WAR & PEACE

You really get a different class of warfare here in the nuclear zone. The war feels so far away you hardly know it’s there, but something strange is happening to the minds of our children. They no longer believe their parents ways can offer them survival, though their parents often seem to think it’s the only way to live, in a phony peace where no enemy dares to harm them but they are afraid to leave their homes at night, closing their doors for fear of football fans and the poor unemployed, and closing their minds to the chance of computer error rendering their paranoia obsolete. 

You used to know you were in a war, it was all so much more personal in the days of machine gun bullets, gas, and fixed bayonets, and everywhere dead relatives hanging on barbed wire and rotting in trenches. Just an everyday war around the world today, where the folks always know with each rat-tat-tat that the next ricochet could be theirs. We see it on the TV. In the sanitised world beneath the nuclear umbrella, however, where the war is played mostly in the minds of politicians and generals and other megalomaniacs of the military industrial complex, the smell of death rarely reaches the nostrils, and it is easy to think we are not involved. But those prepared to press the buttons, and play out the endgame from well-stocked concrete vaults, are still using us as their front line. Their game - our end. Despite the comparative comfort of our surroundings, we must live in the knowledge that if they had the nerve they might give us four minutes warning. Though it would take a minute for them to believe their eyes and ears, and another to see if they could do anything about it, and another to seal off the doors of the shelters, and by then it would surely seem counterproductive to cause a public panic. 

This threat means we live in a constant state of war if we choose to sustain the system, though some suggest it’s working fine as long as there’s no gunfire on the mainland streets. We keep our heavy violence across the Irish Sea, but daily high quality weapons get easier to buy. So when the IRA goes nuclear is it stalemate, or do we get to nuke Belfast? Would we irradiate part of what we call our country as though trying to cure a cancer? Are we prepared to eliminate life on earth as a permanent end to war? This crazy scenario is obviously more stupid than shooting a hole in your foot, but deterrence is based on the premise that our leaders are mad enough to do just that. For the Armageddon button has no purpose unless someone can push it and not care. Well I for one would rather not be cannon fodder for an uncaring leader too stupid to see that the rules have changed. It’s not even the winning side. 

Although we are in this war like it or not, I don’t really think it would count as jihad. So as a muslim living here, what would it take to get me following military orders. If the state decided to bring back conscription, and told me I had to serve and fight, should I object? For what cause would I die, and behind what banner? When the mobs are coming for me up the stairs to my door do I submit, or stand and fight, or join them. What leaders would I trust? Not many I can think of, and most certainly not the ones we’ve got. I would like to hope that there’s more to my life than wanting to survive, as life hardly seems worth living if there’s nothing in it to die for, but with the arrival of each new medical miracle designed to delay at whatever cost our moment of departure, and each masterpiece of hi-tech warfare promising more killed by less with no fuss or mess as long as you’re on our side, the dignity of our race would seem to have been sacrificed for the insane ideology of living for survival. 

So many frightened people, unhappy with what they’ve got and yet unable to change it for want of a realistic alternative vision. What gives the power to change things is to die before you die, the sweet relief from fear that comes with accepting death as a constant companion. For it is not just the flash of a thousand suns that can catch us unawares. Death comes from the brick off the top of a wall, the tyre blowout three cars up front on the freeway, or even that final cream bun firing cholesterol daggers at hour heart, more probable than war for me, at forty-four living in heart attack country. Our lives are given by Allah, and He takes them whenever He wills. In the words of the man falling past the hotel window – “So far so good. So far so good.” 

Fearing Allah, not the man with the button, means at last you are free to fight the tyrant and oppressor, who without subject peoples has no power, yet can achieve subjection only through the use of fear. Who knows what might have happened if those six million jews had refused to just go quietly. In another age they triumphed over Pharaoh, but then they had God on their side. The fighter for truth and justice may be honourably overwhelmed or triumph and transform history, and only Allah knows the outcome, but in the adrenalin rush of death’s proximity there are guidelines to help choose right action amidst the confusion, and protect the mujahid from becoming the oppressor. It is necessary to stop fighting if the enemy concedes, and to try to leave non-combatants unharmed. Yet here we are with a nuclear force that once started will be beyond stopping, and which has an extraordinary facility for killing everything that lives. Any sane muslims would surely disassociate themselves from forms of weaponry so obviously haram, yet around the world the race is on to be the proud possessors of the first “Islamic Bomb”.