Cries from Syria

The documentary on HBO called Cries from Syria is one I had to shut off and could not bear to keep watching, especially the scenes of young children and babies fighting for life subject to the effects of chemical weapons like Sarin.  Also to watch all of it would not serve my awareness, because at a certain point the misery and hell shown in it is exceeds my capacity to absorb it.

Cries from Syria spoke to me about the state of political law across the world and how unenforceable it is when a primary power can use political means to justify the unjustifiable.  The real acid test of the meaning of "war crimes" is if these crimes were enforceable. Clearly they are not and so to purely learn why this should be so, is a self-defeating objective.

For the Russian powerbrokers Syria like Crimea is a relationship that they will go to any limit to maintain, regardless of what their actions contravene.  Then I take pause for thought, that these current powerbrokers in having no regard for the horror inflicted on civillian populations, will also have no regard to think they are protecting their interests using a nuclear arsenal.

It is dumbfounding that political ideology continues to trump flagrant disrespect of international law in the 21st Century.  The ultimate challenge when faced watching a documentary such as "Cries from Syria" is to not get desensitized to the graphic images, because those who engage genocide or the murder of citizens have justified and reasoned this violence to themselves. 

We engage in group thinking when we watch documentaries like this and inevitably there are groups in Syria that created this situation that led to a backlash that became a civil war, that became a tactic of suffocating cities until its people surrendered to the power, a power which the powerbrokers call "liberation".  It is difficult for me to see the creation of hell as liberation.

In any war including a civil war, scenes of carnage and abuse can be used as propaganda to draw in support and groups like Daesh (ISIS) could not succeed if it did not first paint a picture of oppression and define the oppressor, but "Cries from Syria" is not a documentary that is propaganda but an account of how a global humanitarian crisis occurs, one we all are largely only get involved with, when it is far too late - it is as if we need absolute proof of inhumanity.

We have that proof but we exist in a global bureaucracy and powerbroker world where global economic interests and political interests outweigh the individual or human interest.  As Syria happens there are other regions of the world most have paid scant attention to, especially places like Congo.  This is not a state of powerlessness, it is a state of learned helplessness.

We have not become masters at politics otherwise there would be political solutions that offer 21st Century evolution.  Instead we look to 20th Century liberation because so much of our world is operating from political, religious, corporate and social ideologies that end up in some form of nihilism.  Liberation continues to be a political aspiration because we are not evolved.

What I am watching in this documentary is documentary makers who are evolved enough to create a window into what is happening in our world, which is the basis of a great documentary, but it also shows me how much as a global world we have yet to evolve.  It is clear to me that if the successive generations continue to operate as our generation did (and that includes boomers and millennials) then we have not evolved beyond our actual savage human interior.

So how do I personally learn from this without getting caught in the quicksand of logic or drown in an ocean of emotion?  Could the same thing happen where we are?  When the tools of liberation is the escalation of fear, we are all damned.  What does this teach me about my evolution and as evolved being?  That is my chief learning quest here.