‘Nothing to kill or die for’
‘Imagine there's no countries
It isn't hard to do
Nothing to kill or die for’
John Lennon described his ‘imagined world’ of peace and love in his song ‘Imagine’ nearly five decades ago.
Perhaps Lennon’s world is only possible in a dream. He himself recognises this, ‘you may say that I’m a dreamer.’ But he is ‘not the only one’. He is really not the only one. Each and every one of us has an ‘imagined world’, too. Sometimes, it is full of dark fantasy while sometimes, it is full of sweet dreams.
New Zealand mosque shooter Brenton Tarrant, who shot 49 people to death at point-blank range, had also an ‘imagined world’. He disclosed his ‘fantasy world’ in a 74-page manifesto exactly 94 years after the ‘Mein Kampf’ by Adolf Hitler who massacred around 6 million European Jews in the same style.
Lennon’s one was full of love and peace, where he wanted to ‘share the world with all’. It is inclusive.
Brenton and Hitler’s one, which Brenton called ‘The Great Replacement’, was full of death and despair, and hate and crime. They wanted to create a world where there were plans for a massacre. It is exclusive.
If you look at Lennon and Brenton, apparently, you will find no difference. Both of them had good looking faces and smiles on their lips. The difference was the way they look at the world. The difference was in how they think of it and how they wanted to live in it.
Brenton had no criminal record either, except a few stray traffic violations. The shooter’s former Australian boss said he never noticed any ‘extremist attitude’ in him. The authorities of the Big River Gym in New Zealand where he worked for years as a trainer said he used to give free service to train children.
Everybody around him witnessed a generous version of him and a ‘perfect man’. But, none was aware of his ‘imagined world’ where he planned a mass killing. This was his biggest strength, and our great failure was that we could not see his imagination. Ones can construct and reconstruct their imagined world with all freedom and out of everybody’s sight. One can colour it with all the hues of the rainbow in the mind.
In search of his new world, Brenton travelled across the Europe, Asia, to Israel and even to the Korean peninsula. He then rested, planned and scripted a 74-page manifesto of hate and then committed the massacre. The manifestation of his imagined world was in the rifles and bullets he used to commit the killing. Even when he was shooting the innocent worshipers, he was playing a Serbian nationalist song called ‘Chetniks’. The Serbian paramilitary used the song during the Bosnian war between 1992 and 1995. ‘For Rotherham’ was written on one of his weapons. Rotherham links to a sex scandal of Asian Muslims involving Rotherham children. ‘To take revenge for Ebba Akerlund’ was written on the other rifle he used for the massacre. Akerlund was 11-year-old girl. She was killed by an Uzbekistan asylum-seeker, Rakhmat Akilov, who drove a truck into a crown in Stockholm, Sweden in 2017. All through his journey, what he collected were extremist notions, hatred and vengeance. Ironically, all the things he used for his extremist cause were collected from our surroundings.
Using child murder as an excuse to committing terrorist acts in the name of vengeance is common across the globe. Actually, ‘terrorists love to exploit the deaths of children at the hands of the people they declare enemies. The propaganda of al Qaeda and the so-called Islamic State is filled with images of mutilated toddlers that give the jihadis, they claim, license to take revenge and commit mass murder’ (The Daily Beast).
It is like a frenzied lust to take ‘an eye for an eye’. But as Mahatma Gandhi said, an ‘eye for an eye only ends up making the whole world blind.’
We often forget that everybody is part of greater humankind. Once we all together made this world livable. It is now time to turn the world livable again. There is nothing ‘to kill or die for.’ Violence and terrorism based on caste, creed and the idea of nationhood, and the discrimination on the basis of religion and culture are just made of our own thinking. These are the fault lines. As the fault lines remain active, quakes are inevitable.
It has already taken a heavy toll. The statistics show 18,753 people were killed by terrorists in 2017 whereas natural disasters killed 10,000 people the same year. The number killed by terrorism is nearly double of those killed in natural disasters. It is not about death tolls. It is rather about the gravity of our the suicidal route down which we hurtle.
It has been three days into the terrorist attack. The world is mourning and will one day recover from the wounds as it did in the previous time. But, the hatred never recedes and threats to humanity retrocede again and again.
Still, peace is possible. Let happen the ‘The Great Replacement’ with love instead of hate. Love is light. It lights up everything around it whereas hate is a dark that darkens its surrounds.
Farid Ahmed, one of the survivors and husband of a victim, told us what we should do now. ‘I lost my wife but I don’t hate the killer. As a person I love him, but sorry I can’t support what he did… Somewhere along in his life maybe he was hurt. He couldn’t translate the hurt into a positive manner. That’s why he’s doing wrong.’
He is right. We often fail to translate the hate into love. This is the only way to make the world livable once again.
Father of peace studies Johan Galtung categorises peace into two -- ‘negative peace’ and ‘positive peace’. Negative peace refers to the absence of violence, for instance, a ceasefire. It is negative because something undesirable stopped happening. Positive peace is filled with positive content such as restoration of relationships, the creation of social systems that serve the needs of the whole population and the constructive resolution of conflict (Peace Insight).
Let the peace prevail on earth. Let ‘imagine all the people/sharing all the world, imagine all the people/living life in peace.’
*Toriqul Islam is a journalist. He can be reached at [email protected]