On Life “74” “I Do Not Wish To Learn Chess”

Somebody once voiced: “I have realized that hatred expends a great deal of time and energy; and I prefer to redirect that energy towards good and positive work.” As we cast our eyes on the journey of history of human life, we learn lessons that add to our experiences, if we have not experienced them first hand along life’s path!

Which of us has not heard of the Armenian holocaust during the First World War, during which Armenian villages were annihilated on the pretext that they were cooperating with the Russians and Armenian rebels?! On 24/4/1915, hundreds of the most prominent Armenian personalities in Istanbul were arrested and executed in the cities’ streets. Then Armenian families fled certain decease in the journeys of death through the deserts of the Levant!

In the year 1937, the Nanjing massacre took place after the city fell into the hands of the Japanese army, which undertook barbaric acts against civilians, for on 19/12/1937, Father James M. MacCallum penned in his journal: “I don’t know: when will this come to an end? Never in my life have I laid eyes on such barbarism!” Moreover, John Rabi, the German author and businessman, a member of the Nazi party who had passed through Nanjing (China’s former capital), having witnessed this massacre of the Japanese Imperial Army, wrote in his journal, “On one of my tours of the city, there were corpses strewn at every 100 or 200 meters, they seemed to have taken a bullet to the back from the rear, meaning that they were murdered as they attempted to escape. With my very eye, I witnessed the Japanese army looting commercial stores.”

During the Second World War (1939 – 1945), the Jews in Europe were subjected to a mass genocide by the Nazi government and some of its allies, with the purpose of ethnically cleansing them. Those massacres were later known as the Jewish Holocaust.

While in Egypt, we cannot forget the massacre of the Citadel in 1811, aiming to be rid of the Mamelukes, and the massacre of Alexandria in 1882, the victims of which were 250 Egyptians and 50 Europeans, the massacre of Denshway in 1906, and the massacre of Shakid which ended the lives of 250 Egyptian soldiers, slain and some of whom were buried alive at the hands of the Shakid military campaign led by the Israeli officer Binyamin Ben-Eliezer.

There still remain many of these painful fingerprints on the pages of human history, as symbols of shame on the human conscience! Life is to survive as a human along with everyone and by everyone. These are the principles that grant true humans the world in its entirety. For instance, the leader Gandhi still remains an icon of the meaning of human love, the meaning of life, as he loved life for everybody, constantly repeating: 
“I have never wished to learn to play chess, for a reason none of my friends formerly understood and which they now comprehend: that I do not wish to kill my army and soldiers and all on the base of the chessboard, so that the king can live!” Truly, “Standing on your own two feet grants you a small subsection of this world, but standing on your principles grants you the entire world!”

General Bishop and President of the Coptic Orthodox Cultural Center