Dear Yashiko,
I started this e-mail with my honest and impartial views on the violence men wage and why. I then read your article on staying morally superior to sharks and realized that those views were not for you. Is two eyes for an eye really our only option or is there hope for the human soul?
Kind regards
J
Dear J,
In the context of your letter, the term view must be synonymous with opinion. I will assume that you can tell an opinion from a fact; it's not a trivial supposition, but I've got to give you at least some benefit of the doubt. An opinion can be based on facts, or superstition, or ignorance, or, as often happens, nothing at all. Like weather, it can be neither honest nor dishonest. It can be expressed honestly if you have the courage to do so, or dishonestly if you have ulterior motives, but, in your case, we will never know, will we?
We will never know how impartial your views are either, because one is never in the position to pass that kind of judgment against one's own views. Most probably, you opinions are at least as biased as mine or anyone else's, simply because everything you and I confidently claim to be universal truth is in fact culture-dependent. Strictly speaking, there is no universal truth outside mathematics, but you have to be a mathematician to understand that. And since you decided that your views were not for me, both their impartiality and whatever you mean by their honesty will forever remain a mystery. What can I tell you? Life is full of mysteries, and yours is not the most intriguing of them. Sorry.
It is the last question in your short missive that I find the most interesting. Apparently, you are trying to find a compromise between revenge (“two eyes for an eye”) and salvation (“hope for the human soul”). I have never written on either of these two topics, but since you are asking…
Revenge, in my opinion, is a pretty senseless thing. It continues back and forth until one of side runs out of people willing to keep the feud going. And when that happens due to good will rather than attrition, the wiser side inevitably loses. See how unfair life is?
Quite expectedly, the course of revenge does not depend on the name the participants affix to it. In the case of Israel, for example, it's been called retaliation or disproportionate response or treating the “Palestinians” the way the Nazis treated the Jews, or any number of other equally wrong things. No matter what you call it, it is exactly what it is: you kill one of mine; I will kill two of yours. Two times two is four, followed by 8, then 16, and so it goes. And look where it took Israel: straight out of Gaza. If you are one of those who believe that giving the Arabs everything they want will bring peace to Israel, you must be asking why Israel hadn't given them Gaza, Judea, and Samaria decades earlier. And if you are not that na?ve, you must be asking why Israel doesn't take steps that really could bring it peace.
I don't know who you are rooting for in this conflict. Most probably, you are one of the hundreds of millions of Christians and Jews who think that life on this planet will get better as soon as that shitty little country, as Israel was once publicly called by a French diplomat, disappears from the face of the earth, overrun by murderous savages. Just like it became better when the world allowed savages to overrun South Africa, but more so.
However, trying to look at it from Israel's perspective, there is only one way for it to achieve peace. It is to win the war. Win it quickly, decisively and unapologetically, rather than letting it simmer year after year for decades on end, getting more and more out of control. Win it in a way that would preclude even a theoretical possibility of Arabs ever again trying to doubt Israel's right to exist. That wouldn't be revenge. That wouldn't be punishment. That would be victory, and only victory can bring peace.
But Israel, of course, is not going to do anything like that. After all, it is no less concerned about the human soul than you are. Mohandas Gandhi is so much closer to our hearts than George Bush or Ariel Sharon that it seems sacrilegious to even mention them in the same sentence.
Why can't we all get along? Why can't we all be like Gandhi? Or, at least, like Rodney King?
I read somewhere that, during World War II, when Londoners lived under an incessant barrage of German V-2's, Gandhi wrote Winston Churchill a letter offering him a sure, clean way to win the war. Gandhi suggested that the Brits surrender to the Germans, let them occupy their country and peacefully wait until the Germans finally understand that what they are doing is wrong. Then the Germans would leave, enriched with newly acquired enlightment, and the British victory would have been achieved with impeccably clean hands. Wouldn't you agree that keeping one's hands clean and one's conscience clear is more important than victory?
Gandhi was not unique in his humanitarian approach to the world's greatest conflicts. A reader, who probably wouldn't be able to spell Gandhi and, I suspect, thought he was Mother Teresa's husband, wrote to me once that if countries occupied by Hitler hadn't resisted the occupation, there would have been no World War II. This is a wonderfully simple recipe for peace. Do not resist evil, and there will be no violence, except against you. Greet everyone you meet with wide spread legs, and you will never get raped. The trick is to learn to like it. As far as I can tell from your letter, you are half way there.
Let me break it to you gently, J. Your house is on fire. You could have put it out, but you were taught that it might deprive the arsonist of water. And so, instead of doing something to save your family, your house, and yourself, you are explaining away the rise of temperature by global warming, which, as we all know, is being caused by the poisonous SUV exhaust maliciously produced by evil American imperialists. Yeah, right. The last ice period ended 20 thousand years ago. What caused global warming then? Mammoth fart? I guess so. And terrorism is caused by the despair of the oppressed. And AIDS was invented by Jews. And so, here you are, sitting in your burning house, worrying about the condition of human soul.
