Some thoughts.

In these times of great tribulation it is worthwhile, I think, to carefully consider one’s situation. Some, of course, might not agree with me but I derive my thoughts from a variety of sources – some very old – for instance the Ancient Greeks.

Fate, or Chance, or Providence does not play a fair game with us humans. It does not abide by any rules; is not moved by any considerations; is not turned aside by any prayers; or made malignant by any curses. Its onset can neither be retarded, nor hurried, tempered nor envenomed, avoided or way-laid by anything we do.

Why blame it? It moves at its own inexorable pace towards its own determined end.

It is we, humans, who make the rules of the games we play, who plead for consideration, who try to shelter behind the situations we caused. Why blame it if we are thin skinned, if we are unready, if we are cowards, if we did not for-see the consequences, if we are fatuous enthusiasts for our causes?

All we should know is that there is no armour, no shield, no antidote. Some of us trust in fortitude, some in fatalism, some in a hereafter, and a few hardy ones in a grim, derisive, humorous cynicism.

And if at the end of things our trust fails – it does not matter! 

To again quote from The Rubaiyat, by Omar Khayyam, quatrain 52:-

And that inverted Bowl we call the Sky,

Whereunder crawling coop’t we live and die,

Lift not thy hands to It for help – for It

Rolls impotently on as Thou or I.

But then as with Pandora's box - there is always Hope!!

Conform or be an Individual?

This has confused me and I know there has been discussion, sometimes acrimonious, about the merits of striving to be an individual over the easier route of just conforming. This is when the “best for the community” is put before the individual. Now in this regard I’m referring not just to religious conforming when “everyone” has to think and believe a certain way or be called an “apostate” or “heretic”. This, religious conformism, seems to be fading somewhat in the world today – certainly when it comes to Christianity. It used to be that everyone went to church at least once a week – now many churches are almost empty.  

What I’m thinking about is the “autocratic” type of conforming – Turkey, China, Iran, Saudi Arabia, Cambodia, North Korea – even to a certain extent it now appears, in the USA. In these countries only government approved media is permitted and only government approved public expression of views is allowed. All else is “fake news”, or at least contrary to “approved” news and purveyors of such news may be jailed or at the very least may be “pilloried” by the authorities and in social media.

Many of us, certainly in my age group, will remember pictures of China under the autocratic rule of Chairman Mao, where everyone had to wear the regulation blue boiler-suit and carry the “Red Book” of his pronouncements and avoid, at all costs, being termed a counter revolutionary. And where “re-education camps” were widely used.

I’m wondering whether we actually need to conform as traditionally portrayed. We cannot all think and act the same. Humans are just not made that way. This is why I believe that Soviet Communism failed and why any autocratic regime will also ultimately fail. Trying to suppress an individual’s ideas and aspiration just builds up pressure and a great deal of stress. 

Yes, certainly, we humans are social beings. We need to have contact with other like-minded people. It’s just the way we are. This is why families have always been seen as vital to any society. But do I need a government to tell me how I should behave with “foreigners” or what and who to believe, or which social media is appropriate?

No! 

We have to be given the freedom to think and act for ourselves (within certain parameters of the law). The stress of conforming has its downside. For instance Japan, a highly “conformist” society, has one of the highest suicide rates in the world. 

What we have to guard against is the prevalent but very old concept of the “scapegoat” – blame someone or some group for your own troubles. In Australia it’s the “boat people” or “illegal immigrants” invading our carefully guarded borders; in the USA it’s Mexican drug addicts and rapists invading the country; in (nominally) Christian countries in Europe it’s the Islamists wanting to impose Sharia law and upsetting the old traditions; in strict Islamic countries like Saudi Arabia and Iran it’s decadent Western ideas polluting the minds of the young – with such unseemly things as dancing, different sexes swimming together or even watching a football match. 

As the Nazi Hermann Goering warned at the Nuremberg War Crimes Trial (1946): “The people can always be brought to the bidding of the leaders. That is easy. All you have to do is tell them they are being attacked and denounce the pacifists for lack of patriotism and exposing the country to danger. It works the same way in any country.”

We all need to be very vigilant.

Warsaw Ghetto 1940 – Gaza Ghetto 2018.

