear war, as the writer says, we are talking about 2.5 billion civilians facing decimation in South Asia.
Chris Hedges, who as a war correspondent has seen war at first hand in different regions during the last two decades, writes about the Bosnian war in his book. “War is a force that gives us meaning… look not to religion and mythology of warped versions of history to find the roots of these conflicts, but to the leaders who dominated the Balkans.
“It took Milosevic four years of hate propaganda and lies, pumped forth daily over the airways from Belgrade, before he got one (mad) Serb to cross the border and begin the murderous rampage that triggered the war. And although the war was painted from afar as clash of civilizations, the primary task of leaders like Milosevic in Serbia, Tudjman in Croatia and the other ethnic leaders was to dismantle and silence their own intellectuals and writers of stature and replace them with their own second rate pawns willing to turn everything into myth of ethnic triumphalism.”
People from India and Pakistan are in a better position to relate to the above-mentioned lines. In India we have the Bharatiya Janata Party and its ilk continuously trying to lock horns with Pakistan. On the other side of the border, the situation is not that different either. There is no dearth of war lovers in Pakistan. None of these so-called leaders think about the future of their own people.
Hedge calls nationalism a narcotic that exalts and gives potent meaning and purpose to life of common masses filling their empty lives with zeal.
This is exactly what is happening in both the countries unfortunately. — Dr. Khurshid Syed, By e-mail
Inciting hatred
