War

War is sexy and always has been because we err on the side of believing that we’re passionate, because we can’t think straight-because we can’t alter anything, except the direction smoke blows in, and we sense purpose where there is none. We have become worldly without realising. We delude ourselves that because we are willing to give up life itself, like wagner- troops, we are heroically active, participants in a vital battle that will save us all. The reverse may be reality: those who deny that war solves anything may be the real heroes. We know that we will be considered monsters for not jumping on the band wagon, but let’s pause and check out who has chosen to jump off the band wagon….Oblomov stated calmly and went on:

Awarded writers, some with a Nobel, like Harold Pinter, or like Peter Brook, the English theatre director, admittedly passed away since, who spoke of the intelligence of the East, chess, Russians. He, an established figure in the war of words, who made a film about children fighting, had no reason at all to stand up and out himself, as a peace activist, yet he was remembering the war in Vietnam, which he made a film about and the senselessness of the world’s media,bloated and bleeting about how successful this or that side were. We all know now in retrospect that none was successful.

Take a look at the monument that stands in front of Westminster Abbey as an abject example of how lost the world is. The oddness of it only grows as one observes it and reads that it is to the Crimean War dead from Westminster School. It was raised there by their fellow pupils, who feel guilty at being alive. The Crimean War is the first war in which people are described by daily reports in newspapers. It is highly ironic, exasperating and illicit to mention that war emanates from the same places over time.

The strategic value of the Crimean and Black Sea is something none would wish to admit to. Is it sheer chance that America, like Britain, over one hundred and fifty years ago… was fighting to win influence over so tiny a place, so little a piece of land that is the peninsula that is Crimea? Sebastopol was where dogged battles were fought and written about in such detail that our very own lady with the Lamp, Florence Nightingale, was the first woman to aim to help the wounded. The strategies of a woman first to move the hospital away from the sewers and to realise that most soldiers were dying of disease…rather than wounds…stands as a bold epitaph to the dumbness of men. How could so many die without correct care? War as a gravity-centre of stupidity was being for the first time unearthed.

Mental welfare is not by chance the subject now that we all turn to: the mental welfare of the individual has risen up above the other subjects so that my son’s school is inaugurating a mental welfare Saturday event, the first of the newest phenomenon, which weirdly seems to me anti-warfare. We will ourselves to look within and discover what is making war so attractive..and find that contentment lies in a walk away. As Jagger sang in the Stones song: “war is a just a breath away…”.

To aspire to antiwar sentiment is an enormous step….