The mirage of controlling the world and 'militarisation' of our life

There are wars and then there are other kinds of wars. But barring the cold war, all wars are brutal. While the number of casualties, losses and trauma, environmental degradation and the number of refugees in the wake of Russia’s war on Ukraine can only be surmised at this juncture, it is apparent that this new war will lead to irreparable losses in both countries.

War has become the raison d’etre of modern time, underlining our deceptive story of progress. World leaders have agreed upon a universal language of war to write our stories of vulnerabilities and distorted future. We are yet to learn to live collectively on this planet. This madness to invent wars and design death machines, has resulted in militarization of life itself.

Do we call this human evolution? Darwin’s grave needs to be asked this question since we are forgetting the relevance and art of asking questions. We however find it convenient to question people long dead. When death is right in front, when violence is being stoked from all corners in the immediate present, how can we look to the past and to the dead? Ask a dying person, gasping for oxygen, what matters more – oxygen, violence or war?

The ongoing war on Ukraine is a crisis of moral failure, failure of our collective thinking and imagination. The silence of world leaders is deafening, the position of interpretative communities is worrying. Silence is a kind of violence as it creates pathways for further exploitation. Silence which is rooted in the belief that this barbarism will not hit us, but then is there any fire that does not spread to neighbours if it remains unchecked?

The perils of building ‘one-nation’ at the cost of disintegrating others, even decimating them, is damning. How will one live in the absence of other races, cultures, geographical formulations? This sense of illusionary oneness is jingoistic, exclusionary, questioning and erasing all forms of otherness.

Starting from conflicts, physical force, war of weapons, we have now arrived at that stage where we possess the capacity to annihilate the entire planet through nuclear weapons. That shows the increasing focus of our interest, which is devising more destructive means to live, by employing wars, weapons and violence.

The whole issue possibly boils down to one of power, control, possession and ownership. Who owns the world? Unfortunately, it has been wedded to the notion of power. The desire to control, own and govern people and the world drives many of our world’s political leaders.

Leaders are obsessed with numbers, be it the numbers of votes, followers, party members, money, thus making the violence of war an available recourse. The number of missing bodies rarely figures in any war. They are forgotten, only to be mourned by their family members and friends. Their stories never matter to our leaders. It has been aptly said that those who want war do not fight the wars and those who fight in wars do not want it. If the world needs wars to maintain life on this planet, then, we are in the hands of some amateurish storytellers bereft of compassion.

If the condemned writers and philosophers look at this deepened urge to control people, land, mind, economies, including the environment, they will deride the intellectual bankruptcy of our world leaders.

We have forgotten that human life has a limited time, hence, the agenda of controlling the world, seems mostly to be a mirage. Many leaders have been seduced by this mirage in the past, yet their failures have not taught our present lot any lesson.

It is one thing to be incapacious to understand history, but it is a totally different thing to be resolutely deaf and blind, stoking the embers of war.

I am reminded of a moving line from Tabish Khair’s novel Filming, “But death comes on its own, finally; it always does - what has to be attained and preserved is always life.” Are we listening?

(The writer is an Associate Professor of English and Head, School of Liberal Arts, Bennett University)

(This article was first published in National Herald on Sunday.)