Thoughts on War, Refugees, PTSD, and Human Animals

Thoughts on War, Refugees, PTSD, and Human Animals

The news coming out of Syria and now Iraq is causing me having sleepless nights. The ferocious barbarity of the ISIS jihadists is shaking me to the core. The Middle East could be where the Apocalypse started, as "predicted" and "foretold" in some books, written by the scribes who believed in the End of Days. After a thousand years of sleeping, the Arabs and their fellow Muslims are waking up. The status quo is intolerable. The oppressed are finally rising. Death is no longer feared. Excesses are committed in the names of liberation and justice. Nationhood is being thrown out of the window. What count are the family, clan/tribe/, sects and ideologies. 

I'm not saying the ISIS jihadists are  going to triumph. No, they are going to be vanquished as all extremists (Huns, Crusaders, Mongols, Nazis, Khmer Rouge, and Communists. There was a very good reason why the Roman Empire and the Ottoman Empire lasted a long time. The Romans and the Turks knew about accommodation) before them. For any regime to last and prosper, inclusiveness and compromise, not extremism and maximalism, are the names of the rule. Fear is effective only in a short term. After a while, humans, true humans anyway, instinctively choose dignity and death over survival. It's far better to fight and die as real men than to live in shame and humiliation like ordinary animals. Ironically that's what the jihadists and suicide bombers (unless they were brainwashed) believe. Humans knows they really have a choice. Animals do not. Incidentally, Nietzsche once remarked that the Jews cling to life, no matter what. Their behavior at Masada was an exception. 

The news reports of the plight of the Christians and the Yazidis in Iraq brought back to my mind the memories of the sufferings of the Vietnamese refugees who fled from the advancing North Vietnamese troops in the waning weeks of the Vietnam War. War is cruel and dehumanizing. It's even more so and self-destructive if it is a civil war with foreign support and manipulation. 

It was always disheartening and stupid for a people who speak the same language and share the same blood or culture killed one another not with reluctance, but with ferocity. 

War was no stranger to us Vietnamese. It has been with us for thousands of years as we have tried to fend off the rapacious and cruel Chinese. War became real and personal for me around 1959 when the Vietcong started a campaign of assassinations of local officials and bombings to destabilize the South Vietnamese government. My idyllic childhood came to an abrupt end. I could no longer visit my maternal grandmother in the countryside during the summer as I used to. Newspapers started covering the war. Mobilization was initiated. Even before 1959, memories of the fires from the fighting in Saigon in 1955 between  Binh Xuyen faction and the South Vietnamese troops simmered not far from my consciousness which was already burdened by my mother's  (strangely, never by my father's ) narrations of the atrocities of the French Legionnaires and the fascist Japanese troops in the 1940s. My teenage and college years, like those of my contemporaries, were devoted to survival via doing well scholastically in order to obtain the draft deferment.

 I would say most surviving Vietnamese males my age have some kind of PTSD whether they were drafted or not. This reflects on their strange, odd, weird--- but barely confronted and recognized---behavior even though some of us now reside in peace and comfort in the United States and other developed nations. We tend to be unduly self-righteous, aggressive, vain, and fearful of unpleasant truths. We outwardly seemed educated with college degrees but didn't bother to read serious books and improve our minds, and thus fell victim to pathetic ignorance but we would walk around with a ridiculous swagger. We would not hesitate to pontificate on anything although we don't know what the heck we are talking about. We don't have a proper sense of self-respect and intellectual honesty. Some of us in the U.S. even stupidly became Republicans and were inordinately proud of that. So when I accused these contemporaries of mine of being no different from ignorant human animals, they jumped up and down like damned, berserk monkeys. Very few of them admitted their ignorance. They brazenly, blithely, and defiantly defended themselves, but the more they did so, the more glaring their ignorance showed. They found faults in others, but were blind of their own. They have lived in ignorance and stupidity, and are likely to get stuck in those conditions when they die. Incidentally, these lousy traits are not confined to my Vietnamese contemporaries. I found them in Americans, too, especially in those who take delight and refuge in Fox News and Rush Limbaugh. There is nothing more pathetic than for a human to be both stupid and ignorant and not to be aware of that. I should know. I was pathetically stupid and ignorant for a long time until I met Nietzsche and Freud. 

A true, real, authentic human must be honest with himself and must have the courage to confront himself day in and day out. In the end we cannot lie to ourselves, even if we try. And we cannot lie to others either. The truths always have a way to make themselves known via pain.

Thus spoke Wissai

August 11, 2014

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