Do you believe you are saving your soul by letting evil spread? No, dear J., you are confusing salvation with keeping your hands clean. In my opinion, we are in a situation when decent human beings cannot afford to care about the cleanliness of their hands, but most civilized people share your confusion. As a result, the British, the only Western European nation that so courageously fought Hitler, is now, along with the rest of the civilized world, like a bunch of sheep at the end of Ramadan, docilely following Gandhi's idiotic advice in the face of the ongoing Muslim invasion. How soon do you think the Muslims will realize that what they are doing is wrong and renounce their jihad, their “honor killings”, their stonings and beheadings, their martyrdom operations, their false, bloodthirsty, hateful non-prophet, and their entire devil worship that you, along with so many other seemingly good people, whose ability to do good is severely curtailed by their determination to keep their hands clean, consider just another monotheistic religion?
Well, consider this. Christianity began as an insignificant Jewish sect. Then smart people saw its potential as political ideology, and, gradually, Christianity became what it is today. The transformation took 2 thousand years. Half of that time we now call the Dark Ages. During the Dark Ages, out culture plunged far below the level where it was in ancient Greece and Rome thousands of years earlier. Had it not been for the Renaissance, we would still be living in the Dark Ages. If you take the Renaissance for granted, consider that it happened only in Europe. It never happened in Asia, or Africa, or the Muslim world, and the degree to which other cultures managed to leave their own Dark Ages behind is commensurate to the degree to which they have accepted Judeo-Christian values.
Muslims, for instance, are still the same people they were when they mistook their homegrown fuehrer for an ultimate prophet. Egyptian peasants today are using the same irrigation technology that was invented by the real, non-Arab Egyptians at the time they were building the pyramids. All Muslims have learned in the last 14 centuries is how to wear pants and use modern weapons. And they learned that from us.
Try to imagine the Dark Ages that the advent of Islam will inevitably bring to our world. If your imagination is not that good, simply look at Afghanistan during the Taliban years. That was Islam uncorrupted by Western influence. That's the model for our life when Western influence is no more.
And here's another question. Why are you addressing your concerns about the human soul to me? Why don't you try discussing them with a Jew on his way to the gas chamber? Because that was before your time? Then try discussing it with Israeli mothers whose sons and daughters died at a discoth?que or a pizza parlor. We, humans, have done nothing, nothing, and nothing to save them. Nor are we planning to. What makes you think we still have a soul?
What makes you believe that cowardice might, even in theory, lead to salvation?
* * *
Dear Yashiko,
In your What's Good for the Jews is Good for the Gender, you write: “Besides, at least one Pope, John VIII, was a woman…”
Baloney! How about some proof?
…
MAB
Dear MAB,
Try Googling for woman pope. Here is what you will find in the very first entry returned:
John Anglicus was a ninth century Englishman. He traveled to Athens where he gained a reputation for his knowledge of the sciences. Eventually he came to lecture at the Trivium in Rome where his fame grew even larger. He became a Cardinal, and when Pope Leo IV died in 853 A.D., he was unanimously elected pope.
As Pope John VIII he ruled for two years, until 855 A.D. However, while riding one day from St. Peter's to the Lateran, he had to stop by the side of the road and, to the astonishment of everyone, gave birth to a child. It turned out that Pope John VIII was really a woman. In other words, Pope John was really Pope Joan.
Other sources dispute this account. Frankly, my respect for Catholicism and Catholics didn't shrink when I found the morsel above. It won't grow if you manage to prove to me that it was a lie. And suppose it is true. If you are a Catholic now, will that bit of historic knowledge compel you to become, let's say, a Southern Baptist? A Muslim? A Chassid? I don't think so. So, why worry?
And why worry if you are not a Catholic?
But wait! You mention in your letter that “France doesn't look Catholic” to you. Do you know what Catholic is?
* * *
Dear Yashiko,
The gasoline taxes that you are quoting from the American Petroleum Institute seem to be cents per gallon, not percent. It will make a huge difference in actual dollars. You may decide to write a correction.
Regards,
YL
Oops…
* * *
And, finally, here's an unprovoked thought with which I am hoping to provoke your outrage today.
Without diminishing the role D-Day and the sacrifices of American soldiers, we have to acknowledge that World War II in Europe was won by the Soviet Union. The Soviet Union also suffered the greatest losses in that war: 25 to 35 million people killed, much of its European territory reduced to rubble.
The cruel irony of it stems from the fact that, had Germany won, the Soviets would have suffered the least losses compared to the rest of Europe. Their slavery under the Nazis would not have been that different from their slavery under the Bolsheviks. The terror unleashed by the Germans in the Soviet territories they occupied was no worse than the terror unleashed by the Bolsheviks while they were consolidating their power after the revolution of 1917. As a matter of fact, Communists killed and imprisoned more Soviet citizens than the Nazis. Of course, the Kremlin nomenclature would not have survived, but the ordinary people might even have benefited from the German victory, because the Communist regime was, in many respects, more oppressive than the Nazi one. For instance, the Nazis did not eliminate the right of people to own property.
Besides the Soviet elite, there was only one category of people for whom the outcome of that war was literally the matter of life and death — the Jews. So, when the Russian soldiers were dying on the battlefield with their famous battle cry, “For the Motherland! For Stalin!” they were, in fact, sacrificing themselves to the survival of Jews in Russia and whatever little was left of European Jewry. Apparently, those Russians knew not what they were doing.
Do we?
October 24, 2005
© 2002—2005 Yashiko Sagamori. All rights reserved.
Russian version