Do We Know What They Want?
All war must be just the killing of strangers
against whom you feel no personal animosity;
strangers whom, in other circumstances,
you would help if you found them in trouble
--Mark Twain
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Sunday homily: Are we helping in Iraq and AFPAK?
"Between a man of peace and a soldier, can there be any relationship of help?
They belong to different levels of thought, to different levels of society; they may meet in the marketplace but they have different friends, a different language. The man of peace may understand the soldier and want to help him, but only to urge him come out of his world of violence.
The soldier will accept such help only when he himself is convinced of the folly of violence; otherwise, he will wish to lock up the man of peace as a danger to society. Similarly, if you want to reform society, you must be sure that that is what it wants. Otherwise, your help and enthusiasm will be used for its own ends. The collective end is not dissimilar to the individual end.
If you want to help me, you must find out what I am seeking. Otherwise, in what way are you helping me? If you and I agree, then we will help and not hinder one another. But if you do not know what I want and still try to help me, either you are acting out of conceit -- which imposes a limit on understanding -- or you are being carried away by your own activity.
To truly help another is impossible if there is the conceit of knowledge, or experience, of authority, of any pretension. Nor is it possible if you are escaping into activity in the form of social service. To help me, you must know yourself. Otherwise, your ignorance will strengthen my ignorance."
--J. Krishnamurti, unpublished interview, ca. 1950, #6
Don't you wish you got this kind of straight dope from the pulpit? That's why you've got Ranger -- your one-stop moral shopping playground. The words are 60 years old, but as fresh and relevant as if spoken today.
Talk amongst yourselves.
Labels: j. krishnamurti on the helper and the helped. krishnamurti on war
posted by Lisa at 6:30 AM
2 Comments:
I've only got an idea of what they want. But what they don't want I'm fairly certain of. They don't want their children, friends and family slaughtered like rabid dogs. I'm pretty sure that's a universal thing.
working on my magnum opus on afghanistan (which i have to start with epaminondas in sparta) i see the strange thing that occurs.
in athens the 30 years of the war with sparta (two generation wars are always destructive) changed the very culture. before the war they had a citizen muster (socractes, thucydides, aeschulys, euripedes, all the notable men of athens were expected to armor up and march). by the end they had a mercenary force which was augmented by forcible conscriptions.
the army rather than being of service to the state had a state in service to the army. the only remaining difference with sparta was that in sparta the army was the state.
soldiers have a poor focus on civilization. it's the old thing of all that a hammer can see in the world is nails.
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