THE PLUMMETING HUMAN LIFE STOCK MARKET!

THEPLUMMETINGHUMANLIFESTOCKMARKET!

Clausewitz had remarked that. ‘the grammar (character) of war changes, while its logic (nature) stays the same.’ In the mutating dynamics of your hostilities, the ‘civilization of war’ aka the deliberate targeting of civilians
and civilian infrastructure appears to be the operating reality. As of date, there is a market crash in the price of human life …. a historical low, with civilian casualties in armed conflicts surging by approximately 40 percent to
72 percent. Not only that, the shift from military targets to ‘essential services’ including ‘weaponised starvation’ seems to be a mindful strategy to terrorise the population…victory at any cost! One may quote historical precedents and call it ‘inevitability’, but the truth lies closer to ‘conscious Ichoice’, where ‘proportionality’ is thrown to the wind. As it happens, the laws of war are often just paper constraints in the face of raw power, and war crimes prosecution- ‘victor’s justice!’

Existing data reveals a consistent decline in global peace over the last 17 years, and the ability to peacefully resolve conflicts even worse…..at a 50 year low. Strangely enough, while active conflicts are at their highest since
1946, peacekeeping currently accounts for less than half of one percent of global military spending. Today, Dag Hammarskjold’s famous quip that, ‘the UN was not created to take mankind to heaven, but to save humanity
from hell’, rings hollow for those facing hell!

Unfortunately, the very reason for which the veto power was granted to the P5, has become the achilles heel of the UN … the usage increase @ 240 percent in the last decade compared to 2006-2016, primarily on Gaza, Ukraine and Syria is a telling story…..green signaling ‘hell’ on innocent population and collectively accounting for over a million dead.

Interestingly, on 27 January 2026, the nuclear doomsday clock was moved to an unprecedented 85 seconds before midnight….the closest it has ever been since its inception in 1947; attributed to the ‘increasingly aggressive,
adversarial and jingoistic mind-set by world powers.’ Alexandra Bell, the President and CEO of the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists sums it up as, the ‘failure of leadership’.

Waging peace is fundamentally more difficult than fighting a war …. potentially requiring the greatest sacrifice of all …. one’s core beliefs.
Moreover, peace propositions require customization to specific contexts, a
‘process’ which cannot be ‘cut and paste’, unlike military/war proposals …. the difference between intangible trust and tangible metrics!

Anyhow, whatever be the reason, peace advocacy does lack the oomph of war journalism and, is certainly not as photogenic as the latter. Often times, one wonders why the military theorists who yell and yelp about war, cannot
produce the same decibel levels for peace……maybe it requires ‘more mind over matter’….. or perhaps the façade of ‘militarised masculinity’ separates the men from the boys! It is worth mentioning that peace is a biological necessity, not war, and as John Milton stated, ‘peace hath her victories no less renowned than war’!!

Jingoism, frequently described as ‘nationalism on steroids’, is widely recognized to have peaked in the late 19th century buildup to WWI and
surged, if not spiked, over the last decade…the ‘age of the strongman’ as Gideon Rachman calls it! The new pathological strain of ‘weaponised
jingoism’ revels in the ‘othering’ or ‘us vs them’ binary’; a tool of political clout for ‘internal scapegoating’ and quenching imperialistic aspirations, under the guise of national security/existential threat. Many such leaders
dot the horizon, though Trump is clearly in a league of his own; his public spat with the Pontiff and sacrilegious depiction as a Jesus like figure, points to a malignant narcissist with a ‘messiah complex’. Along the line, he
has also dethroned Benito Mussolini as the ‘most cartoonishly self obsessed and vapid egos in history’…. a ‘peacemaker creating his own
truth’!!

It is indeed a paradox that while humans @ Artemis II, the pinnacle of human potential, were finally seeing the ‘dark side of the moon’, they were simultaneously witnessing a ‘dark side of human nature’, threatening destruction of an entire civilization….blissful ignorance of the ‘structure’ of a modern nation state vis a vis the ‘soul’ of an ancient civilization. Octavia E.
Butler in her novel ‘Parable of the Talents’ had aptly remarked, ‘choose your leaders with wisdom and forethought …. to be led by a tyrant is to sell yourself and those you love into slavery, to be led by a liar is to ask to be told lies….’ Those who fail to do so, are doomed to suffer the consequences, or as it is said, the ‘cost’ of a bad leader is rarely confined to a boardroom it eventually leaks out into the world we all live in! !

The Brazilian educator and philosopher Paulo Freire in his book ‘Pedagogy of the Oppressed’ argues that because the oppressed have internalized the image of the oppressors, their initial aspiration is to become oppressors
themselves. One may argue the context, but it does have a familiar ring to it, and it rings loudly! Not only in Gaza, in other conflict zones as well, it is increasingly a ‘tragedy of human choice’ ……if you can’t change them, bomb them! Not only that, dehumanizing narratives have led to ‘market apathy’, where society is no longer moved by tragic news cycles, leading to a lack of
liquidity in humanitarian aid and, creating own rationale for ‘guiltless’ actions, ….. hauntingly reminiscent of the Nazis labeling the Jews (!!) as
‘untermenschen’ (sub human) to justify their genocide in the holocaust.

The current global dynamics has unsettling similarities to the pre-WWI era. It would be prudent to recall that by 1918, the ‘greatness trap’ had led to the collapse of four empires, 20 million deaths, a global economy in ruins and
an inversion of their societies. Therein lies a lesson for the world! Lives when treated as disposable commodities in the pursuit of profit or power,society itself begins to erode. The human ‘bear market’ needs a societal
and ethical correction, involving strengthening human values, ensure accountability and implementing systemic changes to re-centre human dignity…..that will be the true measure of our civilization!

The eminent Indian poet and film lyricist Sahir Ludhianvi had a point in what he said over six decades back, ‘jang to khud hi ek masla hai, jang kya maslon ka hal degi; khoon bahane se aman aata toh duniya kabse aaba dhoti.’ (war itself is a problem; how can war solve problems; if bloodshed brought peace, the world would have been prosperous long ago). Amen!

DISCLAIMER;

(Major General Rajiv Edwards, VSM** (retd) is a historical researcher and
commentator on societal issues. He is apolitical. Views expressed are
personal.