“Is it true that human beings are fundamentally cruel?

Is the experience of cruelty the only thing we share as a species? Is the dignity that we cling to nothing but self-delusion,

masking from ourselves the single truth: that each one of us is capable of being reduced to an insect, a ravening beast,

a lump of meat? To be degraded, slaughtered—is this the essential of humankind, one which history has confirmed as inevitable?”

—Han Kang, Human Acts

In the pages of this book, you wander across the provincial office and the municipal gymnasium along with Dong-ho, a young boy, who helps identify and tag the corpses of murdered protestors. Kang, the first South Korean woman to win the Nobel Prize for her poetic prose, documents the trauma of war in her country and stresses the universality of violence. Her novel, Human Acts, is based in Gwangju, where Kang hails from. Fiction is never without truth.

“The Cambodian government’s killed another 2 million of theirs. There’s nothing stopping us from doing the same,” a character says in Human Acts.

Violence is our past, present and future.

“It happened in Gwangju just as it did on Jeju Island, in Kwantung and Nanjing, in Bosnia, and all across the American continent when it was still known as the New World, with such a uniform brutality it’s as though it is imprinted in our genetic code,” Kang writes in the same novel that is about the 1980 Gwangju Uprising and the death of the young boy Kang Dong-ho.

Perhaps it is true that it is in our genetic code. This isn’t an easy book to read.

Every day, we encounter images of people dying, starving, fleeing home and losing hope.

Every day, we see children looking for the dead. Or children’s dead bodies strewn across hospitals and cities.

Every day, we hear sirens on television and phone screens. They have disclaimers saying, “sensitive content,” and we hear and see and scroll on.

Every day, we forget that there are endless wars.

This relentless conflict has been barbaric and seems to only prolong and never really end. 

Israel has declared it a zero-sum game when it comes to Palestine and in the ruins of places bombed, you can see the destruction that war brings. Ukraine continues to be bombed.

Modern warfare is a complicated affair with many interests intersecting.

Africa seems to be forever in a state of war.

How do wars begin and how do they end? How do we define the ending? What happens in the aftermath?

Last year, India won the title at home, making them the only team to bag four titles in the history of the tournament.

Last year, India won the title at home, making them the only team to bag four titles in the history of the tournament.

Why do we live in a prolonged state of war? What does that living account for, as an audience, a participant and a perpetrator? What happens to those who suffer? How do we tell their stories? Do their stories even matter? How does one return to a besieged place? How long can one flee their homeland?

What does it do to us? Does numbness begin with it?

These are questions that we who write and read often grapple with. 

Many conflicts have now become “frozen conflicts” that might erupt again. Many are dealing with the aftermath.

The inertia in wars is also because of economic interests and stronger countries can extend the duration of war in order to make the other party come to the point of defeat. They can starve a place. They can even stop soap from reaching people. It has all happened. We move on. That’s what we are taught. Self-care is the new name for apathy.

All wars generate hierarchy.

War isn’t an abstraction. It is about layered histories and the lives of people despite the fact that now there is a call to make wars more humane. But how can any war be humane?

Last year, Outlook magazine dedicated its anniversary issue to Palestine and we want to mark the end of this year and the beginning of the next, with a reflection on wars and why we live in a state of perpetual war.

“War is never elsewhere,” we wrote in the issue.

I stuck a poem on my wall. That’s how we began. By moving through time zones and places. This is that poem:

Corpse

—By Bosnian poet and journalist Semezdin Mehmedinović in Sarajevo Blues

“We slowed down at the bridge

to watch dogs by the Miljacka

tearing apart a human corpse 

then we went on

nothing in me has changed

I listened to the snow bursting under the tires 

like teeth crunching an apple

and I felt a wild desire to laugh

at you 

because you call this place hell 

and you flee from here convinced 

that death beyond Sarajevo does not exist.” solare