She gave us another example from a totally different arena, perpetrated by different people for different reasons. "But the insanity behind it was the same," she added.

      She had witnessed a revenge attack against the people of an occupied town who had fought back against the occupation of their country. "In this particular attack," she said, "of a kind that had become almost routine by then, 26 people were killed, 245 wounded, 12 houses were demolished, a school, a factory, and some infrastructure facilities. As the wounded were rushed to the hospital, the occupying forces didn't even allow the wounded to get near the hospital. When some people rebelled and forced their way in, in order to have their wounds treated, the occupiers shut off the hospital's water supply and electrical power. A number of emergency surgeries had to be performed on the street. Obviously, only a few victims survived."

      Ushi told us that this particular atrocity was perpetrated in a supposedly civilized part of the world, and was carried out at the hands of a supposedly civilized people, a people with a deeply religious background in their culture. She suggested that a people's humanity and civilization becomes suspended when insanity rules.

      Ushi suggested to the assembly, that to debate acts of insanity with an expectation to derive conclusions from such debates, is an act of insanity itself. "What I saw and experienced," she said, "had nothing to do with anything that is human. There was no logic behind it, nor was it the result of a natural reaction. It wasn't even fear, or hate, or required for self-defense. The madness that had isolated the people from each other had become elevated to the level of a war against their own humanity, within a war. War had become an orgy of murder for its own sake. We need to explore what we have to do to become human beings again.

      "This goal is the only thing that makes any sense to me," she added after a pause. "It will forever be illogical to me to discuss illogical phenomena. It is more fruitful to explore the dimensions of truth, the dimension of what defines us as human beings. By this process of self-discovery to advance our self-development, we may be able to develop a platform of sanity that has the potential to prevent more insanity from breaking out in the world, and to counteract that which already rules."



      Ushi sat down in a thunder of applause. Our tour guide went over to her, shook her hand, and then kissed her.

      The episode unmistakably settled the controversial issue over guidelines. Our tour guide had won. Nevertheless, our tour guide did accept another reference to the Afghan War as a comment on what Ushi had said. The speaker had promised her to make his remarks immediately relevant to that.



      The speaker was German, a mathematics professor from the University of Heidelberg. He said that he found it hard to believe that the Afghan refugees could be so naive as not to recognize the danger of their situation. He said that they had lived for years in the shadow of constant danger that this war had brought. He said, he became resentful of the speaker for presenting what he felt was an impossible story filled with politically motivated lies.

      Then he told us that something happened in his thinking that changed all that. He said that the idea dawned that much of humanity behaves as naively ignorant about the dangers to its existence as did those people in the high valley. He told us that with this realization in mind, the refugee's story suddenly became believable. He said that he saw the same ignorance reflected throughout the world. The tragic refugee story had for him become an echo of a face of humanity that he said he was more ashamed of suddenly than the senseless, terrible inhumanity that Ushi had witnessed.

Next Page

|| - page index - || - chapter index - || - Exit - ||

Stories about War from novels by Rolf A. F. Witzsche