We have taller buildings, but shorter tempers;
wider freeways, but narrower viewpoints;
we spend more, but have less;
we buy more, but enjoy it less.
We have bigger houses and smaller families;
more conveniences, but less time;
we have more degrees, but less sense;
more knowledge, but less judgment;
more experts, but more problems;
more medicine, but less wellness.
We drink too much,
smoke too much,
spend too recklessly,
laugh too little,
drive too fast,
get too angry too quickly,
stay up too late,
get up too tired,
read too seldom,
watch TV too much,
and pray too seldom.
We have multiplied our possessions, but reduced our values.
We talk too much, love too seldom and lie too often.
We've learned how to make a living, but not a life;
We've added years to life, not life to years.
We've been all the way to the moon and back,
but have trouble crossing the street to meet the new neighbor.
We've conquered outer space, but not inner space;
we've done larger things, but not better things;
we've cleaned up the air, but polluted the soul;
we've split the atom, but not our prejudice;
we write more, but learn less;
plan more, but accomplish less.
We've learned to rush, but not to wait;
we have higher incomes; but lower morals;
more food but less appeasement;
We build more computers to hold more information,
to produce more copies than ever, but have less communication;
we've become long on quantity, but short on quality.
These are the times of fast foods and slow digestion;
tall men, and short character;
steep profits, and shallow relationships.
These are the times of world peace, but domestic warfare;
more leisure and less fun;
more kinds of food, but less nutrition.
These are days of two incomes, but more divorce;
of fancier houses, but broken homes.
These are days of quick trips,
disposable diapers,
throwaway morality,
one-night stands,
overweight bodies,
and pills that do everything from cheer,
to quiet,
to kill.
It is a time when there is much in the show window
and nothing in the stockroom.
Indeed it's all true.
------------
http://www.ntu.edu.sg/home/hblim/passages/paradox.htm
Friday, November 23, 2007
Monday, November 19, 2007
War’s a drug and I got hooked on the carnage of Chechnya
The author of an acclaimed memoir of his life as a Russian soldier, tells how combat and the brutality inflicted on him by his own side claimed his soul.
He is an unlikely hero, as heroes often are. Arkady Babchenko, born in Moscow, the only son of a middle-class family, wanted to be a lawyer. But in November 1995, in his second year of law studies, he was conscripted into the Russian army and sent to Chechnya.
There, as a soldier, he encountered killings, beatings, starvation and sheer terror, all the brutalities and humiliations of war. Yet a few years later, after graduating, he was irresistibly drawn back to fight a second time in the bitter conflict in the tiny republic in the north Caucasus that was trying to break away from the Russian Federation; this time he went as a volunteer soldier.
“Maybe war is the strongest narcotic in the world,” he says. He cannot otherwise explain why he volunteered. “Maybe because my past was there, a large part of my life. It was as if only my body had returned from that first war, but not my soul.”
In Chechnya something happened to him as he stood on the edge of humanity: the war was dehumanising but it moulded his manhood. It taught him to be a survivor and, he says, it made him a completely different person.
Related Links
* One Soldier's War in Chechnya
* One Soldier's War in Chechnya
“When I returned from the war, my mother did not get back her son,” he says. “The Arkady Babchenko who went to war does not exist any more. I am a new man with different interests, different friends, a different outlook on life. I am not happy that the war happened in my life, but I have no regrets.”
Chechnya cost thousands of lives on both sides. Horror was everywhere. Round the main square of one village were large crosses upon which Russian soldiers had been crucified and castrated.
In retaliation Russian troops herded all the men they could find into the square, threw them down in piles and hacked at them. In half a day the whole village was castrated, then the battalion moved out.
But many of Babchenko's comrades were killed, not by their Chechen enemies but by the brutal conduct of their own Russian officer corps who starved and beat the young conscripts, suppressing everything that was human in them, destroying their personality and individuality, treating them, he says, no better than slaves.
That Babchenko, now 30, is alive at all to tell this grim tale is a constant puzzle to him. Tall and slender, with stubble on his chin, he has melancholy brown eyes that still have the stare of a man who has seen death at close hand. He suffers survivor’s guilt.
