Collateral Damage
Dr. Michel E. Abs
Secretary General of the Middle East Council of Churches
Collateral Damage is the name given by those involved in wars to people who are killed, burned, or perished under the rubble of their homes. The designation also includes the damages inflicted or eliminated on the lifespan accomplishments of thousands of people. It includes too damages incurred by whole civilizations achieved by societies.
Quite simply: collateral damage...No, say marginal damage, and no one cares about it or notices it.
The launchers of missiles and rockets are not interested in those who are in their way by unfortunate coincidences.
No sound is louder than the sound of the battle. The roar of bullets, the thunder of cannons, and the cries of planes deafen all ears and overshadow the screaming of children, the groaning of the elderly and the wailing of the frightened.
The calling of the Hungry does not affect the gunslinger, the mortar operator, or the pilot of the warplane.
How many casualties have wars produced and how many civilizations have been destroyed and left behind by wars?
Real war problems are post-war problems.
When the madness of the cannons comes to be silent, everyone realizes the horror of the catastrophe.
“The snow melts and the meadow appears”, as the folk saying goes in my country.
When the belligerents are filled with lethality and destruction, they see the magnitude of the catastrophe created by their own hands.
Poverty, misery, homelessness, deprivation, broken families, or annihilation, and the physically and psychologically handicapped, and the list goes on. Only then would the sages, who were voiceless during the battle, sit down to see what they can do... that is in case the warring parties themselves do not take charge of the affairs of the people they had destroyed.
Researchers in economics, politics and social affairs link modern industrial society with war and consider that this society can only survive through war.
War consumes combat mechanisms as well as their necessary ammunitions, and then opens up areas for investment in proportion to the destruction and the consequent taxes and public debt. A profitable project is war for those who are insatiable with amassing wealth and who do not care about bloodshed or about the hungry.
War is a horrific event in the human trackway, and humanity has experienced it since the beginning of civilization in all its forms and has born its consequences and has not yet learned. It is the worst event that could occur in the route of mankind.
In war, values collapse and instincts escalate. The instincts of murder and exploitation, and the wealthy of wars are not better off than those who conduct them.
Therefore, it is necessary to consider the moral collapse that afflicts peoples during wars as a collateral damage as well, or rather the more difficult damage that is to be treated after the smoke of bombing and lethality recedes.
Collateral Damage!
How ugly is this expression and how disrespectful it is to the human soul, life, and dignity. War is the occurrence that undermines human dignity most, especially civil war during which savage groups kill their own people or categories of their people that they classify as hostile to them.
Collateral Damage?!
Who cares about you, you peaceful and secure people, and who cares about your aspirations, your hopes, your future and the fate of your children? Who cares about reaping off your life and the standard of life and to provide you with food, water, and medicine. Deaf war machines only hear themselves and take their instructions only from their operator who works under the orders of his own operators.
Collateral Damage!
We want to do what we want or what our instincts and greed dictate to us, but you people, we are not concerned with what happens to you.
We ask ourselves, has the term collateral damage been adopted that is to avoid the use of the term essential damage?
The least that can be said about all this is that it aims to justify the perpetrators of wrongdoing against humanity, by considering that they have unintentionally inflicted this harm.
A clever attempt, but it does not erase from the memory of humanity the scenes of the scourge of war and does not wash the hands of war lovers from the blood that stains them.