Götterdämmerung

It may come as no surprise to you, but we've been at it for over four billion years. Ever since the first nucleotides came to blows whilst enjoying a tasty primordial soup; jostling over who got the phosphorus or the carbon or the hydrogen atoms; and it's never stopped since.

As we developed, into what has been laughingly described as more sophisticated life forms, we got a little more creative. When the Clactonian flint knappers were caught napping 400,000 years ago, they were duffed up and their flints nicked. The Neanderthal tool flakers lost their flakes, the Minoan bronze age people lost their bronze and the Aboriginals lost everything, including their lives and their continent. A whimsical skip through time I grant you, but a clear illustration of how, from the earliest amoeba to the apex homo sapien, we casually extinguish each other to get what we want.

We know all this because most of it is recorded on cave walls or illuminated velum or YouTube and we can read, often in graphic detail, of the horrors we inflicted upon each other in furtherance of our quest and more importantly, how we justified what we did. And this is the really interesting bit, because we seem to have boiled it down to three main causes; religion, politics or greed. Three reasons we have come to accept, as a species, as reasonable grounds for genocide.

It took some time to recognise our failings, because it wasn't until 1837 that the German philosopher Hegel pointed out that the one lesson history teaches us, is that we never learn anything from history. We allow the same tacit motives to justify our seemingly unquenchable lust for fatal conflict.

Today, as tensions rise across the world driven by the crass stupidity of an assortment of psychopathic tyrants, the pattern remains unchanged. Nationalism, economics and the unstoppable lust for material essentials continue to push us towards ever more conflict. We claim self-defence, moral superiority or religious indignation in the full
knowledge that prolonged suffering is always the inevitableconsequence.

Tacit acceptance of these justifications is the tool we employ to anaesthetise ourselves from the horrific consequences of what we do. Things so unthinkable and so traumatic that we could never tolerate them without an opiate, an analgesic from the unbearable pain. We swallow the evident acceptance of our forebears, the narcotic which
allows us to sleepwalk through history with indifference. Then, under the influence, we proclaim proudly how now more wise, more sophisticated, more evolved, we will never make the same mistakes again. And the narcotic does its job, as we forget every lesson ever learned in preparation for more of the same. Collective memory is short lived, economic interests dominate and war is often very profitable indeed for the warmongers and the tyrants. So, how do we dismount this whirligig of human absurdity, rescind this executive ordered death warrant?

We drag this curse from its sleep and we employ a new word, an important word which properly reflects the destructive nature of the human condition. A word with sharp edges that will sit uneasily in the mind, refusing to let us forget....the word Götterdämmerung. It's a hell of a word you must agree, meaty and heavy and significant and created by a nation with more than a hundred and fifty types of sausage and a history of quite easily forgetting. Ignore it at your peril. Götterdämmerung, the end of the world through catastrophic violence wrought by the constant warring of the gods. The fading light before a total darkness created by those who couldn't help
themselves.

We should take this word and leave it in the secure hands of a new Ministry of Neverforgetting, staffed by the relentless, whose job it would be to ensure that we do just that....we never forget. Delegates around the table in Moscow or Kiev or Jerusalem would wear Götterdämmerung T shirts and scribble notes to each other with
Götterdämmerung biros. They would dine amicably in the Ring Cycle
Restaurant, reminding each other of the horrors we casually inflict on ourselves in spite of the lessons so painfully recorded. And then, when sense triumphed, they would toast their unanimous treaties with Götterdämmerung spring water, the water which quenched the fires and purified the world.