A tortoise named Timothy was found by Captain John Guy Courtenay-Everard on HMS Queen in 1854. Serving as a mascot throughout the Crimean war, Timothy was the oldest veteran of that war when she died in 2004. {In spite of the name, Timothy was a female]
Roughly quoted from Wikipedia as at 28/10/24
Timothy was obviously treated very well by her English owners. Let us at least be grateful for that.
As Jeffrey Sachs points out in a long but extremely interesting interview, European nations (and their American offshoots) have been at war with each other ever since the early middle ages. We have an attitude problem, it would seem. Look, instead, to Confucius, he suggests: The Chinese were basically peaceful until the odious British opium pushers turned up on their doorstep.
We could be peaceful too. After all, most of us who cast our ballots every few years don’t want wars. Jeffrey Sachs maintains that humans are not inherently evil, just misguided. We have been ill-advised by our own philosophers, he explains. We need to change tack, change priorities. And we need to do so in a jiffy. The heading of the interview I am referring to – and I shall repeat the link for good measure – is “Tell Your Government – Stop These Wars”.
See not least what he tells us about how the USA, with monumental hubris, has left the various nuclear arms control agreements. It is truly terrifying.
Now the Crimean war (1853-1856) was just one of innumerable futile wars waged under the pretext of “maintaining the balance of power”. In practice this meant that gentlemen of a certain class scuffling for ascendency at the national level and beyond, forced their defenceless subjects to sacrifice their lives on battlefields for principles that had nothing to do with domestic prosperity and well-being, principles that were in effect bunkum.
And this is still going on, except that now women of a certain class are also … I am tempted to use a vulgar expression, but I think my point will be understood without it.
Back then, most leading minds of the day did not even think to question the justification of triggering a bloodbath to prove that my daddy is bigger and stronger than yours. Just think how misguided we were! Do you think we are any less misguided now? What will people say of us a hundred years hence, assuming that the human species is still around then.
All this writhing in serpents’ nests to get to the top ultimately runs in tandem with a corresponding race to the bottom, morally. Who is willing to commit the most abject of crimes. Which nation has the least regard for international law and humanity?
We have witnessed, on the cusp of WWI, the Armenian Genocide, on the cusp of WWII, the Holocaust, and on the cusp of WWIII, the Palestinian Genocide.
One of the dangers of this race to the bottom is that when our governments are complicit in such ghastly acts, when our governments disallow public outrage at these ghastly acts, when our governments ensure impunity for these ghastly acts, our governments are destroying the moral fibre of the societies they govern. I shudder to think of the consequences.
We are not born evil, no, but we can easily become very evil, indeed, as we see in the film “Investigating war crimes”.
Tortoises do not become evil.