on pride and faux justice
Work Towards World Peace from Gillian Wearing’s Signs that Say What You Want Them To Say and Not Signs that Say What Someone Else Wants You To Say campaign (1992/93)
For a conflict to last a long time, pride has to be involved. The game of who will fall first, who will admit the other is the fittest, the staring down, the fierce agony of not letting go even when you’ve been torn up again and again. It’s a tiring game for the players involved and oftentimes for their leaders as well because pride itself is exhausting. I came across a few mind-numbing facts while reading through some historical texts for a course. One that specifically inspired this post was the 30 Years War from 1618-1648. 30. YEARS. It made me think on the possible factors that could prompt people to fight for decades. The people that you may call “war-mongers” aren’t the people who fight these wars themselves. They are the ones behind the scenes, pushing and pulling, commanding every move. They’re the ones that convince the people doing the actual fighting that some sort of justice is being served, with every progressive step seeing a wrong turning into a right. However, if a conflict wages on for years, people may start to wonder the sort of “justice” the war command is fighting for.
Think of the fact that the 30 Years War isn’t the only war in history that has lasted decades. The dedication, strength, manpower, money, pride it must take to prolong something as destructive and irreversible as war is insane. To fight a war, you usually have to sell a war to the people directly and indirectly involved; and ‘justice’ is the best excuse. When two people are in some sort of tension, you usually don’t expect it to last so long that it’ll feel like ages (except it’s something extremely bad). It sometimes feels like the first instinct of certain politicians is to attack first, then properly adjust the situation later, or watch their successor fix up their mess - and I don’t even necessarily mean with war but any other lesser severe issues. I’ve been hearing more and more people say that politicians and governments overall do what they want to do irrespective of what their citizens want. Do you think this is increasingly true? I mean, governments are elected to act on behalf of the people and work FOR the people and not vice versa, no?
It’s hard to think of a time more relevant than now to put out the imprinted message “work towards world peace”. By the way, I don’t merely mean this year, by ‘time’, think this century. We cannot forget that misfortune in geopolitics did not begin in the year 2022! Yes, the century is not over, we’re two decades in and hope still lurks around regardless of the gravity of the situations around the world. People often ask the question “when will we finally learn?” during situations pertaining to war and peace. Truth is we are constantly learning, whether we are aware of it or not. The real question should be: “when will we finally understand what we have learned?”
Obviously, we cannot learn everything we want and need to know at once; that’s sort of the beauty of time. It’s like a book fragmented into chapters, or an album fragmented into songs. Time is now, it is tomorrow and it is every day after that. Every day is a new beginning, a chance to see and do something new, something that inspires or keeps you looking forward to the next thing. If we let pride take that away from us, we would surrender ourselves to a great self-inflicted injustice.
