We, supposedly civilized twenty-first century inhabitants of a modernized planet, are killing each other wantonly. Putin invaded Ukraine to buttress his personal and imperial Russian ambitions for greatness; approximately 300,000 soldiers and civilians on both sides are now dead, with equal numbers wounded. Hamas barbarously invaded Israel to remind the world and its Iranian backers that it was still relevant, and in order to shortcut Saudi Arabia’s recognition of Israel; at least 1400 Israelis and 10,000 Gazans are now dead, with thousands more wounded and more fatalities to come.
Hamas was clear: “We succeeded in putting the Palestinian issue back on the table, and now no one in the region is experiencing calm.” Furthermore, “We had to tell people that the Palestinian cause would not die.”
Putin’s claims are equally ignoble and misplaced. But naked ambition and outright greed go hand in hand (or bullet to bullet).
Both misguided expressions of outright terror, and Israel’s devastating bombing of Gaza and its attempt to extirpate Hamas in and around the tunnels and apartment blocks of Gaza City, are explicable in terms of Hamas’ treachery and Israel’s precarious and threatened status on the edge of the Middle East, with consuming dangers all around. But massive losses of humanity are not – neither from treacherous Russian assaults in Ukraine nor from determined Israeli responses to Hamas’ terror in Gaza.
Hamas needs at a minimum to release all of the hostages. At that point, a better international case can be made for attempting to save the lives of non-Hamas Gazans, for temporarily moving numbers of civilians into Egypt or even into the new cities of Saudi Arabia, and for halting the bombing of the Gaza Strip south of Gaza City (where Israel has put down a red line).
Israel’s Dresden-like destruction of northern Gaza will draw more and more international condemnation (on top of the many African, Middle Eastern, and Latin American polities that have already withdrawn their ambassadors and voted for Palestine in the United Nations).
Only a handful of those critics, however, have voted to halt Russia’s attacks on Ukraine. Even though the cases are starkly non-congruent, Putin’s aggression profits from global attention to the Gaza war, from sympathy in the Global South for the Palestinian cause, from latent antisemitism, and from the destructive nature of the Israeli strikes. Few comment that Putin’s unprovoked twenty-month long bombardments of Ukraine have caused more damage and cost much greater losses of life than the pummeling of Gaza -- at least so far.
When “the end of history” was optimistically announced in 1990 with the collapse of the Soviet Union, the world breathed more easily. The Cold War was over. Democracy could flourish globally and, despite the many “small” wars throughout Africa and Asia and autocratic regimes in China, Central Asia, and Africa, the general assumption was that the prevalence of killing fields would gradually subside.
Clearly, as the battles for freedom in Ukraine (and Belarus and Moldova) suggest, and as Israel still needing to defend its existence and Palestinians still needing to seek statehood and freedom from Israeli hegemonic land grabs and pervasive squashing of individual autonomy suggest, so our troubled planet has regressed in terms of the four freedoms and fundamental protections of human safety. Just as the availability of assault weapons of mass destruction allow schools to be shot up and taverns to be invaded across the United States, so the killing fields are spreading across the globe, even beyond the Middle East and Eastern Europe.
The Sudan
More than six months ago, two military leaders with blood on their hands from long ago genocidal killings in Darfur, western Sudan, ended their joint rule of Sudan (achieved as a result of two military coups) and went to war against each other. More than 10,000 Sudanese have died in the resulting blood-spilling between General Abdel Fattah al-Burhan’s regular army and usurper General Mohamed Hamdan Dagalo (Hemeti)’s Rapid Support Forces (RSF), a kind of paramilitary legion.
At first, the deadly contest between the army and the RSF was confined to Sudan’s capital city of Khartoum, its cross-Nile River sister city of Omdurman, and other cities along the Nile as it flows north to Egypt. But in recent months the killing fields have extended into Darfur, where both generals perpetrated genocide in 2003-2005. Hemeti’s troops are again engaging in ethnic cleansing and genocide against the non-Arab Masalit Africans of that western province. Thousands are being killed; the large cities of el-Geneina and Nyala have been taken by the RSF and at least 400,000 Masalit and other peoples have fled across the border into Chad. Soon all of Darfur will be run by the RSF.
