“Where does it all begin? History has no beginnings, for everything that happens becomes the cause or pretext for what occurs afterwards, and this chain of cause and pretext stretches back to the palaeolithic age, when the first Cain of one tribe murdered the first Abel of another. All war is fratricide, and there is therefore an infinite chain of blame that winds its circuitous route back and forth across the path and under the feet of every people and every nation, so that a people who are the victims of one time become the victimisers a generation later, and newly liberated nations resort immediately to the means of their former oppressors. The triple contagions of nationalism, utopianism and religious absolutism effervesce together into an acid that corrodes the moral metal of a race, and it shamelessly and even proudly performs deeds that it would deem vile if they were done by any other.”

from Birds Without Wings by Louis de Bernieres, a wonderful epic historical novel I just finished.

I couldn’t have said it better myself. No, really I couldn’t. I’d love to be able to write like that. But, he makes a very good point, and one that I have looked for a way to say without offending anyone for some time.

All the world conflicts going on today, Jews against Palestinians, Catholics against Protestants, Christians against Muslims, etc. etc. have been going on for years, decades, even centuries. A big, big example that I see here is the Holocaust happening, then the Jews get Israel, national pride mixed with religious and ethnic pride, etc. etc. And now we hear stories of Palestinian civilians being bombed and shot at by Israeli soldiers. What happened here? The oppressed are now the oppressors. These things go back and forth, until you can’t tell who did what to who. Jews and Muslims are truly brothers, both claiming to be descended from Abraham.

Another great example is the communists in Russia, killing the czar and his family, and then the dictators proceeded to live and rule like czars themselves.

Want another one? Ok, the “Founding Fathers” making speeches, writing pamphlets, and fighting and dying to be free from tyranny. And their descendants proceeded to tyrannize other countries eventually. We still have our nose stuck in where it doesn’t belong.

Birds Without Wings tells the story of a small town in Turkey before and during World War I and the civil war in Greece, including the swapping of “Greeks” and “Turks”. People were routed from their homes and forced to march to another country they had never seen, to speak a language they didn’t know, based soley on their religion. Before this time, the Turkish town (and undoubtedly hundreds of others just like it) had hosted families of various brands of Christianity and Islam, many of whom intermarried with each other. De Bernieres tells the story from the point of view of potters, merchants, soldiers, military officers, and history. It is a rich patchwork of individual, personal tales (some fictional, and some pulled from history) that come together to form a heartbreaking, beautiful picture of Turkey before and after the war.

I’ve never been to Turkey, nor do I know any Turkish people, and even if I did, I would see them after the fact of the migrations; but the book does ring with the feeling of truth. No one in particular is blamed as the cause of these terrible things (including a deadly march of Armenians – who were themselves not entirely blameless as a people, although individually not guilty of anything, other than perhaps religious bigotry like us all), but rather it is shown that as in all sorts of historical events fate and governments has convened to force individuals into warfare, poverty, struggle, and hatred against other people. Nationalism is a type of unity that divides. It creates a “them versus us” attitude, especially dangerous when the perceived “nation” exists within an established country or empire. The mud, bullets, and blame start flying, and the only one who can make sense of it is the historian or the godlike omniscient reader of a book like this who can see the whole story from all sides, without taking a side.

Who is your perceived enemy? Is is someone far across the ocean? Or the immigrant two houses down from you that you see as “taking jobs”? What would happen if all these “aliens” were sent home? What if all the Joses and Pedros were sent South? Not to mention Abdul, Hans, Chang, et al. Well, IMHO, we’ve seen the results of that in the last few months. They weren’t forced to march with no food or water, but they were often ripped from loving American families for no reason other than too much bureaucracy and someone, somewhere not doing their jobs. Who’s to blame? Who knows, really. According to de Bernieres, something similar happened in Turkey. The Christians were mostly business people, doctors, bankers, and so on. They ran things, while the Muslim Turks did the dirty work…when the Christians left, Turkey, once part of a rich empire, was in poverty.

Why do these things happen? How do these age old conflicts keep going? How can we let our governments push us around and destroy us? de Bernieres has these words to say, written in a letter from a Muslim Turk to his friend whose families were Christians and thus considered “Greeks” and forced to leave and never return.

“You and I once fancied ourselves as birds, and we were very happy even wen we flapped our wings and fell down and bruised ourselves, but the truth is that we were birds without wings. You were a robin and I was a blackbird, and there were some who were eagles, or vultures, or pretty goldfinches, but none of us had wings.

For birds with wings nothing changes; they fly where they will and they known nothing about borders and their quarrels are very small.

But we are always confined to earth, no matter how much we climb to the high places and flap our arms. Because we cannot fly, we are condemned to do things that do not agree with us. Because we have no wings we are pushed into struggles and abominations that we did not seek, and then, after all that, the years go by, the mountains are levelled, the valleys rise, the rivers are blocked by sand and the cliffs fall into the sea.”

Where we, being wingless, are born, defines who we are, and what we belong to. It determines who has rights, and who is a slave. It determines who has health care and clean water, and who lives in a sheet metal shack making a dollar a week. Where we are born determines who can come and go, and who is sent “home”. But the blackbirds and the robins cross these borders, fences, rivers and other barriers without a thought. Oh to have wings and leave it all behind.