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Good morning

It is horrifying to wake up to images of the alleged massacre in Iraq this morning. To those of us who are not Middle Eastern experts, the sudden shift in the balance of power, seems to have come out of the blue, adding to the impression that violence is random and senseless as different countries successively appear for a moment in the international spotlight and then disappear.

We find it hard to fathom the complexity of this conflict’s causes and Britian’s role is being hotly debated. Some, though, draw attention to what they see as Prime Minister Maliki’s polarising policies, in particular, for ignoring the Sunni population who lost their power base when Saddam Hussein was ousted.

However complex the situation in Iraq may be, a factor that many uprisings share is the fuel of the resentful experience of those on the losing side. For the temptation for the winners in any war is to exclude those they have defeated, not only from power, but also from prosperity, thus sowing the seeds of the next revolution.

I have just returned from a visit to Hiroshima – the first place in the world to experience a nuclear attack. Whilst there I visited the Museum of Contemporary Art and was fascinated by a video installation by Dennis Oppenheim entitled, ‘Two stage transfer drawing’ in which an artist draws on the naked back of another artist, who semi-automatically, reproduces the same design on the page in front of him. It left me thinking how tragically easy it is for us human beings unreflectively to recycle the violence done to us, and how hard it is for us to break the cycle and find another way.

By contrast, in front of the twisted metal of the A bomb dome – one of the few buildings in Hiroshima to survive the fire ball that engulfed the city killing perhaps as many as 140,000 people – there is a memorial to the dead: ‘Let all the souls here rest in peace for we shall not repeat the evil.’

Strikingly, the sentiment was not ‘they’ shall not repeat the evil, but ‘we’ - the people of Hiroshima recognizing the potential for evil in their own hearts and turning away from it; the prospect of nuclear apocalypse enabling them to realise the urgency of curbing their own visceral desire for revenge.

This truth was made shockingly personal by Jesus who told his listeners to love their enemies and pray for those who persecute them. Whether we feel that we are on the wrong side of history or that we are finally getting our way in life, this is a hard saying that runs against the grain. There are no easy answers. Yet unless we can find ways to contain and not repeat evils done to us, and, like the people of Hiroshima choose, instead, to live towards a vision of one human race, I wonder how else this terrible cycle of violence and exclusion might be broken?

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