In one of our last political discussions, my father was trying to persuade me that Putin was miscast as the aggressor in the Russia-Ukraine conflict. He had a penchant for contrarianism, especially when it comes to trusting the American perspective without question. A penchant he passed on to me. After a lengthy monologue on the subject, he asked me what I thought.
“I just think it’s the murder game,” I sighed.
“What do you mean?”
“It’s what world leaders do at this point in history. It’s just murder murder murder murder murder. Putin murders thousands of people, Zelenskyy murders thousands of people, Biden murders thousands of people, just murder everywhere. Most of the work of having power in the world is deciding who to murder and when and in what quantity.”
We go to extraordinary lengths in our lives to dress up the practice of collective ritual murder as something other than what it is. Like “beef” for “cow flesh,” we invent fancy terms and apparent justifications for the practice. We sew uniforms and flags, write speeches and songs, and carefully craft an aura of nobility and duty around our species’ most universally acknowledged act of wrongdoing. In more recent years, as awareness of the average person’s instinctual unwillingness to participate in murder (despite these trappings) has grown, we have made the act of killing more esoteric, mechanical, involving buttons and grainy video-game-style green screens to abstract the act from its intended and obvious consequences.
Perhaps the only people who truly understand what they’re doing, who really embrace the acts they’re committing, are the ones (literally) calling the shots. After all, Barrack Obama, everyone’s favorite President in my lifetime, started each week with an actual kill list. He called it the kill list. And he selected, like a breakfast menu, who he was going to murder that day. Then video gamers in a Nevada office building would send robots to do his bidding.
(Obama wasn’t the only one with a kill list, of course. They all have one, or have other events where they decide whose life they have the right to extinguish, when, where, how. Obama was just the most brazenly transparent about it, or perhaps surprising. And he also understood that one’s actions are pretty irrelevant as long as one is sufficiently likable. Call it the depressing underside of Maya Angelou’s profound truth: “People will forget what you said. People will forget what you did. But people will never forget how you made them feel.”)
I start with this framework because it’s impossible to talk about the murder game rationally at the best of times, much less when personal emotions are running as high as they are on Earth in the year we’ve collectively decided to call 2023. You know where this is going. We all know where this is going. But I have always written with the long view, an eye toward history, hoping to be judged less by the context of my times and more by the context of a better, later time, one that we can create with enough collective will. Nothing ever got better by people appealing to human nature or the status quo or the way things used to be. And given that we consider almost every past century’s practices as widely if not completely abhorrent, it stands to reason that we’re mired in just as much abhorrence now, with vague blinders and inverted vision clouding our judgment.
Increasingly, I don’t have any illusions about my abilities here. Look, the most persuasive guy in the planet’s history was a pacifist and in the couple millennia since his death, literally millions of people have prayed to him for his help in committing their murders. If that’s not an object lesson in futility, and/or the hopelessness of humanity, and/or the inevitability of all ambitious efforts being self-defeating, and/or how little progress has actually been made despite it all… well, it’s enough to make anyone want to give up.
I don’t want to give up. It’s really tempting right now, a veritable siren call, in this, a year that I desperately want to end. But I refuse to believe that humanity is not worth saving. And so I do the only thing I can right now. I write.
I don’t write lightly, nor eagerly. I feel fundamentally that the only real possible outcome of my writing is to alienate people. People I care about, people I love. People who are hurting deeply, who have undergone a profound trauma. People who take sometimes daily joy in the pictures I post of my son on social media, who feel a sense of connection to me that I share. People who are having their own hard times in this very trying year.
But Gandhi has always been my mentor and perhaps my favorite of his lines has always been that “non-cooperation with evil is as much a duty as cooperation with good.” And while I’m not actively involved in any of the present murder games of the moment, I do live and vote and pay taxes in a country that is content to murder more than its share of people regularly, as well as even more content to serve as war profiteer for the really high-leverage, most volatile, and bloodiest murder games currently afoot. To feel intimidated and/or beleaguered out of even saying anything against this unforgivable set of actions in the nation that officially gives me citizenship would be a pretty grave breach of my values. As it is, it’s still next to nothing, a futility I can only begin to assuage by either (a) observing my lack of power or (b) thanking Jesus that at least no one is praying to me to help them kill.
