So for some reason instead of working on animation I felt the need to work this out instead.
I have never pretended like I knew much about the Middle East or the recent wars which have taken place there in the last century. I remember as a kid in Texas with good old President Bush, we, the US were fighting Saddam Hussein. Who was he? Why did he do what he did?
So if you don’t remember, Saddam Hussein was a war criminal and generally considered evil man who was born in Iraq. For some reason this documentary I’m watching about him makes his mother seem like a terrible person who knew how evil he was before his birth because he had somehow, as a fetus, killed all the men in his family so he could be born as the alpha. Sounds like a great origin story for a villain, but the real story is much more depressing. Saddam’s father and brother died of cancer, leaving his pregnant mother alone. Which, being a woman in Iraq in 1937? Without a husband or son? She became suicidal and did want an abortion, but instead had the baby and left him in the care of his uncle.
So Saddam grows up with his Nazi-sympathizer uncle and ends up joining the Ba’ath Party (pronounced bath party) which all you need to know now is, it was a secular, nationalist, socialist party that overthrew the coup which overthrew the monarchy which was effectively working for the British who were doing an Imperialistic Colonialism. He has dreams for a homogenous Iraq which would be a world power under his totalitarian rule, and he had no qualms of being a war criminal to do it.
I went into this rabbit hole thinking searching reasonable answers to questions I had simply never bothered to ask in-depth. I wanted to find meaning for these horrible tragedies. I thought, what would make Saddam Hussein torture people and gas civilians? And I clung to every scrap of history that pointed to a disturbed childhood and other environmental factors that could give me any hope of thinking “Ah, well with a tragic background like that, it’s no wonder his moral compass was so screwed up.” That line of thinking worked for me until I started looking into what drove the people who influenced Hussein, like his nazi-sympathizing Uncle. I remembered the Holocaust and watched a video about the Nuremberg Trials. I learned about the Japan Trials that followed. I learned about the human experiments of Unit 731 and I was captured by newfound horror people could be so inhumane. I saw a lot of pictures I had never seen before, and now they haunt me. I went back and started thinking about terrorism. Even though Hussein was not linked to Al-Qaeda and Bush lied to the contrary to get us into war, terrorism and jihad and many countries near Iraq were related to his struggle. I thought, there is some legitimacy to denouncing America. After all, our soldiers and politicians have committed war crimes too. I read about the Vietnam war and the My Lai Massacre. Now YouTube was recommending to me news footage of the 9/11 attacks on the twin towers. I kept eating this shit up, futilely looking for an explanation, a reassurance that we have not forgotten our history and steps have been taken not to repeat our mistakes. With every revisited or new tragedy I swept through, there came even more of that hunger to find closure, some sign that the world was getting better despite it all. But with every tragedy, I learned of men who were never put on trial, men who were tried but got away, men who were convicted but still managed to live the remainder of their lives in freedom. Wars started in the name of humanity yet resulting in vast harm, the hypocrisy of governments, the absolute absence of justice and reason.
I definitely overdid myself in exposing myself to too much tragedy for my own mental health. In the end, I watched a true crime series about terrorist attacks that were thwarted and fell asleep to it. But I realize that that search for closure was essentially trying to fill a void that will never be satisfied.
There’s this line in Breaker Morant:
“The fact of the matter is that war changes men’s natures. The barbarities of war are seldom committed by abnormal men. The tragedy of war is that these horrors are committed by normal men in abnormal situations. Situations in which the ebb and flow of everyday life have departed and have been replaced by a constant round of fear and anger, blood and death.”
The reason men go to war, that people are tortured and subject to disease and on and on… There is no rational reason except the ego and survival instinct all living things are born with. The stories we tell ourselves are just that – stories. Sure they rationalize the decisions we make, they make some sense of the chaos, but it doesn’t change the fact that all of humanity is intrinsically capable of such madness.
Now might be a good time to mention that I believe every instinct humans have is a result of evolution. If we are violent, there was a survival incentive for that when we evolved. Whether this is according to the design of a divine being, I highly doubt but cannot fully denounce. More on this in another post.
Trying to give meaning to the suffering is a natural impulse, but it’s misguided. Great art that turns human suffering into meaningful stories is not a substitute for direct action, is it? That’s what bothers me the most – because what can one person do to make direct, positive impacts on the world? And there are so many issues. For now, locked in my little flat, I think making good art is all I have. I hope this makes the slightest bit of sense.
I don’t know what else to do.
Sources: (trigger warning for war and violence)
Any other sources you can find on Wikipedia. Honestly I don’t want anyone to go down the rabbit hole all at once like I did. I know most people already know about these events, so there’s not much reason to check the sources except to educate yourself further and coming to terms with them.
Additional reading/watching/listening: