Cry My Beloved Planet

It’s 4 a.m. on Saturday morning, and I cannot sleep. I do not feel like writing humour, which is my favourite writing genre. I’m sad.

I am sitting writing though, instead of sleeping … thoughts flood into my head. I am worried.

Thoughts like,

“They are closing off the street 4 floors below me so that we can insulate our apartment block to get a better Building Energy Rating (BER) — while innocent people are being slaughtered in Israel and Gaza.”

That strikes me as surreal.

Or,

What should I eat for breakfast?

Or,

“As the people who made it through WW2 pass away, we forget and become more and more brutal. We want vengeance. With every passing of the elderly “war generations”, we lose that knowledge and experience.

War begins to sound exciting again. Mostly to those that do not have to actually go and fight.”

After WW1 we, the victors, wanted revenge extracted from the vanquished. The Treaty of Versailles was the result and was decided by supposed cool heads and experienced leaders, to be the best way of protecting us from this atrocity. With these onerous terms, this type of war would never happen again.

They were wrong. So I think we can safely say, a precedent has been established for incorrect thinking.

2 decades later, we were back at war. Only, it was bigger. And worse. WW2 basically ended with unconditional surrender by both Germany and on 2nd September 1945, Japan (Instrument of Surrender).

This is a simplistic account of the end of WW2. I share it for this reason, the victors began a period of reconstruction of the vanquished. A result far removed from the treaties that ended WW1.

We had learned something.

Most of the leaders in 1945–6 had been alive in 1918–9. And they realised something. Punishing your vanquished builds hatred and a need to retaliate.

Nelson Mandela realised this and established a Truth & Reconciliation Commission. It was considered one of the shining lights of modern leadership.

Those WW2 leaders were NOT alive after 9/11. They’re not alive today.

Those WW2 war veterans would say, do not bomb Gaza.

We have forgotten something. And we continue to suffer amnesia.

An example is the current collective voice of Israel, and in particular, its leader, Benjamin Netanyahu. Along with the leaders of the USA & the UK, in particular President Joe Biden.

Netanyahu has declared this is Israel’s 9/11. And as such he wants to prosecute Gaza by declaring war and indiscriminately “wiping Hamas off the face of the planet”.

I don’t blame him.

What Hamas did to innocent Israelis is unforgivable. UNFORGIVABLE.

And that is why Israel must forgive.

Not forget. NEVER forget. But forgive.

It is a hard thing to do. I have learned that the hard thing is almost always the right thing to do. 9/11 was not the USA’s proudest moment. America lost the moral high ground throughout the world as a result of its actions after 9/11.

And terrorism has mushroomed. Terrorist leaders can point to mistakes made by The West as cause for terrorism. Throughout history, remaining terrorist family members have tried to exact vengeance … Disney has made a business out of projecting this “Cinderella” type story. And yet America and the West do not learn.

It is easy to forgive a small indiscretion. But when you can forgive the very worst things imaginable, it is you who becomes free. It is you who breaks the shackles that bind you. Forgiveness is total. It is not only for unimportant minor infractions.

You do not need to be reconciled. But you must forgive.

The rule of law, that held good nations and good people together after WW2, was decapitated by the events after 9/11.

We created an enemy. We built a generational enemy that will never be extinguished.

But mostly we created hundreds of mini-Hitlers. And the free world has paid a price for our supposed “freedom” ever since.

We are not free. You cannot even get on a plane without being humiliated by being forced to take off your shoes and strip-searched. Ditch your bottle of water. Nobody previously had to ditch water. Withholding water is a war crime according to the Geneva Convention. We live in fear.

I find it ironic that the Western ideology suggests it is the Muslims who first committed terrorism. The reality is they learned it from us.

Only we call it freedom fighters.

It is Muslims who remove their shoes and pray. And now we remove our shoes too. To get on a plane.

The irony is not lost on me.

Western comedians joke about the bearded Muslims at the airport. Bearded Muslim comedians joke about us giving up our water and taking off our shoes.