So here we go, the post I’ve been mulling for weeks, long overdue and likely to fall on universally deaf ears:
The Sinwar administration and its fighters committed a series of reprehensible atrocities on October 7th when they murdered more than a thousand human beings. I would imagine that there is no one who could possibly defend these actions. But evidence appears to be to the contrary.
In the days since that violence, the Netanyahu administration and its fighters have committed a series of reprehensible atrocities, murdering thousands of human beings. I would imagine that there is no one who could possibly defend these actions. But evidence appears to be to the contrary.
I can understand the pain and suffering that anyone who feels connected to the people killed in these violent attacks is enduring. Much less the pain and suffering of those who knew or loved the recently murdered. And I can understand the wellspring from which the instinct to enact vengeance flows, especially in a conflict so bitterly entrenched and endlessly retaliatory as that which we call the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.
What I cannot fathom is how incapable people seem of stemming their instinct to enact vengeance, how their anger is not eventually overwhelmed by grief and the commitment to not replicate and proliferate the exact same harm they’ve just endured. Perhaps there is a misapplied egalitarianism underlying this activity: that a crime almost as fundamental as the murder itself is the inequity of one person’s loved one being taken while another’s survives. And yet, people manage to avoid this reciprocal violence in nearly all other circumstances. When was the last time you read about someone whose sister was murdered in civil society murdering the murderer’s sister? Once in a great while, they might murder the murderer, but almost never in centuries have they murdered the murderer, his family, friends, and neighbors.
I have read numerous justifications and arguments beyond mere vengeance, be they on social media or in press briefings or official statements. I have yet to encounter a single one that doesn’t sound like it was lifted from an elementary schoolyard. For those of you who are parents, if your justification for supporting a military action sounds indistinguishable from one you would scold your child for using on the playground, you should probably reconsider your perspective. Of course, the stakes on the playground are Johnny’s nose or feelings, whereas the stakes in the field of battle are thousands of children’s lives.
Of course, the argument here transcends deontology. Whether one is inclined to support “Palestine freeing itself from oppression” or “Israel preventing future terrorism,” murderous escalation is a laughably absurd response on a purely practical basis. Israel will never be violently intimidated out of its militant posture and every single death of an Israeli provides more rhetoric for its most hardline leaders to insist on a perpetual war footing. Gaza and its aligned neighbors will never accept a reoccupation and paving over of its entire territory and every single death of a Gazan provides more rhetoric for its most hardline leaders to insist on perpetual violent resistance.
It is truly unbelievable to me that many friends who ridiculed the Iraq War as an obviously failed effort from before its inception can turn around and claim that their preferred side must “do something” (murderously escalative) or “has no choice” (but to bomb children).
Netanyahu himself acknowledged this in 2014:
“The US fought against a smaller Gaza called Fallujah… Fallujah is a tenth the size of Gaza. The great United States fought in Fallujah, its Gaza, sacrificed hundreds of soldiers who fought bravely… Went in once, twice, three times,” he said. “Thousands of Iraqis were killed there. Many thousands. And in the end it went out and al-Qaeda came back.”
Of course, he cited the same incident recently to fend off US criticism of his current tactics. And he’s right about one thing: the US, in particular, is in absolutely no position to argue that Netanyahu or any other world leader should stop murdering civilians. We practically invented the practice and certainly perfected it, replete with an ocean of immoral justifications bathed in jingoism, racism, and dehumanization.
And ultimately that’s what it takes. If you really break down and examine the rhetoric employed to make people feel good about the murder game, it’s dehumanizing. Despite millennia of still tripping over the same basic and fundamental moral precept, it is also instinctually so hard to convince a human being to kill another human being. The most effective approach is to convince them that what they are killing is not actually human. It’s effective, but also absolutely and completely a lie.
Some day, some leader somewhere is going to refuse to retaliate. They’re going to endure the murder of hundreds or thousands or tens of thousands of people in a series of reprehensible atrocities. And they’re not going to close their borders or restrict movement. They’re not going to declare martial law or suspend democracy. They’re not going to fire a single shot or drop a single explosive. They’ll announce that it is a time to mourn, to grieve, to remember, and to acknowledge that the best response to loss is not to manifest it for others in kind, much less tenfold. And that day may mark the end of terrorism. Certainly for that country and maybe for all humanity. You don’t have to be a deontologist or a Kantian or a Gandhian or a pacifist to believe that this is a better course of action. You just have to be a little open-minded and put your actual self-interest above your instinct for revenge.
