Everyone has at least once seen or heard a vampire story. There are even avid lovers of such narratives. Some (including me) treat them dismissively claiming that one usually grows out of them. Whatever our opinion of vampires is, there is one pinch of old folk wisdom in them. I mean when a vampire bites you, you are irrevocably turned vampire too. I strongly believe that this was derived from the observation of the people who experienced traumatic hurts. The hurt humans begin acting like beasts which seems part of our nature. One must be a real heroic true Christian so as not to succumb to the natural inclination to retaliate. Seeking for revenge seems normal although the norms of civilization may reduce its impetus and, through rationalization, be eliminated by other means of compensation. Actually, what can be observed in Europe nowadays is a kind of example thereof. There is hardly anything further from the truth than the statement that now the Europeans have forgotten all their mutual wrongs and love each other. What is really happening is that we live in such a system of interdependencies that our negative emotions are under a strong control. Besides, many of us do believe we should forget each other all the harms and try and live not only in peace but in an authentic friendship and mutual respect. Wishful thinking, one may say, but the intentions are good and praiseworthy.
Therefore, whenever we hear of some violent military actions in our old tired Europe, we feel outraged and try to finish the conflict as soon as possible and do our best to solve the problem. Well, in fact Europe would have done little in Bosnia or Kosovo without the USA , because one must have guts to take decisive actions, but let’s assume that it was our European love for peace that summoned the US army and intervene in the former Yugoslavia. It is an absolutely separate issue whether this intervention did any good to the inhabitants of Bosnia and Kosovo. In my opinion, no problem was solved. On the contrary, both these parts of the former Yugoslavia are just bombs with delayed ignition. Moreover, Kosovo makes a precedent promptly used by the Russians to partition Georgia, which is happening before our eyes.
Vampire stories may be proposed as a perfect metaphor of the mechanism that transforms victims into aggressors themselves. The metaphor seems very tempting in the face of what we can see in Gaza nowadays. If we treat Hitler as an evil spirit that once possessed the souls of the whole nation (well, there were definitely exceptions but the Germans were and, to some extent still are, really easy to get possessed by someone who is in power), and the Jewish as his victims, one may draw a conclusion that now the latter, who after the Holocaust created their own state, act like those vampire infected by hatred. The problem is that they do not address their natural aggression to the Germans, who in the meantime appear to have become a peace-loving jovial intellectuals, but to the people on whose territories they settled, the Arabic-speaking Palestinians. In turn, the Palestinians, who used to be just a noisy street market merchants and Bedouins traversing their local deserts from one oasis to another, now have been changed into a bloodthirsty fanatics dreaming of an ultimate elimination. And what is now going on is nothing but an incessant bloodshed between new generations of vampires.
Nice metaphor, isn’t it? Actually, in this case it is worthless. If we can employ vampire stories comparing certain human behaviors, it is possible on the level of individuals only, or on the level of groups acting under strong emotions. Looking at TV spots from Palestinian streets and seeing the people dancing and laughing on September 11, 2001, one may think “they do not know what they are doing, they are like stupid children”. Neither do I justify their behavior nor support their stupid acts of desperation involving suicide attacks and missiles launched towards the territory of the much stronger enemy. On the contrary, their stupid acts demonstrate clearly that it is strong and blind emotions that are behind such decisions.
Something quite the opposite should be expected from the Israelis or the group of Ashkenazi Jews (and their descendants) who created the state of Israel and who have been in power ever since. The Israeli leading politicians are cold-hearted calculating intelligent guys who do not seem to succumb to their emotions. It is absolutely obvious that their responsibility is to protect their own citizens from enemy attacks. It is also clear that there is a time when they must say “enough is enough” and take some decisive steps. However, the methods they employ in solving the problem are always incommensurable with the needs. Is it necessary to bomb the whole city with its civilians to catch a group of armed terrorists? Was near carpet-bombing of the vast tracks of Lebanon indispensable to eliminate Hezbollah, who were just troublesome guests in Lebanon?
I don’t know whether the Israeli government employ a professional psychologist, but if so, this person can’t have been the best student. All those exaggerated military attacks lead straight to the opposite psychological effect than expected. Should the Israeli believe that common people, seeing what their support of terrorists results in, will cease to back the militant fanatics, they are either naive or do not remember the history of their ancestors. The uprising in the Warsaw ghetto in 1943 was an act of determination in spite of the fact that the military preponderance of the Germans was indisputable.