He was having coffee in Soho last week after readings at London’s South Bank Centre from his acclaimed book on the conflict, One Soldier’s War in Chechnya, and admits that while he does not miss war, without its extremes of highs and lows it has left everything else flat.
“You would imagine that this trip to Britain would impress me and have an impact on me,” he says. “Yet it is not happening. Of course war was the lowest point as well as the highest in my life. Because I had buried all my sensations there I am totally immune to anything now. I have slowly regained some of the feelings but not all of them, so my senses are not all there.”
He thinks he is suffering from the same emptiness described by some survivors from Stalin’s gulags – “this totally destructive, negative experience which wipes out everything in you”.
More and more these days, Babchenko is recognising that just being alive is a gift. He was a colleague of the late Anna Politkovskaya, the renowned Russian journalist and fierce critic of President Vladimir Putin’s policies in Chechnya, who was murdered just over a year ago. He remains deeply affected by her killing.
Politkovskaya, 48, had been working on an article about torture in Chechnya. Her still unsolved murder – she was found shot dead in the lift of her Moscow apartment block – had all the hallmarks of a contract killing.
Like Babchenko she worked for the newspaper Novaya Gazeta (New Newspaper). Although he says that he has not received death threats Babchenko, also an ardent Putin critic, admits that he now wonders how safe he is in a Russia where more than a dozen journalists have been murdered in recent years.
This and more makes him fear for Putin’s Russia. “I think it is hanging on a brink of an incredible precipice,” he says. “It has not yet fallen to the bottom. But it has not quite got out.
“Russia’s problem is that it is too big. It is also its saving grace. There is so much inertia because of its size that the upheavals and perturbations are absorbed by this enormous body of the country.
“I do think it will slowly emerge. You can see the signs of an emerging civil society but Putin is pushing Russia down, trampling it into the mud even further. That is the logic of his actions.”
But, he says, the West should not be frightened of Russia, for all the aggressive rhetoric from the Kremlin. “Rather we, not the West, should be the ones to be frightened of Russia. No Russian tanks will ever enter London, Paris or Berlin.”
Moreover, he says that the Russian army is no longer a good fighting army. It was at its most professional, well trained and combat experienced in 1989 when it withdrew from Afghanistan. But the best army officers resigned over Chechnya after 1995. They felt betrayed that the high command had sold them and gone into the conflict just to make money. There were no high ideals worth fighting for.
In Chechnya, he writes, thieving was both the foundation of the war and its reason for continuing: “Ours is an army of workers and peasants, reduced to desperation by constant underfunding, half crazed with hunger and a lack of accommodation, flogged and beaten by all, regardless of the consequences, regardless of badges of rank, stripped of all rights. This is not an army but a herd drawn from the dregs of the criminal masses, lawless apart from the dictates of jackals that run it.”
He tells how the soldiers sold cartridges, the drivers sold diesel oil, the cooks sold tinned meat and the battalion commanders sold the soldiers’ food, while the regimental commanders trucked away vehicle-loads of equipment and the generals stole the actual vehicles themselves. Many Russian soldiers, he believes, were killed by bullets and guns that their desperate comrades had sold to the Chechens for food.
One day, he writes, two recruits were caught selling ammunition through the wire to Chechen children for vodka and came in for specially sadistic treatment. After a savage beating they were put in a pit for hours, then taken out, suspended by a rope from a makeshift gallows for a day and a half, then they had their toes wired to a hand-driven electric generator.
“Afterwards the armaments officer unties the ropes and they fall to the ground like sacks of flour. They can’t stand or lift their swollen arms. Their hands have gone black and their fingers are twisted,” Babchencko writes.
These days Babchenko does not maintain links or contacts with the comrades he fought alongside: “I don’t want to see the people whom I saw being beasts and they don’t want to see me because we both experienced this animal state back then in Chechnya. We have gone our different ways and the things that unite us are not the best things in our lives by far.”
