Like many diasporan Ukrainians this past weekend, I placed a lit candle at my front window as a memorial symbol to the millions that died in Stalin’s deliberate and genocidal destruction of millions of Ukrainians who resisted his criminally misguided collectivization and Russification policies in the early 1930’s.
That tragedy, which has now become globally known as the Holodomor, is a civilizational wound, one that reminds us that, regardless of what other progress mankind has made over the millennia, we still have not overcome our primitive proclivity towards barbarism when dealing with each other as human beings.
Regrettably, the Holodomor is not unique in modern history. The twentieth century abounds in other examples of mass human cruelty and depravity – the Jewish Holocaust, the Armenian genocide, the Rwandan massacres, the Cambodian genocide under Pol Pot, the tens of millions who were killed during China’s Great Leap Forward program, the ethnic cleansing in Bosnia, the Red Terror in Ethiopia, the massacres in Darfur, Sudan, and most lately, the growing trail of death and destruction caused by fundamentalist Muslim terrorism.
As a human species here in the twenty first century, we like to think that we have progressed and matured significantly since our caveman ancestors trod upon this earth. We have mastered science and technology, we have tamed and harnessed nature, we have tripled our average lifespan, we have conquered disease and are now reaching out into outer space and the broader universe. Shamefully, what we have not been able to do and where we have made virtually no progress at all, is in learning how to live peacefully with each other.
Inter-human relations, be it on an individual, national or global level, is still essentially governed by a primitive, Darwinian imperative, namely survival of the fittest and might makes right. It seems that in this sphere of life, the only difference between our Neanderthal forebears and us is that they settled their differences with clubs and spears, while we do it with Kalashnikovs, tanks, F-18s, MIGs and plastic explosives.
It would be safe to say that civilizationally, we have reached an existential turning point in our history where, if we do not focus on learning how to live peacefully and cooperatively with each other, we will likely commit species suicide and destroy much of this planet in the process.
The essential problem is that despite much lip service to the contrary, we have always prioritized material progress and our own selfish interests, at the expense of morality, altruism and concern for our fellow human beings. Virtually all the major religions of the world preach love, kindness, spiritual well-being and a core set of ethics and morality that are pretty well universal. Yet on both a micro and a macro level, we have failed miserably in putting these into practice in our daily lives.
We continue to perpetuate the primeval social and cultural divisions that divide the world into “us” and “them” – Christian vs Muslim, east vs west, white vs. black, socialists vs capitalists, French vs English, Russians vs Ukrainians, etc. etc. Through the power of modern media, unscrupulous politicians, fundamentalist religious leaders, billionaire criminals and oligarchs, and charismatic psychopaths fan the flames of division into hate, terrorism, chaos and ultimately genocide.
We need to recognize that all the scientific and material progress that we have made over the millennia will ultimately mean nothing if we do not start making serious progress in mankind’s spiritual and moral domains. We have to prioritize those things that will lead to a change in the way we deal with each other both individually and collectively – literacy, education, cooperation, responsible stewardship of this planet, tolerance, understanding, social conscience, equality of opportunity, economic equity, justice, and above all respect. We need to strengthen those structures that promote democracy, human rights, freedom of speech and religion. We need to transform the United Nations from the ineffectual and symbolic body that it is today, into an effective tool for managing and governing this shrinking planet of ours.
As with climate change, time is running out. We have a generation or two, perhaps a century, to put our house in order. The Holodomor shone a light into how low human depravity can take us; the candle in the window is our hope and belief that mankind is capable of much more.
We were after all, created in the image of God, not Satan.
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