I fear, that if Israel goes down the path of “This is our 9/11” and continues to retaliate as they currently are, they too, will never be free. Palestinian boys and girls today, who watch as their innocent mothers and fathers are blown to bits, will become the Hitlers of tomorrow.

When the British put our South African women and children in concentration camps during the Boer War. The Boers attacked the British with a new vengeance. A rekindled hatred and defeated the strongest army in the world.

All gloves were off. Rules of war fell by the wayside.

I fought in a bloody and uncivilised war in South Africa not so long ago. We too fought so-called terrorists. My platoon used to strap ‘black terrorists’ to the front of RATELS and drive them through the bush at speed. You cannot imagine what a hardy thorn tree or natural vegetation will do to the soft flesh of a human being.

Or how about a black man’s testicles being used as a tobacco pouch? That’s what us civilised white educated superior race-boys did. It was done in the name of “intelligence gathering”.

Those “terrorists” are now the Government of South Africa. I have never felt more used, by the previous regime, in my life.

Do not let politicians and puppet masters use you.

War changes people. Without exception.

And seldom for the better. And the decent becomes more silent. And the meek, shrink. And the balanced humans remain quiet because to speak out, is to suggest you were NOT a South African. You are not for your country. Not patriotic.

It’s not true, but it is hard to struggle against. Especially when your men have been wounded and killed while standing next to you, and you are in the VOCAL minority.

Stupid people are always the loudest.

And the few barbaric take control of the many, without a democratic mandate, and the “bad” in us, grows. It feeds off the fear.

I was moved to Intelligence Headquarters. It was one of the best days of my life. I could get out of the madness. The glazed-over eyes and the hollowed cheeks. And there I learned that there is nothing intelligent about war. It must always be a last resort.

I know what it is to be an innocent Palestinian in a Hamas-type controlled area. Speaking out is death. Or being shunned. Or worse.

I abhor the indiscriminate bombing of civilian targets in Ukraine, and now Gaza. It causes a lifetime of retaliation and suffering. It hardens minds and creates a stronger foe.

The Blitz of London is well documented to have hardened the most passive minds of WW2 against Germany.

I have no problem with unleashing the most awful torture on proven, PROVEN that is, Hamas fighters, in the quest for intel to save innocent Israeli lives. Even to save innocent Palestinian lives. But bombing a city into oblivion is not the answer.

The price is too high for Israel to pay and future Israeli generations will reap the crop of the seed that the Israeli government sows today.

Putin should be told, “If you bomb one more civilian target, purposefully or by mistake, it is an act of war,” — the bombing will stop. He is a chess player, a survivalist, not an idiot.

People the world over should be crying. We should not be apathetic. Nor complacent. What has been done to Israel is barbaric. Wrong.

And whatever Palestinians say about the past, and what has been inflicted on them, cannot justify the deaths and acts perpetrated by Hamas in recent days.

The world has stood by and watched this escalate over decades. The war in Gaza is the fault of our useless weak political leaders. We have no leadership, only vacuous orators.

And we vote for them. Our bad. We hope for a better tomorrow. A good farmer plows and prepares the ground for a better tomorrow. He does not sit on his mobile phone watching random shit and says, “Let’s see what tomorrow brings.”

While we paint and clad our homes in Europe to keep the heat in. While we watch World Cup Cricket and Rugby. While we decide where and what to eat … our planet is at war.

War spreads. It is its main characteristic.

But so too with peace. Only one of those options brings prosperity to all. The other brings prosperity to a few.

America, which we all follow blindly, cannot even elect a speaker for its House Majority party. Isn’t it time we looked elsewhere for leadership?

Isn’t it time we realised we are following leaders whose economy is built on war? We call that warmongering.

I will write more humour. It may be our only solace. I am sure Israel can crush Gaza. But that does not mean it should.

But mostly I am sure we have to find a way to negotiate with terrorists as hard as that notion is. Man has risen to some incredible challenges and overcome. I pray for strong principled men and women to lead us out of this valley of death.

But mostly I pray that the cloak of complacency that covers us citizens of the world, is blown sky high and off us. However that needs to happen.