Amended May 15, 2018
I wonder if anyone ponders  the irony of the current situation between Israel and the Palestinians (in Gaza) and compares it with the terrible events in Warsaw in the early years of the Second World War?

In 1940 the Germans (Nazis) walled off a small area of the city of Warsaw and instructed all Polish Jews to either move there or be forcibly transported there. From this Ghetto many Jews were transported to the infamous “Extermination Camps” that the Nazis had set up, under the ruse that they were to be “resettled”.

Once those in the Ghetto realized what was happening they set up a resistance movement to fight for their survival – after all they had nothing to lose. The final battle started on the eve of Passover on April 19, 1943, when a Nazi force consisting of several thousand troops entered the ghetto. After initial setbacks, the Germans under the field command of Jurgen Stroop systematically burned and blew up the ghetto buildings, block by block, rounding up or murdering anybody they could capture. Significant resistance ended on April 28, and the Nazi operation officially ended in mid-May, symbolically culminating with the demolition of the Great Synagogue of Warsaw on May 16. According to the official report, at least 56,065 people were killed on the spot or deported to German Nazi concentration and death camps - (I acknowledge  reference to Wikipedia for some of this information).

Now, today, in the Gaza Ghetto with the Palestinians who were either moved there or were forcibly resettled because the Israelis took control of Palestine, we are seeing an eyrie replay of those appalling events of 1943 under different circumstances, certainly, but with the same intent:-

To DESTROY THE RESISTANCE AT ALL COSTS!

There is a blockade in place – imposed by Israel under the guise of stopping the rocket attacks on Israel. OK – this, just possibly, I can understand. But what I can’t understand is the Israeli refusal to recognize the Palestinians justification for their use of these weapons.  Remember there are 1.8 million Palestinians packed into a small enclave. Gaza is the most densely populated area on earth – they have nowhere else to go. The Palestinians are frustrated, demeaned as a people, treated as second class citizens, racially vilified, starved of opportunity and quite frankly treated in a manner that those Jews who survived the Holocaust would recognize as similar to what they were subjected to.

So now, the Palestinians are fighting just as the Jews did many years before.

To so twist words as to accuse the Palestinians (Hamas) of “causing the problems and the deaths of  Palestinian’s” is an obscene abuse of language. Hamas (read Palestinians) are fighting for their survival as a people; fighting for their community, their religion and their way of life. Isn’t this what the Israelis have always done in the past? Isn’t this what the Jews trapped in the Warsaw Ghetto did? Would anyone in their right mind claim that the Jews who died in the Warsaw Ghetto caused their own deaths?

I am sure the United Nations would, today, classify the Zionist militia group, Irgun (1931-1948) – under the leadership of Menachem Begin ( later, in 1977, Prime Minister of Israel), as a terrorist organisation. In fact Begin himself was, at the time, in the 1940s, declared a terrorist by the British who had a “mandate” over Palestine. Various Zionist leaders held different ideas about how to achieve their goal of an Israeli nation but revisionist Zionists, like Begin, were extremist nationalists who believed violence was justified to create a state and considered guerrilla and terrorist tactics a legitimate route toward this end.

Sound familiar?

The injustice of the carve up of Palestine after the Second World War when Israel was established (in 1948) without any Palestinian consultation or the payment of any reparation for the Palestinian properties taken over when the new State of Israel was formed, is the root cause of the present problem.

That injustice, seventy years old now, still burns in the Palestinian psyche. What are the Palestinians supposed to do? They formed Hamas to fight for their rights just as the Zionists formed Irgun to fight for theirs.

The Israelis have now systematically destroyed the infrastructure of Gaza – hospitals, water plants, electricity generators, sewage systems, schools, roads, in fact anything of value to the inhabitants – with  the intention, I am sure, of forcing the Palestinians to leave, thus solving Israel’s “problem” (which the Israelis themselves created).

This is exactly what the Nazis did in Warsaw.

Violence begets more violence and creates a vortex, which, like a black hole, sucks in everyone and everything - there is no way out. Killing people never solved a problem – the Israelis know this; the Americans know this; the world knows this. Violence, as I have proclaimed in these posts many times before, is the last resort or the morally bankrupt.

Remember, what goes around comes around.

Read what you will into these words.