In this column HUGH SELBY sets a warring scene of history, with a focus on the Middle East, then follows with a sobering generic warning, fictional for now, that looks at the seeds of ethnic and religious hatred planted today to what mankind may harvest in the future.  

Numbers, especially large numbers, swirl around us without much meaning, except to those who have a link within that number.

Those killed in natural disasters, mass transport disasters and war are hidden within the repeated zeros, save to those who grieve.

The exceptions that prove the rule are the events with emotional tugs: the child that drowns at the beach on a summer’s day, the guests in a bus that rolls over on the way to a wedding, a church congregation killed by gunfire or explosion: these situations attract attention to the individual victims.

But large numbers can matter, especially when those numbers are the fertile beds for seeds of violent revenge that can lie dormant for years.

Numbers that do and don’t matter

To the victors go not only the spoils but also control of the historical record.

During World War II around 40,000 Australian service men and women lost their lives. 

We have Anzac Day, Remembrance Day (this month), and we have the War Memorial honouring all those who served in our forces in any conflict to remind us. Winners (even if Gallipoli was an heroic disaster).

In the Australian frontier wars the same number, 40,000, is a midpoint estimate of Aborigines killed by colonials. A couple of thousand settlers were killed, too. That was all conveniently forgotten history, at least among the non-indigenous, until just a couple of decades ago. A convenient whitewash.

In the eight months of the German blitz bombing of the UK in World War II some 43,000 civilians were killed. That was appalling, but it is remembered.

The civilian German population was to pay a much heavier price. British air marshal Sir Aurthur “Bomber” Harris famously said: “The Nazis entered this war under the rather childish delusion that they were going to bomb everyone else, and nobody was going to bomb them. 

“They sowed the wind, and now they are going to reap the whirlwind.” 

That whirlwind was at least 350,000 deaths. Forgotten losers.

In early March 1945 the firebombing of Tokyo wiped out 100,000 civilians. Including the losses from the two atomic bombs at least a half million Japanese civilians perished from bombing. US general Curtis LeMay is believed to have said that he thought the Japanese deserved it. Total losers, but the atomic bomb victims are remembered – as a warning to others, not for themselves.

Following the break up of Yugoslavia, the deaths in the Bosnian War between 1992 and 1995 were at least 100,000, of which at least 60,000 were Muslims. That was ethnic cleansing. It was followed by successful prosecutions for war crimes.

Other religions supposedly free of incitement to violence

Making no mention of that recent event or its aftermath is a current bit of anti-Muslim propaganda on the internet. The intention is to blame Muslims, and only Muslims, for any and all “terrorism”.

Risably, in that propaganda piece other religions are now supposedly free of incitement to violence and live in harmony with one another. The Sikhs, the Irish, and the minorities in Myanmar and China might have another view. 

Just over a year ago the Palestinian Hamas (an acronym for “Islamic Resistance Movement”, but the word means “zeal, strength, bravery”) made the awful mistake of ignoring cause and effect. They slaughtered around 1200. The retaliation continues. The Israelis have lost nearly 800 while inflicting more than 40,000 deaths in Gaza. 

Our mainstream media, and the major political parties, have chosen to follow a narrow approach to commentary upon this current Middle East war. There is no attention, for example, to the manner in which Israel was created, the fate of the Palestinians thereafter, or the myriad of competing political, religious and commercial interests in that region.

That can be contrasted with the reporting of Putin’s invasion of the Ukraine. Some 80,000 Ukrainian troops have died. Russian losses are much higher, but that population is not discouraged. We know a lot more about the suffering of the Ukrainians than that of the Palestinians or the Russians.

Our country being a multicultural, immigrant-receiving nation it is inevitable that the intractable hatreds to be found not only in the Middle East, but also Africa, China, Myanmar and India will find tragic expression here.  

The following is a generic warning, fictional for now, intended to look beyond what is planted today to what may be harvested in years to come. Sow hatred today and blooms of death will follow. 

