War’s Unexpected Positivity

Kashmir Valley -Image Courtesy (Wikipedia) 

Mark Manson in his book, The Subtle Art of Not Giving a Fuck, talks about his month-long stay in Russia, where his Anglo-Western values where pulverised from all sides. The frank and honest expressions of the Russians were new to his polite, proper and well-mannered education and upbringing. But he was quick to realise that these honest expressions were based on values different from his own with a history of war and famine and a lot of Holodomor experience. He grew comfortable with it and also asked his Russian teacher about it. These were the Russian teacher’s words:

“Having lived under communism for so many generations, with little to no economic opportunity and caged by a culture of fear, Russian society found the most valuable currency to be trust. And to build trust you have to be honest. That means when things suck, you say so openly and without apology. People’s displays of unpleasant honesty were rewarded for the simple fact that they were necessary for survival — you had to know whom you could rely on and whom you couldn’t, and you needed to know quickly. But, in the “free” West, there existed an abundance of economic opportunity that it became far more valuable to present yourself in a certain way, even if it was false than to actually be that way. Trust lost its value. Appearances and salesmanship became more advantageous forms of expression. Knowing a lot of people superficially was more beneficial than knowing a few people closely.

That is why it became the norm in Western cultures to smile and say polite things even when you don’t feel like it, to tell little white lies and agree with someone whom you don’t actually agree with. This is why people learn to pretend to be friends with people they don’t actually like, to buy things they don’t actually want. The economic system promotes such deception.

The downside of this is that you never know, in the West, if you can completely trust the person you’re talking to. Sometimes this is the case even among good friends or family members. There is such pressure in the West to be likeable that people often reconfigure their entire personality depending on the person they’re dealing with.”

I connected another of Mark Manson’s anecdotes with the above.

He writes: In the 1950s, a Polish psychologist named Kazimierz Dabrowski studied World War II survivors and how they'd coped with traumatic experiences int he war. This was Poland, so things had been pretty gruesome. These people had experienced or witnessed mass starvation, bombings that turned cities to rubble, the Holocaust, the torture of prisoners of war, and the rape and/or murder of family members, if not by the Nazis, then a few years later by the Soviets.

As Dabrowski studied the survivors, he noticed something both surprising and amazing. A sizeable percentage of them believed that the wartime experiences they’d suffered, although painful and indeed traumatic, had actually caused them to become better, more responsible, and yes, even happier people. Many described their lives before the war as if they’d been different people then: ungrateful for and unappreciative of their loved ones, lazy and consumed by petty problems, entitled to all they’d been given. After the war, they felt more confident, more sure of themselves, more grateful, and unfazed by life’s trivialities and petty annoyances.

Obviously, their experiences had been horrific, and these survivors weren’t happy about having had to experience them. Many of them still suffered from the emotional scars the lashings of war had left on them. But some of them had managed to leverage those scars to transform themselves in positive and powerful ways.

I couldn’t help thinking about my home state of Jammu, Kashmir and Ladakh, in North India. The legacy of the inhuman and brutal Partition of 1947 with the creation of Pakistan (the first Islamic State) and the subsequent wars of ’65, ’71 and ’98, the aftermath of the 1979 Iranian Revolution and the Soviet-Afghan War, three decades of conflict, a proxy war, and armed insurrection of the 90s and the new millennium not to mention centuries of invasion, pillage and internal strife were bound to create generations of trauma in the people. Could I apply Dabrowski’s observations to my people? Should I?

Will they in the next few decades also become ‘better, more responsible, and happier people’? Will they recognise and self-reflect the harm they have been doing to their own? Will there be a course correction? Will there be atonement for the ethnic cleansing of Kashmiri Pandits, the agnostics, the seculars who had to resort to exile in order to survive? Many didn’t even see their homeland before death and had to be buried or burnt on the pyres far away from home and hearth. Can there be forgiveness for this? Can any form of Islamic supremacist ideology ever replace what was once a very peaceful knowledgeable and vibrant kingdom?

These are questions that haunt me like the ghosts I walk with….

https://medium.com/@arshiaunis/wars-unexpected-positivity-e20e63e252ec