Have you seen rain in Afghanistan?
Early this morning, i.e. around 4 a.m., there
was a loud noise. ‘Rain,’ I told myself with a smile, even though I was
a fair distance from Bubbly Land. It did rain. For half a second. It was
almost like some friendly cloud had decided to relieve itself just
there. A loud noise. Half a second’s worth of rain. That was it. That’s
all the rain in Kottawa that I can talk of this morning (August 6, 2010)
I know there are floods in Pakistan and you might wonder if I got the
country name in the title wrong. No, I did not. It is raining in
Afghanistan, I was told by a man who died of a heart attack in 1956, at
the age of 59. Bertold Brecht was his name.
It was a poem, ‘When evil-doing comes like falling rain’. It’s about
what happens when people get killed. At first there is a cry of horror,
Brecht observed. When a hundred gets butchered, there is still outrage.
And then a thousand get slaughtered and there no end to the butchery.
What happens?
‘...a blanket of silence spreads.
When evil-doing comes like falling rain,
nobody calls out
‘stop!’
When crimes begin to pile up they become invisible.
When sufferings become unendurable
the cries are no longer heard.
The cries, too, fall like rain in summer.’
A few days ago a NATO air strike killed at least 12 Afghan civilians,
hours after the US commander urged his forces to avoid hurting
non-combatants. General David Petraeus is reported to have said ‘Every
Afghan civilian death diminishes (their) cause’. I don’t know where they
think they began, but we are talking about 3.5 million unnecessary
deaths related to the invasion of Afghanistan. That’s a lot of
diminishing. A lot of silence. A lot of rain.
There is so much rain and not just in Afghanistan. There is silence
about all this in the holiest temples such as the one where a High
Priest called Ban Ki-moon appoints advisory committees. There is silence
in a place called London. Silence in a place called the International
Crisis Group.
There are some cries of horror I hear at the other end of the world.
Someone is calling for butchery.
The knife is to be thrust, if ‘all goes well’, into the breast of a
man called Bradley Manning. Representative Mike Rogers of the USA wants
Manning electrocuted for allegedly (!) leaking classified documents to
WikiLeaks. To stay with Brecht-speak, that would be Manning being
accused of not being silent about that which has caused silence to
descend on Afghanistan like the summer rain.
This same Rogers had voted the previous week for funds which
according to a congressional report ends up funding weapons and
explosives used by the ‘enemy’ that US Forces are supposed to be
fighting in Afghanistan, the Taliban.
Speaking about WikiLeaks, Admiral Mike Mullen, Chairman of the Joint
Chiefs of Staff said at a news conference last week that Julian Assange,
the founder of WikiLeaks ‘might already have on his hands the blood
of some young soldier or that of an Afghan family’.
So much irony!
So much blood. So much of butchery. The dead in Afghanistan looked at
me in silence. There was a message there: be silent for that is the
loudest shout against butchery.
It is raining in Afghanistan. It is not a half-second cloud-burst. It
is pure Brechtian rain.
Let me be silent now.
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