I find it hard to put into
words the feelings and emotions I have regarding the appalling and tragic
attacks in Paris this week. I ask every one of us to pray for those that died
so tragically and for their families and for those that are injured and fighting
for their lives.
It is not enough to say how
deeply saddened and horror struck I am and surely all of us are at these awful
terrorist attacks on innocent people in the heart of Paris. People enjoying a
Friday evening’s entertainment or just having a quiet moment with loved ones
after a hard week’s work suddenly slaughtered – lives lost, shattered and
families in deep mourning.
The pain and horror will
never go away and what of the future – is this what we have to look forward to
- copy cat incidents – more and more violence and a deterioration of the peace
and values of our society?
The reasons sadly are not
difficult to find, and believe me I am not looking for excuses – If you create suffering it will inevitably come back to haunt you big
time – there are so many current examples: Iraq, Libya, Iran, Afghanistan,
Pakistan, Syria…. A long list of countries shattered by war, ambition,
politics, power, control religious abuse and so forth - waves of immigration and desperation
All this misery and suffering in the name of politics,
power, money, oil, control, ambition – you name it – and innocent, helpless
people continue to die and suffer – its awful.
The problem (as always) is
one of “cause and effect” – the Genie is out of the bottle and political decisions and actions over the decades have come back to haunt this generation and we are facing a
massive collapse of the values that so many of us take for granted. At the same time as people were suffering and dying in Paris others were dying in Syria, Palestine, Afghanistan and elsewhere - we have to find a way to stop this nightmare and NOW.
Of course, none of this is an excuse for the
terrorists to kill and maim today, but unscrupulous leaders, equally
driven by power, money, ambition, ego, hate and revenge will use these reasons
to get what they want – and use any religious reasons they can come up with to
back their schemes and plans often in the name of a revengeful God.
The terrorists very often outcasts
in the societies they live in are radicalized in their homes – or deliberately
infiltrated by ISIS and other Jihadist groups in the surge of immigration are
persuaded that they will go to heaven or paradise if they kill Christians and
other non-believers – of course, the truth is that if we believe in God and an
afterlife and that we will reap the rewards or horrors of the things we do in this
life, then they will go to the deepest hell for their unforgiveable sin of
killing people.
For those of you that
kindly read my blogs you will know that I often write about peace, love,
compassion, kindness and valuing all forms of life as the only way forward to
creating a peaceful and happy life for all of us. But, when confronted with the
level of hate and violence that we have witnessed on the streets of Paris this
week it is hard to think of compassion and love isn’t it?
And yet, my friends we must
somehow find the compassion to pray not only for those poor people suddenly and
violently killed and injured but also for the terrorists who will be sent to
the deepest hell for their appalling actions.
Its hard especially when we feel so outraged and hurt by their actions,
but if we carry this hate and instinct for revenge all we will be doing is
perpetuating the cycle of death and destruction. More misery, more death and
pain, more suffering – is this what we want?
I have copied an article
from today’s London Sunday Times by Niall Ferguson, where he writes about the
historical comparison between today and the fall of the Roman Empire – it is a
piece that gives us all a serious look at our world today and what happened to
a mighty empire before.
For me there are no easy
answers, but I do know that until we all stop killing and causing unbelievable
suffering there won't be a human race -
so we had better start to learn from the myriad of mistakes made in the past
and that we are continuing to make – everything is “cause and effect” – “we
reap what we sow” and unless we stop acting in the same old way time and again
there will never be peace and happiness.
I can only repeat time and
again that important mantra that “Compassion, Caring, Kindness and Love create
Happiness” – whereas “Hate, Killing, Jealousy, Greed, Desire, Ignorance, Revenge,
Anger” all create Suffering.
You will no doubt say "will any of this help today"? The answer is I don't know, I certainly don't have all the answers, but what I do know is that unless we all find a way to create some happiness, caring and compassion in this world of ours there won't be a world to enjoy.
Please read the article
below it makes very important reading – it puts into perspective the stark
reality of our world today:
PARIS and the attacks! (An article by Niall Ferguson in the London Sunday
Times Nov 15)
I am
not going to repeat what you have already read or heard. I am not going to say
that what happened in Paris on Friday night was unprecedented horror, for it
was not. I am not going to say that the world stands with France, for it is a
hollow phrase. Nor am I going to applaud François Hollande’s pledge of
“pitiless” vengeance, for I do not believe it.
I am going to tell you that
this is exactly how civilisations fall.
Here is how Edward Gibbon
described the Goths’ sack of Rome in August 410AD: “. . . In the hour of savage
licence, when every passion was inflamed, and every restraint was removed . . .
a cruel slaughter was made of the Romans; and . . . the streets of the city
were filled with dead bodies . . . Whenever the Barbarians were provoked by
opposition, they extended the promiscuous massacre to the feeble, the innocent,
and the helpless. . .”
