{"id":284126,"date":"2025-01-06T12:00:48","date_gmt":"2025-01-06T12:00:48","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/?p=284126"},"modified":"2025-01-02T08:27:20","modified_gmt":"2025-01-02T08:27:20","slug":"finding-a-cure-for-humanitys-cancer","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/2025\/01\/finding-a-cure-for-humanitys-cancer\/","title":{"rendered":"Finding a Cure for Humanity\u2019s Cancer"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"\"<\/a>1 Jan 2025 <\/em>– I welcome in the new year with a sense of abstract helplessness, as the headlines continue to bring us dead children, bombed hospitals, torture, rape and, of course, ever more \u201cself-defense\u201d (sometimes known as genocide).<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

From my safe, secure office space I absorb the daily news \u2013 from Gaza, from all across the planet \u2013 with a whiplash of guilt and naivete. What the hell do I know what it feels like to have my house, or my tent, bombed, to see my children die, to have no access to water, let alone healthcare? Is it enough to comfortably empathize with the collateral damage of this world at war?<\/p>\n

No, no, no, it\u2019s not.<\/p>\n

But I empathize nonetheless, and shake to my depths with an incredulity that never goes away: \u201cAs if the relentless bombing and the dire humanitarian situation in Gaza were not enough, the one sanctuary where Palestinians should have felt safe in fact became a death trap.\u201d<\/p>\n

The words are those of Volker T\u00fcrk, the UN High Commissioner for Human Rights, quoted in a recent UN report about Israel\u2019s ongoing devastation of Palestinian hospitals and its virtually total destruction of the occupied territory\u2019s healthcare system, including the arrest \u2013 the abduction \u2013 of hundreds of doctors and other medical professionals, who often wind up being tortured and sometimes murdered.<\/p>\n

The UN report was released \u201cjust days after the last functioning major healthcare facility in northern Gaza, Kama Adwan Hospital, was taken out of service after a raid by Israeli military forces, leaving the population of North Gaza with almost no access to adequate health care,\u201d according to UN News<\/a>.<\/p>\n

\u201cStaff and patients were forced to flee or were taken into custody, with many reports of torture and ill-treatment. The director of the hospital was taken into custody and his fate and whereabouts are unknown.<\/p>\n

\u201cDuring the period covered by the report, there were at least 136 strikes on at least 27 hospitals and 12 other medical facilities, claiming significant casualties among doctors, nurses, medics and other civilians, and causing significant damage, if not complete destruction of civilian infrastructure.\u201d<\/p>\n

It\u2019s virtually impossible to absorb news like this without first reducing it to an abstraction. This is something that\u2019s happening \u201cover there\u201d somewhere, to people I don\u2019t know. And soon enough the world itself \u2013 the world in which we all live \u2013 is mostly an abstraction . . . an entity separated by borders. I can read about terrible things going on in distant places, but my sense of actual connection to them is missing.<\/p>\n

The UN News story proceeded to point out: \u201cThe protection of hospitals during warfare is paramount and must be respected by all sides, at all times.\u201d<\/p>\n

And here\u2019s where my internal alarm went off. I have no disagreement with the point of the above sentence, but there\u2019s something missing. Something crucial. Its basic point is this: When you\u2019re waging war, hey, you still have to obey certain rules, e.g., don\u2019t bomb hospitals without a really, really good reason. If you do, you\u2019ve done something bad. You\u2019ve committed a war crime.<\/p>\n

It\u2019s not simply that acts of war are wrapped snugly in legalese, but that war itself \u2013 in the context that births the term \u201cwar crime\u201d \u2013 is not questioned or morally challenged. War simply exists<\/em>. It\u2019s a transcultural moral certainty. It\u2019s part and parcel of civilization itself. Various social entities across the planet are bound to disagree and\/or get annoyed with one another from time to time, and when they do \u2013 what choice do they have? \u2013 they go to war. This is just the way things are. It\u2019s OK to kill \u2013 you just have to do so within certain rules. And mostly those rules apply to the loser, not the winner. Certainly this is true in retrospect.<\/p>\n

And suddenly the sense of abstraction I was feeling begins to shatter. The concept of war instantly turns life itself into an abstraction. No matter that religions (see Genesis 1:27) all seem to acknowledge the preciousness of human life . . . of life itself. Most religions are also the first to send their troops \u2013 or, nowadays, their tanks and bombers \u2013 into battle.<\/p>\n

A year ago I wrote<\/a>: \u201cWe \u2014 by which I mean most of humanity \u2014 are still playing with the so-called \u2018just war theory,\u2019 the intellectual justification for war dating back to St. Augustine and the early centuries of the Common Era.<\/p>\n

\u201cYou know, violence is morally neutral \u2014 and thus, when the cause is just and sacred, go for it! Kill the non-believers. . . . The neutrality of violence can be used by anyone in a position of power.\u201d<\/p>\n

And, oh yeah, before you open fire, before you start killing, you have to take a spiritual step directly into the process: You have to define, and then dehumanize, the enemy. Once that happens, let her rip! The only thing stopping you now are the so-called rules of war, which allegedly protect innocent civilians and keep the whole thing reasonable. What a joke. Violence is poisonously addictive and easily expands \u2013 anywhere and everywhere.<\/p>\n

War, as I have noted, is humanity\u2019s cancer. Its seeming inevitability is ensconced in the global military budget. We have a few thousand nukes ready to go (\u201cif necessary\u201d) and thus the power to destroy all life on Planet Earth, a.k.a., ourselves. Isn\u2019t it time to start rethinking this potential Armageddon?<\/p>\n

We are capable of creating peace<\/a>! Most of us want it, at least for ourselves, our loved ones, our community and country. We just don\u2019t know what it is \u2013 and no, it\u2019s not some clich\u00e9 of perfect harmony. But it begins with the only rule of war that is necessary: It must never be waged again.<\/p>\n

______________________________________<\/em><\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a> Robert C. Koehler is an award-winning, Chicago-based peace journalist and nationally syndicated writer. His book, <\/em>Courage Grows Strong at the Wound (Xenos Press) is still available. Contact him at <\/em>koehlercw@gmail.com<\/em><\/a><\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

Go to Original \u2013 commonwonders.com<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

1 Jan 2025 – I welcome in the new year with a sense of abstract helplessness, as the headlines continue to bring us dead children, bombed hospitals, torture, rape and, of course, ever more \u201cself-defense\u201d (sometimes known as genocide).<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":4,"featured_media":77939,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[41],"tags":[1854,87,865,487,307,88,427,124,126,965],"class_list":["post-284126","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-tms-peace-journalism","tag-crimes-against-humanity","tag-gaza","tag-genocide","tag-human-rights","tag-humanity","tag-israel","tag-palestine","tag-united-nations","tag-violence","tag-war-crimes"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/284126","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/4"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=284126"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/284126\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":284127,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/284126\/revisions\/284127"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/77939"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=284126"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=284126"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=284126"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}