Meditating on grim things
Lately I’ve found myself reading and viewing a lot of material on conflict in the 20th century, which necessarily involves reading and viewing a lot of material on the immiseration of various human beings in the course thereof. Reading The Cold War’s Killing Fields, (which I’ll post more about later) led me down the rabbit hole of conflicts both famous (the Vietnam War, the Korean War) and little-known in the US (Operation Searchlight, the mid-1960s massacres of Indonesian communists and those affiliated with them).
Besides adding a huge list of books to my “to-read” pile, I also found a ton of interesting videos on YouTube. Besides some analyses of particular battles (I saw a really good one about the Battle of Ia Drang,) I’ve been watching archival and documentary footage. It’s really something, watching washed-out, grainy footage of civilians piecing through piles of shattered buildings, weeping over the bodies of their loved ones. You begin to realize how much of your life was assembled around you in its particular configuration by the whims of fate. I could have been a Bengali student executed by roving Pakistani soldiers in the opening maneuvers of Operation Searchlight, or a protester shot by police at the outset of the Iranian Revolution. Or I could have been a soldier or a cop myself. Or even a nameless farmer or craftsman or mother or father or child, immolated or gassed or annihilated by weaponry.
Two interesting documentaries I watched parts of were The Laughing Man and Pilots in Pajamas. The first is an interview with an ex-Wehrmacht soldier who had enlisted as a mercenary in Africa in the 1960s. He is quite ebullient about having committed the most grotesque crimes on the native African population. The other is a series of interviews with American pilots (the documentary refers to them as “air pirates”) who were shot down while bombing North Vietnam. What struck me about these men, again, was how not much separated me from them. These are guys ranging from their mid-20s to early 40s, most married with children, most with college degrees. They enlisted for various reasons, and they wound up attacking the civilian population of North Vietnam, and they were shot down and likely tortured and paraded in front of East German cameras for propaganda purposes, and then eventually some of them went home. Watching this last one in particular really showed me that anyone could rationalize themselves into committing acts of horror against their fellow man. How many children had these men blown to pieces in the course of their bombing runs? (One of the pilots had flown over 100 raids combined over North and South Vietnam.) You begin to see why the idea of Christ is so powerful. To think of one person who takes all of humanity’s sins upon their shoulders… but really it should be humanity’s suffering that they take on instead. It’s tough to think of the way in which humanity shatters its own lives, often without even realizing it or thinking about it that much.
Part of me wants to move onto lighter subject matter, but it almost seems like a betrayal of the stories of those who have suffered and died. I know that me gravitating on the immiseration and death of all these people doesn’t really do anything. But to live life blithely, without a care for what happened before I was born just because it’s not proximate to me: is that conscionable either?