The actions on the part of Israel just consolidate Palestinian and, in a broaden sense, Arab solidarity. If they were to play a role of a deterrent, the Israeli government brains should at least understand that this idea has failed. On the other hand, it also common knowledge that Israel is a special country whose citizens live in the state of permanent fear. The threat of being physically annihilated is strong enough to develop the ideology which can be briefly expressed as “either we kill them or they’ll kill us.” It is obvious that this slogan is not conducive to compromise. If we add the fact that the other side of the conflict cherishes exactly the same political philosophy, we have a vicious circle from which neither of the parties is able to free themselves. However, it is the more powerful and more sensitive one from whom we expect a responsible attempt at solving the problem. We, the free civilized world of peace-loving people, expect the Israeli just to captivate the terrorists, demolish illegal Jewish settlements on the Palestinian territories and to start a real dialog with the rest of the Palestinian people as well as with the other Arab countries.
Why does it never happen? Maybe the Israeli hawks need the enemy to keep control over their own country. Prime Minister Moshe Sharett was a person who could have maintained sincere negotiations with the Palestinians but Ben Gurion’s men would never let it happen. Yitzhak Rabin paid with his life for his turn towards more peaceful measures. Neither warring party seems play fair. What we get on TV news is just demonstrations of hypocrisy. I strongly believe there are a great number of people among both the Israelis and the Palestinians who look forward to a long-lasting period of peace and who are even ready to forgive and forget the wrongs experienced from the enemy. On the other hand, it is not these people who are leaders of their nations. It is impossible to estimate their number. There are undoubtedly Palestinians who will always want to eliminate the state of Israel from the map as well as Israelis who will never give up their desire for the reestablishment of the Temple (in the place of the present Al Aqsa Mosque). Probably they will never disappear but it is those who are more compromise-oriented, those who really want to stop the bloodshed and genocide who should rule the region. So far nothing has indicated even a sign of this direction.
Let’s return to the present day situation. Imagine a criminal hiding in your house. You and your family are dead scared but the guy with a gun is in your place and you can do nothing about it. Then imagine a division of police surrounding your house and pointing their heavy guns and bazookas thereat. You are scared even more but simultaneously count on the police’s help. The sheriff, however, does not give a damn for you and your family but simply starts the fire which totally destroys your house and kills your children. There is even no guarantee that the criminal was slain too. He could have fled as well. Can you imagine anything like this in a civilized country? (Well, maybe in some regions of the USA or Russia, OK, the guys in these countries have their own quite peculiar methods). Or imagine that the Italian government in Rome decides to send the army to Palermo and Naples to eliminate, respectively, the mafia and the camorra from these cities. The army, instead of looking for the criminals “solves” the problem more “economically” and drops bombs on them. They would get rid of the criminals as well as regular citizens. Nobody can even think of such an absurd. Ethnic cleansings in Serbia or Kosovo were eventually stopped by the international forces. The action was taken mainly against the Serbs because examining every particular case would have been too time-consuming. Russia and China are too strong to be rebuked by anybody. Nobody cares for Sudan. Neither did for Rwanda. They are beyond the sphere of the world powers’ interests. The Israeli have the strongest bully in the school behind their backs, the US. Vae victis or Woe to the conquered said Brennus the Gaul to the Romans who complained about too high ransom imposed upon them by the barbarian. Should you be a small people not clever enough to secure a superpower’s protection for yourselves, you’d better give up and wait for your inevitable sad end. If you are Tibetan, Chechen, Kurdish or Palestinian, don’t expect any mercy. If you are passive (like the Tibetans) or put up resistance (like the others), nothing will help you anyway since the most powerful neighbor decided to humiliate or get rid of you. One may say there is nothing new in what is happening at the moment. History is full of such cases. The ancient Spartans, for instance, organized special expeditions against their helots, state slaves who were descendants of the former inhabitants of the country. The expeditions were a kind of training for young warriors. Nobody cared whether the helots rebelled or not. When they did it was all the better.
We must agree with this pessimistic statement but, on the other hand, the history of mankind shows that at all its stages people have sought for peace, and along with the development of civilization, they endowed this process with ideological sanction. No civilized politician (even American, Chinese or Russian) would openly declare his/her admiration for war and violence. We still tend to believe in peace and life treated as one of the inalienable human rights.
Therefore, when the American administration announces their full support for mass slaughter of hundreds of unarmed civilians, I don’t really know what to think of this. Should I understand that the European civilization has become so different from the American values that any attempt at communication seems impossible? Or maybe some barbarians managed to impose their standards upon us all and we are becoming barbarians too? Or else some vampires have already bitten us and we are just turning into monsters?
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