The Indians love their children too

Talking about the enemy as human beings

In 1985, at Cold War’s climax, Sting’s debut album featured a song “Russians” which showed a human image from across the Iron Curtain: “…the Russians lover their children too.” Through its anti-war lyrics, he tried to strike a music chord in the noisy hysteria of war. He insinuated how nuclear warheads had no loyalty and even an American could not save “his boy” from “Oppenheimer’s deadly toy.”

The last lines of the song remain as powerful as ever and can become an anthem of peace in the present standoff between Pakistani and Indian governments. “We share the same biology/Regardless of ideology/What might save us, me, and you/Is if the Russians love their children too.”

In the wake of the present tensions surfacing between Pakistan and India, there exists a need to heighten the muffled sound of a silent majority that is against aggression of all kinds. Discipline of humanities with its firm foundations on the creative corpus of writers, poets, playwrights and novelists achieves it in a very significant manner. One remarkable work which accomplishes something similar to what Sting does is Mark Twain’s “War Song”, a short narrative that describes a town gripped by the frenzy of war. Children and elders equally exhibit patriotic passion and a group zealously prays for victory in town’s church. A saintly figure appears and addresses them as the messenger of God and articulates the other side of their prayer, the unsaid part. He tells them that their victory means that another group of human beings will be destroyed because their prayer is not a single prayer, it is two prayers combined: the uttered one and the discrete one.

He articulates the unsaid part of the prayer: “O Lord our God, help us to tear their soldiers to bloody shreds with our shells; help us to cover their smiling fields with the pale forms of their patriot dead; help us to drown the thunder of the guns with the shrieks of their wounded, writhing in pain; help us to lay waste their humble homes with a hurricane of fire; help us to wring the hearts of their unoffending widows with unavailing grief; help us to turn them out roofless with little children to wander unfriended the wastes of their desolated land in rags and hunger and thirst, sports of the sun flames of summer and the icy winds of winter, broken in spirit, worn with travail, imploring Thee for the refuge of the grave and denied it – for our sakes who adore Thee, Lord, blast their hopes, blight their lives, protract their bitter pilgrimage, make heavy their steps, water their way with their tears, stain the white snow with the blood of their wounded feet!

The mob, however, in their state of frenzy for war rejects his message and declares him a lunatic because “there was no sense in what he said.”

Humanist scholars have offered remarkable exposes of the intricate verbal webs that are woven to hide the true reality. They have dissected verbal implements used by politicians, generals and statesmen to deceive populations to go to war with each other. The naked ugly reality of war is hidden through the employment of language. Prominent among such tools, also what is extensively used by some conspicuous babblers in Pakistanis the personification of a diverse nation and its description as a single human being. This is done to ensure that bad attributes and pathological conditions could easily be tagged onto the enemy.

In the present hype too, we see something similar happening. Hindu for us is an individual who is attributed various contemptuous traits. In our popular imagination, he is someone who is a baniya and is unclean, conniving charlatan who has somehow tricked the whole world into believing him to be someone respectable. The country is also presented as if it were a single entity with a stable, unified opinion. “India” says this and “India” says that is how media report. Lords of war utilise such personifications to vent their nefarious agenda.

Abstraction is another verbal tool that is used to whip up sentiments of hatred against another people. Instead of talking in a concrete manner, a cocoon of abstractions is woven around a few doubtful factoids and then polemics follow. In the age of electronic media, this activity is even more dangerous because it is accompanied by an assortment of powerful props which accompany verbal content. Music, the way it is played alongside reporting on the statements coming from various representative of the state heightens the violent impact of such a story. There are a lot of thudding sounds when such vulgar, visual packages are played on screens and in this way various media outlets try to push a populace towards belligerence. Immediately, battle lines are drawn in the society as well and the voice of those preaching sanity is drowned in frenzied references to possible and fictional aggression of the enemy abound. Just like the sage of the church in Twain’s ‘War Prayer’ who is considered “lunatic” by those praying for total destruction of their enemy, here too, most of our people express similar sentiments about those opposing the war.

One strategy which surely does not play in the hands of warmongers is when the assumed enemy or its society is talked about in the same way we talk about ours. Throughout history, humanists have deployed this strategy to wean their people away from the valley of war. They have talked about the enemy as human beings. Like Sting’s song where Russians were shown to love their children, we too, here in Pakistan, must also try to spread the idea that the Indians, too, love their children.

The writer teaches courses on literature and literary theory at GC University Lahore. He can be contacted at [email protected]; blog: 1687r.wordpress.com