The point of this resumed killing of civilians in Sudan is largely to achieve ascendancy, the RSF over the army, and vice versa, and for Hemeti to oust Burhan, and vice versa, so that the victor can gain control over Sudan’s gold, ivory, and petroleum riches. Hemeti has ties to Russia’s Wagner mercenary group, and to Putin. He also gains support from the United Arab Emirates. Burhan is backed by Egypt and by Saudi Arabia.
Both the African Union and several Arab nations have failed to broker a ceasefire in Sudan, most recently at a meeting this week in Saudi Arabia. Senseless, and driven entirely by personal lust and ambition in a Putinesque manner, the struggle in Sudan has immiserated that country, with little result beyond human losses and infrastructural destruction.
The Congo
One more (among many) lapse into purposeless mass killings is occurring in the eastern region of the so-called Democratic Republic of the Congo. A weak central government, a corrupted national army, and an ineffective UN peace enforcement mission (which the Congo wants withdrawn) seem unable to contain the insurgent forces of up to 200 rebel soldieries that fight each other and assault innocent Congolese villagers in order to extort cash from them and from petty shopkeepers and to control proceeds from the widespread artisanal mining of gold, coltan, and cobalt.
The largest of the Congolese insurgent armies are the M23 and the Allied Democratic Forces. The first is led by local Tutsi and backed by President Paul Kagame of Tutsi-dominated nearby Rwanda. Lots of gold and coltan is now exported from a Rwanda; none was before.
The ADF is allied with the Islamic State and attempts from time to time to invade Uganda as well as to keep an Islamist footing within the eastern Congo. Recently, it was responsible for horrific killings by machetes in sections of North Kivu state near Uganda.
Overall, the human fatality rate has always been lower in the Congo than in Ukraine or Israel, but the killings there are equally without purpose. And those who are dying from collateral damage are as innocent and as haplessly targeted as in Ukraine or Israel. About 3 million Congolese have been displaced from their homes; total fatalities this year alone are in the many thousands.
The End of History
How to return to the much more hopeful days of 1990 is the puzzle of our current crisis. Each conflict has its own rationale and its own likely path to a negotiated settlement. But how, actually, to arrange a meeting of antagonistic minds (many full of revenge) and to end massive losses of life is the imperative of our age. With no easy shortcuts to success, we must somehow cease the endless slaughters of the twenty-first century. They serve no purpose except to emphasize our persistent resort to inhumane methods of settling scores. There are better ways. We must, in the search for a more productive conduct of world affairs, re-find those rocky paths that can lead to sustainable peace and conflict avoidance.
The Climate
We must find those paths amid the inexorable surge of warming that is engulfing our planet and likely to alter our lives forever. We are killing the planet (as its inhabitants kill themselves) by refusing to cease putting carbon dioxide into the atmosphere. And by killing the planet we kill ourselves. China is constructing new coal-fired power plants. Republicans oppose the Biden administration’s plans to restrict fossil fuel consumption and electrify federal transportation fleets. Even the gradual retirement of benzene-producing gas stoves has been transformed by Republicans into a politicized purgatory. As a civilization, we are moving far too slowly to save ourselves and our heirs from a calamitous collapse.
To save the planet and to save lives in today’s conflicts, the bipolar United States must lead the way. We must find effective paths to peace everywhere, and do far more than at present to try somehow to cool the planet. Otherwise history will end, and so will we.
Well stated. Scary, yes. Soltions are possible. Leadership is required within the passive, frightened millenials to mobilize them to action. It appears that their fear, and lack of understanding (and lack of any education in government and world politics) keeps them focused on marijuana legalization and trying to afford rent and food. I absolutely blame the extremist faction of the republican party in their 40 year war in their attempt to create an authoritarian government, destroying our Constitutional federal republic. If only the private-schooled evangelical/extremists get involved in politics, I will be truly frightened.