Good Doesn't Beget Good, but Evil Always Brings More Evil

Life is a weird place. It's a plain and crazy contradiction, and we, little ants here, keep trying to make sens out of it. Maybe I feel too philosophical when I sleep too few; it happens due to some unbalanced levels of some neurotransmitter, I heard. But the fact is that it doesn't need too much to look around to figure it out, unless one is another lobotomized of the herd.

I've just read "La Contra", and there is this interview to a journalist who survived to the Israeli attack to Gaza in December 2008. As he says, 1000 hours of horror, 65h recorded, 2h shown. 380 people were killed in the very first 7min of the attack. He's made a documentary, To Shoot an Elephant, to show to the world the horrors of this military action on civil population. It is so real (what a meaningless word!), it has been qualified as gore: He shows how two children die in a hospital. The movie can be seen in YouTube.

His conclusions: "war is ugly and avoidable, and those who make it, are bad people. That simple". Unfortunately, I think he is wrong. War is part of Human nature, part of Nature itself, and thus, difficult to avoid. War is part of a mechanical cause to produce some gains. That's why is unavoidable. As long as it is easier for a government to obtain its desires by means of war, war will exist. And there is nothing easier than war, specially when the opponent is disarmed.

By chance, so far, I've never been involved in a war, so I speak from ignorance. But I've met people who has. My grandfather did the whole Spanish Civil War on the first line, and was injured in the Battle of the Ebro. His brother, too. His father, too, 4 years in Cuba. It seems that people get used to live surrounded by death as people get use to smoke and noise in big cities. He explained how people blew out by grenades or mines, fell down by machine guns (sewn, he said), or were just shoot in the head or executed at dawn. Atrocities were their every day bread.

In Japan, I met an ex-Marine who had been in the first war of Iraq; he told me people can't imagine what it is to be in a battle: people paralyze and crap their shit out of them, literally. My grandfather told me the same thing, and how they had to kick the younger ones to move somewhere safer most of times. The journalist also say he shit his pants several times. War is shit and blood.

Were them good or bad? They were just normal people. For me, there is no good or bad, standing alone like two single objects that can be labeled with a word. They are mixed and they depend on the context. Both are part of the same nature, and we all share it. Are these Israel soldiers bad? I don't know.

Recently, I happened to meet a very friendly Jewish old woman in London, Ela. She lives in the suburbs, near Cannon's Park, in a neighborhood with the highest level of Jewish population in the city. Her ex-sister-in-law is living with her at home. She is a 27 year-old girl from Israel, who just moved back to London because she wants to go to college. And, as all young Israeli, she did 3 years of compulsory military service, and we all know what it means.

Is she somehow guilty? Naively, one could think so, but I don't. If she had skipped the military service, she would lose everything, freedom, citizenship and rights. In Spain, I skipped mine; but my father did his military service, 18 months in Africa. For me, it was easy; for him, impossible without losing too much: deserters faced either martial court and prision, or exhile. Life seems to be a cost minimizing-benefit maximazing problem, sometimes.

Once I heard in a documentary a Russian prisoner saying that there would never be a stop for evil in the world, since "good not necessarily begets good, but evil always gives birth to more evil". Good/evil, love/hate, peace/war, truth/lie; doublethinking accepts them as the same. I think they are disctinct degrees of the same, which is something completely different. And people should accept reality more often. Now it rains.