Unknown seeds, deathly blooms

Two pairs of data, one pair from each site, no problems. We ran that data every day and every day it told us the same confounding result.

The problem was the crossover, which we couldn’t unravel. Human remnant 1 from site A had the same source as human 1 from site B. That made no sense. What took the “no sense” to the unintelligible was that remnant 2 and human 2 also had a common source.

The two sources were not identical: did that make the problem easier or more difficult to solve? We didn’t know.

Site A was an intersection just down the road from a school. The traffic had gridlocked when a driver rammed a mobile speed camera van. That prevented the lunch delivery van reaching the school. It blew up in the intersection. We still don’t know why it was detonated. It took the crime scene people days to collect the remains, human and non-human. 

The analysis took months. I had no idea how often people carried their pets in their cars. The answer is “often”, leaving so much material to be collected, analysed, interpreted. What happened to those pets when their owners didn’t make it home? 

The traffic office started fielding complaints about that intersection not being open the very next day. I wondered whether traffic controllers, in the aftermath of terrorist attacks elsewhere, faced the same angry selfishness with indifference to the fate of others.

Site B was the inside of another school. This time they got into the main building carrying bags. Their mistake was to assume that because the reception was unattended as they walked inside that there was no security.

A woman of few words, but quick responses, shot them both, checked they were dead, raised the alarm and then said her prayers.

There was nothing unusual about the explosives. We’d seen both types before. It was the same with the devices intended to make sure that when the right moment came there would be a lot of death, and a lot of rubble.

Crowd killers are like most of us: if it works, use it again. That made it simple to identify what groups were behind each planned attack.

What wasn’t simple was accurately identifying the four dead. We had two bodies from site B and forensic remains at site A. Eventually we had names and we had aliases. We had friends, sport and gym team mates, even those they dated. What we didn’t have was unique identification of their origins, or when and how they came to enter this country. 

How old were any of these four when they arrived? Where had they been before they were sponsored to come here? 

They were unwavering servants of the cause in which they had been raised, committed unto death to destroying the enemy: heroes or terrorists depending upon accidents of place and time.

So soon as beliefs about superiority (whether that be race, caste or religion) trump other emotions then there is neither room nor reason for any calculus. 

There are no limits to the sacrifices to be made by innocents. Remember World War II . To even consider such tangential matters is to show a lack of commitment, a dangerous potential weakness where real time moral questions intrude. Besides, collateral slaughter attracts more attention. More than that it makes both the enemy and the wider community more afraid. That is justification enough.

The blindspot of short-term success though is to ignore what comes after that fear. Retribution comes in many forms (for example, carpet bombing, targeted assassinations, occupation, rendition and torture) and that may stretch from hours to years.

And after that retribution, especially when it targets the innocent? Where better to recruit for the next wave of violence than among the dispossessed who saw and heard their family members and friends blown to bits, or bleeding out, in the twisted wreckage of their homes. The pools of blood nourish pools of willing recruits.

Take that reason for vengeance, add a simple ideology (based on race, caste or religion), provide training and common cause. Voila, the perfect instrument for the next cycle of violence.

Well trained, resolute, courageous, invisible sleepers, waiting for the wakeup call from their puppeteers, leaders who have no qualms about sending their followers on kamikaze missions. 

We never solved the problems of the crossovers in the genetic pools among the four dead operatives. The two schools were tied to antagonistic religions, aligned with different race and caste. Each pair of operatives was associated with a group dedicated to vengeance upon that target religion.

We had hypotheses, not provable, about the movement of survivors to transit camps, then more permanent camps, followed by resettlement programs which may have been influenced by informal, corrupted processes, in which origin was buried. 

Some would say: “They’re dead, whoever they were, and good riddance!” Understandable but… every so often we hear of babies swapped at birth. We all grasp the unfairness of that. It seems likely that two of these “would-be killers” were unknowingly attacking their own. 

Seeds of despair, nurtured in hate, accidental transplants, deathly blooming, unremembered.