"Savage"
"A couple of radio deejays who were engaged in banter suddenly turned solemn and could not find the words to express their shock and revulsion at what had just happened. What had happened was the massacre at Mumbai wreaked by, well, most of the witnesses referred to them as mere “kids” or “boys,” no one possibly older than 25, who went about their business without thought or compunction. At the time the deejays talked about it, the first wave of news was just streaming in, with all its images of carnage and, it seemed at the time, a city in flames.
"True enough, words fail to describe the horror of the event. And even more the kinds of emotions it brings out in us. It was all the two deejays could do to take in the enormity of it. “How can anyone do this?” one of them asked. “It’s just totally mad,” the other replied. And they went on to talk about the utter perversity that informs acts of terrorism. And as acts of terrorism goes, they said, this one ranks high up there.
"You can understand the sentiments. Anyone who saw the news that day, particularly those who have Indian friends or kin in India, would have been speechless at the savageness of it. Some things are simply alien to human conduct, and despite India’s often bloody history and the savage rituals of its arcane cults, a monstrous thing like this happening to it in this day and age boggles the mind. Particularly when India, like China, is well on its way to becoming an economic power to go with its being an ancient civilization.
"Truly you have to wonder how people can be so lacking in human empathy that they can gun down men and women while they go about their daily lives, laughing, loving, wondering what meal they would prepare for their families when they get home. Many of those who died were in the platform of a station waiting for their trains to arrive.
"Horror amid normality, extraordinary mayhem amid ordinary life, the sudden visitation of death amid the fullness of life—all these have been known to happen. Disasters do that. A train wreck, a violent earthquake, or a vicious hurricane, does that. But for human beings to do that, willfully, deliberately, methodically—that is the truly horrific thing about it, the lack of passion or emotion with which the killers killed, like the Nazis gassing the Jews in the gas chambers wondering how many lamp shades they could make with their hides—you stand in absolute disbelief in the face of it.
"Terrorists do the terrifying things to try to send a message to their presumed oppressors. Which is that, “Anything you can do, we can do worse. Any act of atrocity you can commit, we can make more atrocious.” But at the very least, the problem with that logic is that it doesn’t sell with the victims, who are the innocent. It not only doesn’t sell with the kin of the dead, who can only call on heaven to rain upon you the worst evils to be found in hell, it doesn’t sell with the public who cannot possibly find anything in common with you to bind them to, or make them sympathize with, your cause. Acts of terrorism do not weaken the enemy, they strengthen them.
"At the very most, it hides the oppression and atrocity of the enemy by making your own oppressiveness and atrociousness the only thing the world can see. Some acts are just too savage, too unspeakable, for words. The Abu Sayyaf beheads several soldiers, and the world forgets the atrocities of the government in Muslim Mindanao, or indeed the atrocity that is government’s treatment of Muslim Mindanao. And why not? The sight of the headless and mutilated bodies of human beings is a blinding spotlight that turns everything around it dark.
Which is deeply tragic because the oppression and the atrocity of those that stoke the fires of terrorism are very often real enough. Terrorism strengthens its enemy not just physically but morally, by blotting out that enemy’s oppression and atrocity, rendering its enemy free to commit oppression and atrocity anew, this time in the name of fighting the very thing it spawned. An atrocity that is visible will always command the world’s attention while an atrocity that is invisible will always be overlooked. A carnage wreaked barbarically will always horrify while mass murder wrought civilized-ly will always mollify.
"It’s human nature, but a sad commentary on it. Because as has been asked in poetry and song and the wailing of the bereaved, is there really any moral, philosophical, ethical, religious, conceptual, rational, goddamn difference between murder wreaked from the skies, as Graham Nash puts it in a song, and murder wreaked on the ground?
"Murder wreaked from the skies is in fact more mind-boggling in quantity, if not in quality. You do not see the “perps,” as law enforcement agencies call them in movies, nor do the “perps” see their victims (they are just bleeps on the radar screen), but the results of their actions are just as grim, just as blood-spattered, just as inhuman. Just look at the sight of the mothers and fathers sobbing out their grief from the scattered remains of their children after US warplanes bombed out an Iraqi hospital during the first days of the invasion.
"What makes the Mumbai massacre doubly terrifying is the method in the madness, the willful, deliberate and methodical way it was carried out. But as willfulness, deliberateness, and method go, can there anything be more so than the destruction of homes and the annihilation of civilians wrought from decisions made in war rooms, the “perps” armed only with consoles like those to be found in gaming arcades? Yet seeing the one, we are at a loss to find words to condemn it, while not seeing the other, we are at a loss only to find the words to grasp it.
"It is human nature, but truly a sad, sad commentary on it."
-Conrado de Quiros-
