Let the Lights Shine

 This is what you could call an aspirational piece which came about because it so happened that today is the official celebration of Diwali or Deepavali, the Hindu Festival of Light. This ancient festival is the celebration of the triumph of the light over darkness.

 

 Celebrating the moment when light overcame darkness

By coincidence, this was also Remembrance Sunday, the day in which the world marked the end of the First World War. This was a pivotal moment in world history because nobody had seen a war as bloody and as miserable and as destructive as World War One. The Western World (which was at the time the centre of global decisions) was shocked and various leaders like US President Woodrow Wilson vowed that they would do everything to ensure that the world would never see anything as destructive as a World War. You could say that the ending of World War One was the first major instance in modern history where global leaders saw the light and tried to avoid going back to the darkness of war.

 

 Was this the First Festival of Light?

Whilst history shows that the world leaders who vowed to avoid another war as bad as the First World War would fail in their efforts, the world seemed to get the message after the Second World War. For all its failures, the United Nations has done what its predecessor, the League of Nations failed to do – it has endured and whilst the UN has by no means been super successful, it has help keep things under control. In Europe, which was the continent where both World Wars started, there was the creation of the European Economic Community (EEC), which would eventually lead to the European Union. The original idea behind the EEC was simple – ensure that the France and Germany would tie their economic interest so closely together that they would never go to war (Franco-German rivalry being at the heart of both World Wars).

For all its faults, the EU has succeeded brilliantly in its original aim. Today, nobody living in Western Europe can conceive of a war breaking out on the continent. Two generations ago, nobody could have conceived of Western Europe being at peace for any period of time.

It would seem that humanity valued light over darkness. Sure, there’ve been plenty of nasty conflicts around the world. I’m old enough to remember when we cheered the end of the Cold War but then we the daily news became about the slaughter in the former Yugoslavia and Rwanda. However, by and large, the conflicts that we’ve seen since 1945 have been contained and as awful as they’ve been, they didn’t get worse.

However, things look like they could be changing. Today, you have the Russians in Ukraine. Suddenly, the thought of a great power conflict breaking out has stopped looking so remote. Then, if the Russian invasion of Ukraine wasn’t bad enough, you had the October 7, 2023 attacks on Israel, which has led to the even more brutal Israeli response in the Gaza strip.

Slaughter, which was once a word that people dreaded saying, has become sanitized and part of everyday speech. Politicians who never saw day in combat have discovered that they can appear manly (they usually are) if they talk tough and send the troops out to die. So, here’s the question, why do we seem to be heading back into the darkness of the 1920s and 1930s?

I guess there are a multitude of reasons and those are best left to the intelligentsia to list out. However, I would argue that the problem is that we’ve become so used to living in the light that we forget what the darkness looked like or that darkness looks and feels attractive or at least something to be glamourized. To many people with the wrong outlook in life are getting into positions were playing with lives seems like fun rather than serious business.

Take the Israeli example. We’ve gone from Yitzhak Rabin to Bibi Netanyahu. Mr. Rabin got us the Oslo Accords. Bibi built his entire career on condemning the Oslo Accords to history. While Bibi Netanyahu did serve in a combat unit, he was never a “real solider” in the same way that Mr. Rabin was. Yitzhak Rabin fought in wars. He knew what the darkness looked like and so he worked to bring the light.

We need leaders who have been in the darkness because they know the difference between light and dark. People like Mr. Rabin in Israel knew that he had to sell certain sacrifices to ensure Israel would be safe. In Rwanda there was a darkness and you had a leader who knew what that darkness looked like, and so, whilst Rwanda is not a rich country, it’s been trying to get into the light.

We need leaders who know the darkness and know they have to get us into the light. The object of Remembrance Sunday is to ensure we don’t get back to the dark – it’s something we should commemorate once a year so that we don’t have the need to make it a regular event.