We’re all damaged in some way or another and who can tell how our lives would be different if our childhoods had enjoyed a different path. I have just finished reading The Bureau and The Mole, an efficient account of FBI agent Robert Hanssen?s vast and continuous betrayal of American Secrets that lead to his sentencing to life imprisonment this week. David A. Vise, the author, concludes that if Hanssen’s father had not been the abusive family figure who failed to ever encourage his son then maybe Hanssen Jnr would never have felt the need to flaunt authority in later life with such damaging results. The book states that because the Russians were handed information by Hanssen that revealed American plans and procedures for survival after nuclear attack the Russians realised they could win a Nuclear War! From a Russian standpoint the theory of Mutually Assured Destruction was irrelevant. Distill this information into its simplest form and you get: Man beats child – Russians believe Nuclear War winnable.
This week the Israelis and the Palestinians are still slogging it out. We (the US and the UK) are still lobbing grenades in caves in Afghanistan. On the Indian and Pakistani borders a million troops are massing pissed off at each other and ready to fight. This weekend the Colombians are having a General Election in which one of the candidates is espousing all out war against the terrorists who plague his land.
And then I read this sobering quote from this week’s Time Magazine from the director of Gaza City’s psychiatric hospital: “We don’t have a single child in Gaza who knows what it?s like to be a normal child.”
How many future Stalins and Hitlers and Hanssens are we breeding at this very moment? May the peacemakers win and may the warmongers fail.