I became an adult in a war. The one from Bosnia. Starting in 1993, I spent several years in refugee camps in the former Yugoslavia and there I became, to a large extent, who I really am. My friends died during those years. Some have lost a family member. Most of them are homeless. I experienced the desperation of someone who had lost everything and the personal pain every time they bombed a neighborhood, destroyed a symbolic building or entered a city with sword and fire. .
Later I returned to other times in conflict areas, but that first and long experience marked my life and my perspective on the suffering of wars.
That is why I know that only those who have not seen them up close distinguish the dead. Social networks are more prone to hatred and dehumanization because they allow you to express your opinion while you see the world from the distance of your bed. Without looking people in the eyes, without smelling life or being polluted by anything. To those who smell gunpowder and fill their hands with dust, all the dead will be equally hurt.
Social networks are more prone to hatred and dehumanization because they allow you to express your opinion without looking people in the eye.
From afar, wars are a matter of geopolitics. Of phobias and philias. But when your ears ring from a nearby explosion everything disappears and the war is endless terror.
Of course, it is still possible to distinguish victims from aggressors. In addition, in any conflict one inevitably has a mental side for one side or the other where one believes that one has found reasons. But the dead do not understand that.
Many people, when reading books or watching movies and documentaries about the Holocaust, think that something like the discrimination and subsequent extermination of the Jews in Nazi Germany cannot be repeated today. Only those who have not experienced wars like Bosnia, Rwanda, Iraq, Afghanistan can think that. The truth is that a spark is enough for any people to launch into ethnic cleansing or genocide. No country – even the most civilized – is safe from the virus of discrimination or the possibility of unleashed violence. And when we enter the spiral of war, each massacre is justified as a response to another previous massacre. Each side has a list of grievances to justify their massacres and atrocities. At that point, the only thing that was indisputable was the dead and the crippled. Broken mothers and lost children.
Only an inhuman wretch remains unafraid of the announcement or vision of a bombardment like those falling on Gaza these days. Because a Jewish child cries like a Palestinian.
Rejoicing in any of these deaths are psychopaths. But it doesn’t have to come to that and anyone can show their badness without having to get hurt. Indifference to human suffering is claimed by some to be the strongest identification of human filth.
The waste that, moved only by some civilian deaths, collaborates with massacres or torture, even in absence.
If you are afraid of innocent deaths in a terrorist attack anywhere in the world, but you are not equally afraid of shootings, bombings or torture carried out in retaliation, you are blinded by hatred or a rude person. If you also show sympathy for these crimes or argue about their necessity, you will be a necessary accomplice and your hands will be stained with the blood of the innocent.
As long as bombs continue to fall, everywhere, destroying children, the elderly and civilians, anyone who justifies it is a wretch who disgraces the very concept of humanity.
I became an adult in a war. The one from Bosnia. Starting in 1993, I spent several years in refugee camps in the former Yugoslavia and there I became, to a large extent, who I really am. My friends died during those years. Some have lost a family member. Most of them are homeless. I experienced up close the…
