cartoon of the day
By Guest Post • Apr 28th, 2009 at 20:04 • Category: Artwork, Cartoon of the day, Palestine
Little picture, big picture
Introduction by Sonja Karkar:
On Saturday, Australia’s most well-known cartoonist and social commentator Michael Leunig, gave his readers a disturbing account of how the time-honoured traits of decency and caring for others in what we call our civilised world, are fast giving way to the callous “me first” syndrome with dire consequences for the human condition that few realise will inevitably affect even them. He recounts a shocking incident where a women is accosted by a group of men in a suburban street and is saved by a 72-year-old man who is badly beaten, but lives with honour intact. He then reminds us about the incomprehensible atrocities taking place in Gaza against an imprisoned and defenceless people while most of the world turns away without any sense of outrage or compassion. We pick up his story from this point.
When we walk away from cruelty and rationalise it in the scheme of things, we do ourselves an invisible injury.
By Michael Leunig The Melbourne Age January 10, 2009
As this small unfortunate event was taking place in the suburban street, a massacre was in progress on the other side of the world. Israeli aircraft were bombing Gaza – the tormented little punishment space of one-and-a-half million desperate and helpless Palestinian refugees, half of them children. The Palestinians were being crushed yet again in the most cynical and brutal way – and as if this was not appalling enough, the government of Israel was also trying to tell the world that this chaotic mire of blood and rubble and burnt human flesh was a legitimate and necessary procedure in the making of civilisation and a better world. One cannot help but think the Israeli Government a bunch of amateurs in the business of nationhood.
Modern military conflict should not longer be called “warfare”. It is more like mass industrial killing than combat. It is coercive homicide posing as defence, and is radically uneven – or “asymmetrical” as the militarists like to say. In the Western calculation, it means that we do the killing and they do the dying. The children, the mothers, the elderly and the poor do the dying in particular: those not-quite-white people, born in distant unfortunate lands – they do all the wailing and the suffering.
To witness this as a moral being, albeit at a distance, is to be made sick and aghast, and driven half mad with a bewildering mix of sorrow, anger and shame. It is the strong abusing the weak. It is what conscience, justice and honour cannot abide. Yet, if there is such a distinguishing change in war, there is also a change in the overriding effect it has upon the earth and its people – regardless of so-called winners and losers. We are stupid if we do not know this, but there are reasons to believe that with the advancement of fiendish military technology, there had been an equivalent advancement of universal consciousness about the meanings of war and those who drive and control it.
Humanity, although oppressed and tormented by militarism and its abuses, now seems to instinctively understand that something is fundamentally different about the meaning of military might, and that modern war in a modern world makes victory increasingly irrelevant and tragically absurd. It is the vary practice of military violence that is now most significant, because of the psychological cancer it creates in the world – a condition that eventually affects us all. Nobody escapes. Even those who shrug and turn away will find this complex spread of depression and chaotic perversity arriving mysteriously in their homes and among their families sooner or later. We have much to learn about the universal ecosystems of the psyche.
War makes death, but even worse it creates living death. A complex and painful new disease, distributed slowly and evenly to the rich and the poor around the world. It poisons all and makes borders meaningless. Humanity is being united by this common heartbreaking, life-wrecking despair. No armies, no weapons can stop it.
It’s just simply too late for the promised land – the earth is what’s urgently at stake now, and the world is sick and in revulsion. Atrocity is atrocity, injustice is injustice and enough is enough.
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The entire column by Michael Leunig is available online at:
http://www.theage.com.au/news/entertainment/arts/little-picture-big-picture/2009/01/08/1231004194072.html
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