In the photo essay, Ethiopia : The Scorched Earth, Mary Anne Fitzgerald writes in the caption beneath a photo of a young girl crying, “Tears of hunger are a good sign. During the final stages of malnutrition children are too weak to cry.”
There was Live Aid and U.S.A. For Africa, once for Ethiopia. Millionaire singers, millions of viewers and millions of dollars raised, despite that millions starved. Well meaning intentions moved on once the songs slipped from the charts, the misery inspired single with little lasting impact for those in the place that had inspired it all in the first place. The imagery of a child slumped over, exhausted while the vulture watches is iconic in so far as Western consumption for distant anguish goes. The footage of a malnourished Palestinian girl running after empty water-tank trucks, thirsty, hungry and desperate, is for the moment as tragic, though before the eyes of doomscrolling voyeurs, it is all too soon to become regrettably forgotten.
Celebrities could once go on television and participate phone in fund drive marathons, money donated by people at home interested in giving up cash in the hopes that it could go on to buy aid, food, or anything to prevent another child from collapsing beneath a vulture. Much of that money, filtered through cynical layers never reached those on the ground and what does, still needs to get through. Logistics to remote regions is hard enough, with a full blown military embargo, such as is occurring in Gaza. It’s now impossible.
The Israeli military is moving in, taking and seizing ground. Their spokesmen have promised that they will take over the food and water, now that they are there. What children climb from out of the cement dust and shattered masonry, must open their mouths to the same military that has been for long months starving and exterminating them. If that little girl survives the bombs, snipers and malnutrition in the coming weeks, maybe she will not need to chase another empty water truck.
I had a friend, Ben, who I met through the combat sports, a big man with a bigger smile. Mighty broad shoulders, dark Igbo skin and a keen mind. He had come across Milton Friedman as a young man, from then on dedicating himself to free markets and human liberty. Ben had been born in that brief slither of human history when a nation called Biafra once existed. The Igbo and others sought independence from Nigeria, but with little foreign backers, they fought a desperate war. Starvation, war and the tragedy of human invented horrors led to the death of thousands, if not a million or more. Despite this, Ben was born.
His passport said, Nigerian. Though he never saw himself as Nigerian. It was a nation, like others that arose in the death throes of empire that had come about after Europeans swiped their hands across the map. The modern Middle East is infected by such imperial inventions. Places where the victims of such colonialism tend to know the histories of their regions better than the outsiders who assume that, “this is how it has always been over there.” Savages, uncivilised near-humans fighting one another.
Ben had told me that he and the other Africans he knew had often encountered this, the assumption that they were savages, Nubian throwbacks that needed to be led, otherwise cowards or only preferable as labourers. He once mentioned how the Palestinians, and the then victims of the US invasion of Iraq, were seen by outsiders as “humans weeds to be eradicated to make another man’s garden.” History is a compost heap stacked with such human weeds, cut down by the civilised and savage alike.
If he was still alive, I wonder what he would have thought about the current genocide in Palestine. I am old enough to remember slurs expressed at the expense of the Igbo, in light of their own mass starvation. “He is as skinny as a Biafran” or “A Biafran would have a better chance getting a meal than…” these were remarks thrown about in the 1980s, a decade plus after that war. On TikTok, Israeli and other ‘influncers’ have taken to making slop that ridicules those suffering in Gaza. To the comfortable and wider doom scrolling world, ‘it’s all in good fun’ or maybe ‘in bad taste.’ In a decades time, we may hear expressions lingering, “she’s as skinny as a Gazan.” Or perhaps with a little girl in mind, “as thirsty as one.” The humour’s found in distance. The distance of time and geography. But also, perspective.
Ben was an advocate for free markets, human liberty. He had seen up close the bureaucratic monstrosity of government, the corruption and use of ever expanding laws against the common person. In places like Nigeria they are extreme farces, depressingly comical. Though, often the OCD rendered facade is all that differs, some places have their corruption and exploitation mastered. It’s homogenised. Above all, Ben was anti-war. Not a pacifist, he had quick hands and a faster mind when violence did arise. There is a difference between fighting and waging war, one deals with individuals while the other is collective vulgarity.
War is the end of freedom, the destruction of liberty. It’s where collectivism reigns, it profits a few, glorifies some and destroys many more. A genocide, is the fulfillment of the worse trait of humanity.
It transcends human beings, it’s the reckless carcinogen of anti-life. I once went to a talk held by veteran aid workers, they were discussing their experiences in Rwanda, Ethiopia and Somalia. They had worked for most of their life trying to save lives, they were not wealthy people materially only in dignity, devotion and experience. Atheists to religion and politics, just human beings who did good. In those horrible regions, their existence was mostly respected, at times exploited. They were generally not intentionally targeted, it was still dangerous for them. Techno-voyeruism allows us to now watch many workers being targeted, executed. The most ‘moral military’, has been killing them with impunity in Gaza.
The Biafran war of independence was one of those lost moments during the cold war, a period of endless wars. Outside of writers like Frederick Forsyth, much of the intellectual imagination at the time was focused on the American war on Vietnam. Wars like the Nigerian Civil War are usually dismissed as a conflict between tribes, regional players with modern arms doing as they would otherwise be doing with spears and shields. One caption in a magazine from the period read, “even the Federal soldiers look as savagers(sic) dressed in Western hand me downs.” Above it stood a young Nigerian soldier in a mishmash of Allied World War Two era kit, holding a Sten sub machine gun. At that same time the IDF was going into battle with M3 Half Tracks, Sherman tanks and some of their soldier still carried Mauser bolt action rifles, they too were in a mishmash of foreign kit. That same magazine would praise the blitz like successes of the IDF in the six-day war. Today, media can still be found that praises the IDF’s restraint and morality.
The Israel claim to Palestine, is often reasoned to be found in the bible. An ancient religion determines that a theologically founded State has the right to not merely exist, but to expand. In doing so, it can defy the very international laws that safeguarded it’s own existence and creation, and can commit atrocities that even some of it’s own supporters struggle to ignore. It’s a modern state, Western, and is from all accounts the tip of the spear as far as technology and civilised esteem goes. It seems that funding and technology is what separates the savage from the civilised.
In her essay, The Conspiracy of Silence, June Goodfield said of modern war, “the profile of war has changed. The military machine that marched through history, albeit often breaking rank, has degenerated into a flailing, amoral behemoth that kills without conscience.” I suspect that it mostly always has, we just saw it with a romantic vision and often in the past, the war was just geographically distant to the innocent.
“How strange that there exists no science of peace – no science comparable to the development of armaments and strategies in the science of war,” asks Alice D. Wolf in the book, Peaceful Children, Peaceful World. It is strange indeed. Meanwhile the institutions and entities that justify their very existence, their might, and reasons for them to retain monopoly powers, all grounded in tomes containing many poetic words interwoven by the language of legalese boasting peace, justice and order. In reality they destroy human liberty and dignity and in the end may be the destroyer of worlds. They continue to wage their wars, support others in theirs. Despite their own laws or, supposed values. We watch a little girl run after a water truck. How far we have come, yet how often we stumble. The truck drives on, she remains thirsty. No more trucks are coming. Just soldiers and more bombs.