Now, does that not describe
the scenes we witnessed in Paris on Friday night? True, Gibbon’s History of the
Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, published in six volumes between 1776 and
1788, represented Rome’s demise as a slow burn. Gibbon covered more than 1,400
years of history. The causes he identified ranged from the personality
disorders of individual emperors to the power of the Praetorian Guard and the
rise of Sassanid Persia. Decline shaded into fall, with monotheism acting as a
kind of imperial dry rot.
For many years, more modern
historians of “late antiquity” tended to agree with Gibbon about the gradual
nature of the process. Indeed, some went further, arguing that “decline” was an
anachronistic term, like the word “barbarian”. Far from declining and falling,
they insisted, the Roman empire had imperceptibly merged with the Germanic
tribes, producing a multicultural post-imperial idyll that deserved a more
flattering label than “Dark Ages”. Recently, however, a new generation of
historians has raised the possibility that the process of Roman decline was in
fact sudden — and bloody — rather than smooth.
For Bryan Ward-Perkins,
what happened was “violent seizure . . . by barbarian invaders”. The end of the
Roman west, he writes in The Fall of Rome (2005), “witnessed horrors and
dislocation of a kind I sincerely hope never to have to live through; and it
destroyed a complex civilisation, throwing the inhabitants of the West back to
a standard of living typical of prehistoric times”.
In five decades the
population of Rome itself fell by three-quarters. Archaeological evidence from
the late fifth century — inferior housing, more primitive pottery, fewer coins,
smaller cattle — shows that the benign influence of Rome diminished rapidly in
the rest of western Europe. “The end of civilisation”, in Ward-Perkins’s
phrase, came within a single generation.
Peter Heather’s Fall of the
Roman Empire emphasises the disastrous effects not just of mass migration but
of organised violence: first the westward shift of the Huns of Central Asia and
then the Germanic irruption into Roman territory. In his reading, the Visigoths
who settled in Aquitaine and the Vandals who conquered Carthage were attracted
to the Roman empire by its wealth, but were enabled to seize that wealth by the
arms they acquired and the skills they learnt from the Romans themselves.
“For the adventurous,”
writes Heather, “the Roman empire, while being a threat to their existence,
also presented an unprecedented opportunity to prosper . . . Once the Huns had
pushed large numbers of [alien groups] across the frontier, the Roman state
became its own worst enemy. Its military power and financial sophistication
both hastened the process whereby streams of incomers became coherent forces
capable of carving out kingdoms from its own body politic.”
Uncannily similar processes
are destroying the European Union today, though few of us want to recognise
them for what they are. Like the Roman Empire in the early fifth century,
Europe has allowed its defences to crumble. As its wealth has grown, so its
military prowess has shrunk, along with its self-belief. It has grown decadent
in its shopping malls and sports stadiums. At the same time it has opened its
gates to outsiders who have coveted its wealth without renouncing their
ancestral faith.
The distant shock to this
weakened edifice has been the Syrian civil war, though it has been a catalyst
as much as a direct cause for the great Völkerwanderung of 2015. As before,
they have come from all over the imperial periphery — from North Africa, from
the Levant, from south Asia — but this time they have come in their millions,
not in mere tens of thousands.
To be sure, most have come
hoping only for a better life. Things in their own countries have become just
good enough economically for them to afford to leave and just bad enough
politically for them to risk leaving. But they cannot stream northwards and
westwards without some of that political malaise coming with them. As Gibbon
saw, convinced monotheists pose a grave threat to a secular empire.
It is doubtless true to say
that the overwhelming majority of Muslims in Europe are not violent. But it is
also true that the majority hold views not easily reconciled with the
principles of our liberal democracies, including our novel notions about sexual
equality and tolerance not merely of religious diversity but of nearly all
sexual proclivities. And it is thus remarkably easy for a violent minority to
acquire their weapons and prepare their assaults on civilisation within these
avowedly peace-loving communities.
I do not know enough about
the fifth century to be able to quote Romans who described each new act of
barbarism as unprecedented, even when it had happened multiple times before; or
who issued pious calls for solidarity after the fall of Rome, even when
standing together meant falling together; or who issued empty threats of
pitiless revenge, even when all they intended to do was to strike a
melodramatic posture.
I do know that 21st-century
Europe has itself to blame for the mess it is now in. Surely nowhere in the
world has devoted more resources to the study of history than modern Europe
did. When I went up to Oxford more than 30 years ago, it was taken for granted
that in the first term I would study Gibbon. It did no good. We learnt a lot of
nonsense to the effect that nationalism was a bad thing, nation states worse
and empires the worst things of all.
“Romans before the fall”,
wrote Ward-Perkins, “were as certain as we are today that their world would
continue for ever substantially unchanged. They were wrong. We would be wise
not to repeat their complacency.”
Poor, poor Paris. Killed by
complacency.
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