We do not live in happy times. We live in fearful times, in times of depleting hope and diminishing human values. We live in a lacerated world with multiple fractures and festering wounds. Ours is truly tragic times
Ours is essentially a tragic age, so we refuse to take it tragically. The cataclysm has happened, we are among the ruins, we start to build up new little habitats, to have new little hopes. It is rather hard work: there is now no smooth road into the future: but we go round, or scramble over the obstacles. We’ve got to live, no matter how many skies have fallen.”
—DH lawrence,
lady Chatterley’s lover
lawrence was writing about the gloom that had descended upon much of Europe, especially Great Britain, after the first World War. The physical destruction witnessed then was only one of the many devastations that befell nations. There were also lives ruined, deaths by millions, orphans and widows, crippled men facing an uncertain future, and settled, orderly arrangements within and between countries unsettled forever. In that misery and grief, hopelessness and despair were sown the seeds of the Second World War.
It would be not merely an exaggeration but outlandishly far-fetched to suggest we face similar gloom today. A century after the guns fell silent and Empires collapsed or capitulated, it’s a different world we live in. Yet, the distance of an intervening century does not necessarily mean a long journey from unsettling war to settled peace. like lawrence who penned these lines in the early-1920s, we too live in tragic times if not a tragic age. The cataclysm may not quite have happened but we are hurtling towards it.
It has been a terrible week of bloodshed. Well into the 21st century when the world and humanity should be grappling with problems like climate change, food shortage, energy needs and disappearing water, problems that transcend borders, nations, regions and continents, we are confronted with the spectre of a war that will have neither victor nor vanquished, but victims and untold misery. We may not be quite hurtling towards apocalypse, at least not yet, but the drum-beat of the hooves of the Fifth Horseman’s steed continues to get louder.
It would be facetious to suggest, even remotely, that nobody expected the hideous massacre in Paris last weekend. Memories of the Twin Towers being brought down by passenger planes hijacked by terrorists may have dulled with the passage of 14 years but the possibility of terrorists striking again in a similar manner was never ruled out. The gleaming new chrome and glass towers that have come up at Ground Zero both mock at the merchants of death and destruction as well as remind us of 9/11.
Three years later, in March 2004, terrorists struck with undiminished ferocity: 191 people were killed in the Madrid train bombings. In July 2005 suicide-bombers struck on london Underground trains and a bus, leaving 52 people dead. A year later, in July 2006, commuter trains were bombed in Mumbai in replay of Madrid, killing 209 people. Then came the grisly Mumbai attacks of November 26, 2008, a dark chapter of 21st century terrorism, taking a toll of 266 lives. There were other attacks too, targeting Indian cities, in Ahmedabad, Jaipur, Delhi, Pune. Early this year, Charlie Hebdo’s offices were attacked in Paris.
The purpose in recalling these crimes is not to merely place the latest carnage in context but remind ourselves that we do not live in happy times. We need to constantly refresh our memory lest we forget. We need to remind ourselves of the Peshawar school attack and how terrorists killed 141 people, 132 of them children. We need to remind ourselves that a dark force has risen that calls itself the Islamic State with a ruthless army of barbarians who murder, rape and pillage in the name of a merciful god. We need to look, and look closely, at the Middle East where flames of hate are laying to waste land and lives. We cannot, indeed must not, ignore the rapacious Boko Haram in Nigeria.
The Paris attacks are scarily similar to the Mumbai attacks: The careful selection of targets, the dimultaneous assault at multiple places, the high casualty (129 dead, 368 injured) and the tactics are virtually indistinguishable from what we witnessed in Mumbai this month seven years ago. And now comes news ofjihadis storming a hotel in Mali and taking more than 100 guests and staff hostages. The siege is over but not without death and mayhem. Meanwhile, Syria continues to crumble, lebanon lives in fear of further terrorist strikes like the suicide-bombings near Beirut and investigators struggle to figure out what brought down a Russian passenger plane crammed with holidaymakers over Sinai.
France has declared the attacks on Paris as an “act of war”. The outrage in France and rest of Europe is understandable. More than an “act of war” it is an act of betrayal. The left-liberal elite in Europe had clearly failed to see, and even if it had seen, failed to recognise, the evil face of Islamism. Instead, it chose to gloss over the radicalisation of young Muslims, children of immigrant parents, who grew up in liberal welfare states but chose to imbibe and internalise the ideology of hate. Bogus notions of multiculturalism drew a veil, both metalhorical and often literal, over their drift into violence. The moral vacuum of Christendom with the decline of the Church hastened the process.
The UN Security Council met to discuss a combined assault on the Islamic State. Goaded by Russia taking unilateral action and China seconding it, the US, till now playing all sides while making a show of cockamamie airstrikes, is lazily waking up to the fact that Moscow has shown up Washington, DC to be puny and limp-wristed; worse, in popular opinion around the world and across the Atlantic, American policy is increasingly being viewed as synonymous with deceit and duplicity. France is in a rage. Much of Europe is. And we could see the forging of a grand alliance and the relaunching of War on Terror 2.0 in the coming days. To what end is anybody’s guess given the West’s past record of failing to stay the course.
There is no reason to believe we are immune or that the bloodletting by barbarians of the Islamic State is too far from our shores to worry about. France today, India tomorrow is not an impossibility. The best security apparatus can minimise the impact but will not deter mass murderers from having a go. We will have to carry the burden of fear and loss. As I said, we do not live in happy times. We live in fearful times, in times of depleting hope and diminishing human values. We live in a lacerated world with multiple fractures and festering wounds. Ours is truly tragic times.
(The author is a current affairs journalist based in NCR)