But, in another way, he cannot completely let go of his military past. He runs a hugely successful website and a magazine written by Russian war veterans – a copy of which he has brought with him to London – that tries to reflect, analyse and do something about the war that so changed their lives.
The cover of its latest issue is the cemetery at Bogorodskoye, 30 miles from Moscow, where all the unidentified Russian soldiers killed in Chechnya are buried after years stored in a refrigerator. The magazine and website are filled with their stories, diaries and songs.
Paradoxically it is for these things and not his remarkable book, which has been so acclaimed in the West, that Babchenko is best known in Russia. Here his book is being compared with All Quiet on the Western Front and the best writings on war. In Russia, he says, no one cares. Nor perhaps should they.
“In war,” he writes, “there is a breed of people who, like bears that have tasted human flesh for the first time, will keep killing to the end. They look normal enough, but when it comes down to it all they can think about is plunging themselves into another slaughter.”
If another war happens, he says that he will go back: “But I will not be armed. I will go as a journalist. This is my work now.”
------
http://entertainment.timesonline.co.uk/tol/arts_and_entertainment/books/article2889310.ece
He is an unlikely hero, as heroes often are. Arkady Babchenko, born in Moscow, the only son of a middle-class family, wanted to be a lawyer. But in November 1995, in his second year of law studies, he was conscripted into the Russian army and sent to Chechnya.
There, as a soldier, he encountered killings, beatings, starvation and sheer terror, all the brutalities and humiliations of war. Yet a few years later, after graduating, he was irresistibly drawn back to fight a second time in the bitter conflict in the tiny republic in the north Caucasus that was trying to break away from the Russian Federation; this time he went as a volunteer soldier.
“Maybe war is the strongest narcotic in the world,” he says. He cannot otherwise explain why he volunteered. “Maybe because my past was there, a large part of my life. It was as if only my body had returned from that first war, but not my soul.”
In Chechnya something happened to him as he stood on the edge of humanity: the war was dehumanising but it moulded his manhood. It taught him to be a survivor and, he says, it made him a completely different person.
Related Links
* One Soldier's War in Chechnya
* One Soldier's War in Chechnya
“When I returned from the war, my mother did not get back her son,” he says. “The Arkady Babchenko who went to war does not exist any more. I am a new man with different interests, different friends, a different outlook on life. I am not happy that the war happened in my life, but I have no regrets.”
Chechnya cost thousands of lives on both sides. Horror was everywhere. Round the main square of one village were large crosses upon which Russian soldiers had been crucified and castrated.
In retaliation Russian troops herded all the men they could find into the square, threw them down in piles and hacked at them. In half a day the whole village was castrated, then the battalion moved out.
But many of Babchenko's comrades were killed, not by their Chechen enemies but by the brutal conduct of their own Russian officer corps who starved and beat the young conscripts, suppressing everything that was human in them, destroying their personality and individuality, treating them, he says, no better than slaves.
That Babchenko, now 30, is alive at all to tell this grim tale is a constant puzzle to him. Tall and slender, with stubble on his chin, he has melancholy brown eyes that still have the stare of a man who has seen death at close hand. He suffers survivor’s guilt.
He was having coffee in Soho last week after readings at London’s South Bank Centre from his acclaimed book on the conflict, One Soldier’s War in Chechnya, and admits that while he does not miss war, without its extremes of highs and lows it has left everything else flat.
“You would imagine that this trip to Britain would impress me and have an impact on me,” he says. “Yet it is not happening. Of course war was the lowest point as well as the highest in my life. Because I had buried all my sensations there I am totally immune to anything now. I have slowly regained some of the feelings but not all of them, so my senses are not all there.”
He thinks he is suffering from the same emptiness described by some survivors from Stalin’s gulags – “this totally destructive, negative experience which wipes out everything in you”.
More and more these days, Babchenko is recognising that just being alive is a gift. He was a colleague of the late Anna Politkovskaya, the renowned Russian journalist and fierce critic of President Vladimir Putin’s policies in Chechnya, who was murdered just over a year ago. He remains deeply affected by her killing.
