What would I kill for?

I was a Russian soldier. Rewind to the Second World War. We were advancing through a winter forest: tall black trees spiking up through a fresh white snowfall. I could hear our tanks rumbling and clanking behind me, and the shouts of the men of my unit by my side. Then the shooting started. I was hit high up on my torso between the chest and shoulder and I fell back into the white snow. The noisy battle moved on past me. My friend knelt down beside me, and for a moment, without a word being spoken, I felt the deep love between us: the love of two kindred souls journeying together for a time. Then I started to leave: floating upwards into the misty white, away above the tips of the reaching trees.

That was just one of my wartime experiences in the past-life regressions I have experienced under hypnosis. In another past life, lived during the 10th century in southern England, I was enjoying a peaceful agricultural existence, when I was drafted into the army of a local nobleman and taken off to the front. My keenest experience of that war was not wanting to be there. I nearly died when a horse fell on me during battle. At some point, I simply got up, turned my back on what I recognised was someone else’s fight, and walked away, back home. In that life I died an old man in my thatch-roofed farmhouse, peacefully, surrounded by my family.

With all the revolutionary energy stirring in north Africa at the moment, there is part of me wanting to be there, to be a part of it. I can relate to those British aristocrats who joined the international brigades during the Spanish Civil War – prepared to fight for their socialist ideals. I was even ever so slightly disappointed when my friend and his family were evacuated from Cairo at the height of the recent uprising there – but I guess I’ve still got a hangover from the recent 2010 World Cup slogan: “Will you be able to say ‘I was there’?”

It is one thing to get revved up and passionate about a particular ideal, and it is quite another to take up arms for it. It is one thing to watch the beauty of people-power in action while bunkered down safely on my couch (and was there ever a more romantically-named uprising than The Jasmine Revolution of Tunisia?), and quite another to be huddled in your house while the torrents of hyped-up protesters flood past your door – will they pass by and leave you be, or not?

There are members of my immediate family who have experienced war and guns a little more up close and in person. My mother was a 4-year old living in Holland during the Second World War. She remembers it vividly, but speaks very little of it. My eldest brother spent the best part of two years ‘on the border’ in what was then South West Africa, the ranking officer for a team of San trackers, in the guerilla war against SWAPO. He speaks not a word about it. I have been on the receiving end of a pointed gun too: in my bed in Johannesburg, during a night-time robbery. I know in my skin that there is no romanticism in these experiences.

As a youngster growing up on our farm in the Eastern Cape, guns were a part of my world. I often stalked the orchards with a pellet gun, doing my best to keep the fruit-eating birds at bay. (While at school I wrote a story about this experience: I Shot a Dove.) Farm-life was full of animal killing. During pumpkin season, the porcupines just couldn’t help themselves but trespass into our vegetable garden. And if they woke the dogs and us at night, we would be after them in our pyjamas, to bludgeon them to death where we ran them down. (I can still hear the hollow rattling of the quills.) Sometimes a rogue lynx would make merry in our flock of sheep – often killing four or five lambs in a night. Then we would call in the pack-hounds, and for a few days our valleys would resound with their baying before they eventually treed the suspect, and the huntsman would execute him with a shot.

These killings could still be justified as protecting our crops and our flocks. But what of the sport-hunting? What about the springhares, the rabbits, the Egyptian geese, the rhebuck and the kudu? I will never forget shooting my first (and last) kudu. It was one of the few times I carried and fired a “real” rifle. I can’t remember whether it was our .270 or our 30-06 that day, but either way, I remember that the gun fired with a real intent that I could feel in my shoulder. That smell of the gun oil lingers. I remember the difference in sound that the shot made when it found its mark. I cannot pinpoint what the difference was, but I knew instinctively from the sound that the bullet had hit home. I also knew immediately that this hunting with “real” guns wasn’t for me. (Two years after we moved on from the farm, I was far enough removed to distill my feelings into a short-story about springhare hunting, entitled Catharsis.)

So how to reconcile the stirrings I have to support revolutions and causes (I am a regular Avaaz contributor), with a clear knowledge (from this life and past lives) that I am anti-war and couldn’t even countenance raising a gun against another human being, let alone pulling the trigger in anger? Is my idealistic belief in passive resistance strong enough to never be drawn into bloody battle?

It is my dream that enough people will see beyond that which separates us (tribalism, religion, nationalism), to that which unites us. We are fellow sojourning souls who in another life (if you’ll allow that metaphor) were on the side we now see as “other”.

In this romance of mine there is a need for metaphorical killing only. Look out if you’re a margarita: you’re about to be murdered.

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