Cruelty Has the Ball, or World War Three

OPED

Would it be fair to say that the world has become a more violent place to live than it was before? Probably not, because the world may not be described as more violent now than it was during World wars One and Two, but more weirdly violent- yes, it definitely seems to be so today.

Weirdly violent! Secretly violent! Surreptitiously violent! These epithets would describe the violence in the modern world to the level of accuracy of mathematical precision. Weird it is because the sides of violence are weird. One of the warring sides is the peacefully working unsuspecting population of the world, hereinafter referred to as Population, and the other side is made up of angry-for-various-right-and-wrong-reasons part of the world’s population, which uses physical terror against the Population to perpetuate their mostly incomprehensible cause. Let us, for the sake of simplicity, here call them Terrorists.

Confrontation between the Population and the Terrorists could easily qualify as war, and I am tending to call it World War Three. In conventional wars though, the adversaries know each other, the sides are identifiable, and they are armed to the affordable capacity and power. The whole game – as strange as it might sound – looks fairly honest: the strongest and the smartest to emerge a winner. In the new World War Three, things are slightly different: only one side is armed, the Terrorists; the other side, the Population, is absolutely defenseless and vulnerable, not even having a pen-knife in the pocket to peel an occasional apple or peach. The Terrorists are usually invisible, and the Population is displayed in the field, clear to all. The Terrorists plan their attacks well in advance and the Population is always caught napping. The Terrorists are always angry and fuming, thus morally ready to commit violence, but the Population usually feels happy and balanced, each of us minding our own business and never suspecting the possibility of violence against us.

In this process of violence perpetrated by the Terrorists and taken as another Wrath of God by the Population, even regular human values vary in the two different cases of human existence. For instance, the rules of World War Three would not even include words like brave, intelligent, courageous, strong and fair. The newly recognized values are cunning, ambush, anger, grudge, kill-the-innocent, get-them-now, grab-the-moment, mercy-does-not-pay, cruelty-has-the-ball, etc.

The Population is scared and losing courage, and even taste for life, as a consequence of those unfathomably wicked attacks of the Terrorists, and the Terrorists are becoming stronger, braver and readier with every new assault, proudly and openly claiming that the new massacre was their work.

One of the most stunning differences between the Population and the Terrorists is that the Population counts billions of human heads, and the Terrorists are only hundreds of thousands in number, creating a clear impression that numbers do not count. It is faith that has meaning and does wonders.

As to faith, it is universally and tactfully recognized that religious difference is not an argument in World War Three. Talking straight and loud about religious differences between the Population and the Terrorists is a taboo, and breaching that taboo might mean a global catastrophe. In the meantime, we hear some faint voices that the continuous violence, committed by the Terrorists and so cruelly suffered by the Population almost every day of the week, could be ascribed to a clash of civilizations. Some famous authors and their wise books would dare talk about this most difficult issue of contemporary life on Earth. Some of these books even state that violence in the given form will never stop unless the global problems are taken care of globally.

As we philosophize and theorize around the issue, somewhere in the world there could be a crowd of Population right now which might in a twinkle of an eye become victim of another attack of Terrorists- Terrorists contemplating at this very moment their revenge against those who are only the innocent instruments with which to send a signal to those who are thought to be the real brewers of injustices in the world.

Nugzar B. Ruhadze