Politkovskaya, 48, had been working on an article about torture in Chechnya. Her still unsolved murder – she was found shot dead in the lift of her Moscow apartment block – had all the hallmarks of a contract killing.
Like Babchenko she worked for the newspaper Novaya Gazeta (New Newspaper). Although he says that he has not received death threats Babchenko, also an ardent Putin critic, admits that he now wonders how safe he is in a Russia where more than a dozen journalists have been murdered in recent years.
This and more makes him fear for Putin’s Russia. “I think it is hanging on a brink of an incredible precipice,” he says. “It has not yet fallen to the bottom. But it has not quite got out.
“Russia’s problem is that it is too big. It is also its saving grace. There is so much inertia because of its size that the upheavals and perturbations are absorbed by this enormous body of the country.
“I do think it will slowly emerge. You can see the signs of an emerging civil society but Putin is pushing Russia down, trampling it into the mud even further. That is the logic of his actions.”
But, he says, the West should not be frightened of Russia, for all the aggressive rhetoric from the Kremlin. “Rather we, not the West, should be the ones to be frightened of Russia. No Russian tanks will ever enter London, Paris or Berlin.”
Moreover, he says that the Russian army is no longer a good fighting army. It was at its most professional, well trained and combat experienced in 1989 when it withdrew from Afghanistan. But the best army officers resigned over Chechnya after 1995. They felt betrayed that the high command had sold them and gone into the conflict just to make money. There were no high ideals worth fighting for.
In Chechnya, he writes, thieving was both the foundation of the war and its reason for continuing: “Ours is an army of workers and peasants, reduced to desperation by constant underfunding, half crazed with hunger and a lack of accommodation, flogged and beaten by all, regardless of the consequences, regardless of badges of rank, stripped of all rights. This is not an army but a herd drawn from the dregs of the criminal masses, lawless apart from the dictates of jackals that run it.”
He tells how the soldiers sold cartridges, the drivers sold diesel oil, the cooks sold tinned meat and the battalion commanders sold the soldiers’ food, while the regimental commanders trucked away vehicle-loads of equipment and the generals stole the actual vehicles themselves. Many Russian soldiers, he believes, were killed by bullets and guns that their desperate comrades had sold to the Chechens for food.
One day, he writes, two recruits were caught selling ammunition through the wire to Chechen children for vodka and came in for specially sadistic treatment. After a savage beating they were put in a pit for hours, then taken out, suspended by a rope from a makeshift gallows for a day and a half, then they had their toes wired to a hand-driven electric generator.
“Afterwards the armaments officer unties the ropes and they fall to the ground like sacks of flour. They can’t stand or lift their swollen arms. Their hands have gone black and their fingers are twisted,” Babchencko writes.
These days Babchenko does not maintain links or contacts with the comrades he fought alongside: “I don’t want to see the people whom I saw being beasts and they don’t want to see me because we both experienced this animal state back then in Chechnya. We have gone our different ways and the things that unite us are not the best things in our lives by far.”
But, in another way, he cannot completely let go of his military past. He runs a hugely successful website and a magazine written by Russian war veterans – a copy of which he has brought with him to London – that tries to reflect, analyse and do something about the war that so changed their lives.
The cover of its latest issue is the cemetery at Bogorodskoye, 30 miles from Moscow, where all the unidentified Russian soldiers killed in Chechnya are buried after years stored in a refrigerator. The magazine and website are filled with their stories, diaries and songs.
Paradoxically it is for these things and not his remarkable book, which has been so acclaimed in the West, that Babchenko is best known in Russia. Here his book is being compared with All Quiet on the Western Front and the best writings on war. In Russia, he says, no one cares. Nor perhaps should they.
“In war,” he writes, “there is a breed of people who, like bears that have tasted human flesh for the first time, will keep killing to the end. They look normal enough, but when it comes down to it all they can think about is plunging themselves into another slaughter.”
If another war happens, he says that he will go back: “But I will not be armed. I will go as a journalist. This is my work now.”
------
http://entertainment.timesonline.co.uk/tol/arts_and_entertainment/books/article2889310.ece
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