Sadism

The war in Ukraine continues. I didn't believe there was going be an invasion. Then I thought it was going to be over in a few days. A month in, keeping track of reality has become a real difficulty. I saw dozens of videos of people wrapped in packing tape, tied to lampposts, but I don't know who's doing it, or why, or when it happened. Sadists are having a field day under the cover of wartime nationalism.

I watched a Danish documentary about soldiers going to Afghanistan, because I thought it might help me think through what is happening. At one point they commit a war crime. Having thrown a grenade at people who were shooting at them from a ditch, they enter the ditch and machine gun the severely wounded survivors. A soldier later comments, “Well, if you're not here, you don't understand what it's like.”  And something clicked for me. This is something I've heard so many times, as a civilian, from people who've committed atrocities. You weren't there, you wouldn't understand. This is what sadists say to excuse their actions when it’s time to report back to real people.

People join police forces and armies because they are sadists and if you need me to explain to you that I think not everyone who joins the police force or an army is a sadist, I think you might not be hard enough for this world. This is a world built on war crimes and at any moment the slime can ooze through a crack in the surface of this evil, shapeshifting world, sometimes in the shape of complaints that young people have forgotten how to be nice to official murderers.

Ukraine has been invaded. Russian artillery is bombing the shit out of Ukrainians. Under the cover of that are other horrors. Romany people, faces ink-bombed blue, wrapped to a pole with yellow tape, in a perverse representation of the Ukrainian colours. Who is doing this? Azov battalion, the battalion with the Nazi insignia, or run of the mill sadistic nationalists?

When the last invasion of Iraq kicked off, the same footage was shown over and over and over again and I understand why now. The yanks were bombing the shit out of Iraq, but CNN wasn’t really showing the extent of it. One explosion on repeat becomes meaningless. The sight of many and various explosions would have driven anti war protesters mad and back out into the streets en masse.

This invasion becomes an occupation and a long, drawn out, series of atrocities committed by every kind of sadist. Seeing one person wrapped in tape, heavily taped to a pole, is terrible. Seeing dozens is a bad experience that makes you want to take action to make the pain go away.

As a man who is not very good at violence, but was raised by someone who was very, very good at it, I've always been fascinated by violent men, but I'm increasingly interested in people who are very happy to commit violence against helpless victims. There's always a self righteous reason to torture someone.

I'm not above cruelty. I was a child in a school and the ability of a mob of kids to maliciously turn on a child is pretty incredible. I was on both ends of this Lord of the Flies action, I spent most of my childhood in a state of fear and anger. This trauma didn't make me a better person, but it did make me focus on this world and take my own thoughts about it seriously. The main thought being that something is deeply wrong with this planet. But is it the planet? Or is it the people on it? And is it the people on it? Or is it some of the people and what they do to the rest of the people? And we should all know the answer to that.

There have to be other ways. Other systems for living that don't at every single opportunity give the green light to the sadists among us to have their way.

A tiny number of people take full advantage of the rest of us, however, looking at the cruelty, the incidental, side mission, malicious violence, occurring in Ukraine, it's easy to give up and decide well, maybe people are just shitheads. To give up on the human project, to decide it's a fantasy to want a better world. When you're thinking big, unhelpful thoughts like that, it gets hard to string it all together into a compelling story that anyone would want to hear. So yesterday I went to the beach, and I saw a seal basking on a big rock in a place where I've never seen a seal, and when a passing hippy man observing the seal said to me, “I wonder what he's trying to tell us”, I didn’t roll my eyes. I was too busy desperately praying to a fucking seal.