Direct Translation via Google Translate. Edited.
by Petr Akopov
[REGNUM] “They are just animals and do not deserve humane treatment” - this is what Israeli leaders and many Israelis now say about Hamas, whose fighters, during the attack on Israel, took hostages, killed civilians and mocked the bodies of the dead.
In response, the Palestinians recall decades of Israeli occupation, torture in prisons, the destruction of the families of those whom Israel considers “terrorists” - in general, both sides are actively engaged in dehumanizing the enemy. This is not news, it was the same in the recent Armenian-Azerbaijani conflict over Nagorno-Karabakh, and, alas, it is the same in our civil war in Ukraine, which is going on in the form of a war between two states.
The sublimation of mutual hatred is the law of war, but many are quite sincerely perplexed: is it really impossible to do without extremes, without unnecessary cruelty, without atrocities? Or even this: what should civilized people do when faced with atrocities? They are against such cruelty, but how can they respond to savages who do not observe the “laws of war”? An eye for an eye, an atrocity for an atrocity?
As a rule, discussions immediately follow about civilization and barbarism, about highly moral and developed societies and savages prone to cruelty. This is what they say in Israel not even about Hamas, but about the Palestinian Arabs as a whole, “a nation of terrorists,” and they have no doubt about their right to respond in the form of a total shutdown of the Gaza Strip and massive bombings that will lead to the death of thousands of civilians.
So do civilized people have the right to such actions?
If you're expecting a "no" answer, you're wrong. The problem is different. It is that there is no opposition between civilization and barbarism in the form in which it is presented. Cruelty, atrocities, and violence are not inherent only in “simple” societies, not to mention the fact that the very criteria for dividing into highly developed, civilized, progressive and backward, primitive and reactionary are more than conditional.
From the point of view of the average modern Western person (conditional, of course), the atheistic atomized consumer European society is civilized and progressive, and from the point of view of a believing Arab Muslim, it is not just at the lowest stage of development, but on the path to its own destruction.
The cruelty of some Sharia laws - such as stoning or cutting off a hand - causes horror among Europeans, but they are practically no longer used in the modern Islamic world. But euthanasia or sex reassignment operations, increasingly practiced in the West, cause shock among Muslims or Orthodox Christians as completely contrary to their idea of good and evil.
There are different civilizations in the world, moreover, each of them has its own age, that is, now both very old and very young civilizations live in the world at the same time. Does this mean that the old are necessarily more humane, and the young are prone to violence and cruelty? Of course not. And how can one accurately measure the age of a civilization? Is Arab younger than European?
But what about the Middle Ages, when it was the highly developed Islamic civilization that was not only an order of magnitude superior to Western European civilization, but actually preserved the ancient philosophical and scientific heritage for future “developed Europeans”? Or did not the highly developed German civilization, the core of the European one, demonstrate in the middle of the 20th century the heights of organized not even cruelty, but inhumanity? Like her Anglo-Saxon cousin throughout the 17th–20th centuries in relation to various “subhumans”:
Yes, cruelty was also characteristic of these peoples, both in relation to each other and in relation to Europeans. But only the European white man not only placed himself at the highest level of development, but also denied other races and civilizations even the right to be called people. Is this not the case now? Yes, but it is precisely the direction of development of Western civilization that will more than likely lead it to a new division of people: into a higher, genetically modified type and ordinary, ordinary people. And we can only guess in what form the atrocity of the former will manifest itself in relation to the latter: after all, for them they will be at the same level as domestic animals are now for humans. Will they feed and care for you? Or sterilize?
Is it possible to wean humanity away from cruelty? No, because human nature itself is sinful, and no society will be free from violence in one form or another (and often the most terrible thing is not the most open and brutal). Of course, it is possible to limit the brutal nature in a person as much as possible if everyone strives for the salvation of the soul and for living according to the commandments. But there are no guarantees here either - even very religious societies can be phenomenally cruel to strangers, to those whom they do not consider human. And this is not about today's Jews or Palestinians, but about all of us.
You can, of course, try to forcibly wean people away from violence - drive everyone into barracks (it is not necessary to build them on the ground, virtual ones will do even better) and instill in them the spirit of peace and love for all living things. This, however, will not end well, because the salvation of the soul is always the result of individual choice and will, and only the person himself can fight the demons in his soul. God created us free, including to fight our cruelty.
But, renouncing the devil-beast, defeating him in our spiritual warfare, we should not think that others are now worse than us, we should not demonize others (and alien civilizations), we should not dehumanize them. Because this is the sure path to destruction - both of one’s own soul and of one’s own civilization.
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