I saw a recent quote from Kevin Williamson that gets straight to the heart of a lot of contagious thinking in the last month:

If Hamas wants to put Palestinian children between Israeli soldiers and Hamas terrorists, then the deaths of those children will rightly be understood as an atrocity—but it is Hamas’ atrocity, not the Israeli Defense Forces’ atrocity.

First response: If only it were that simple.

The person who shared that quote listed it under the heading “Clear thinking.” Many, many people, it seems, share this sentiment. But I really am failing to grasp how this is clear at all.

First of all, it is not in any way clear — especially not from this side of the world — that all civilian deaths in Gaza are in fact a result of Hamas’s use of civilian shields. As we have seen and should know full well by now, the best military technology in the world still kills plenty of civilians just by being wrong about the “targets.”

As bad as the civilian deaths we “accidentally” cause are, the point being made is much more sinister. Namely, that, because this is war (which it is), and because Hamas is so evil (which it absolutely is), and because the enemy is embedded among civilians — therefore, the Israeli Defense Force bears no responsibility for who gets killed by their own warheads while they seek justice. Williamson et al. act as if this point is self-evident. It is not. There isn’t even the slightest hint of self-evidence in it.

There is no case where this sort of thinking applies at all, let alone to any extent that warrants the assumptions propping any of this argument up. If a murderer takes hostages, law enforcement doesn’t drop a bomb on the building and call it a day. “Sad for those hostages and bystanders. An atrocity, yes, but at least we know it’s not our atrocity.” Williamson may think that, since it’s war and not “police action,” the rules have changed. But he’s effectively done nothing but roll his eyes to explain why.

Granted that, as with any comparison, there are differences. While no person or group is free of all responsibility for who dies in the process of carrying out even the most righteous act, I’m not saying that there are never individual situations in war where a decision would have to be made that does lead to civilian deaths — as tragedy. But this “it’s their fault not ours” kind of thinking that Williamson exemplifies leads to civilian deaths as sloth, as the result of nothing more than the ancient sin of acedia! It’s shameful, moral laziness and it excuses so much horrifying death with a wave of the hand and a cursory shrug at responsibility.

You can say, as Williamson so stunningly and dismissively puts it, “This is not a time or an occasion for moral muddiness or intellectual flabbiness.” And, in his defense, at least in Williamson’s case, I wouldn’t for a second accuse him of intellectual laziness. He’s thought a lot about this and I have no doubt that he is much smarter than I am. That’s why I’m accusing him of sloth. It is moral laziness that he and half the western world are unwittingly preaching, while at the same time they claim to be rooting out all “intellectual flabbiness.”

(I know that sloth is a funny word, and that it gets used as virtually synonymous with laziness of any and all kinds. But it’s something much more specific, and it really does help to think of it as a moral laziness. And as such, it’s something that the hardest worker and deepest thinker can be perfectly guilty of. “Something in our soul,” Simone Weil wrote, “has a far more violent repugnance for true attention than the flesh has for bodily fatigue.”)

The Williamsons of the world, and their much less thoughtful echoers, may not think (or want) this to be an occasion for moral muddiness, but moral muddiness is our lot, whether they like it or not. And it is the current lot of Israel and Gaza. Calls to forcefully simplify the matter by declaring muddy water clear are about as meaningful as the manager of a mid-level paper company in eastern Pennsylvania stepping out of the break room and declaring bankruptcy.

But while these declarations of moral simplicity may not hold a drop of water, they are anything but benign.

My sense is that, as with all culture war issues, no one involved is capable of speaking to (or, rather, against) anyone other than the worst representations of the other side. Williamson writes as though anyone who disagrees with him simply must be waving a “stop the genocide” sign. (He has, in essence, chosen to counter much of the Left’s moral laziness with his own brand of the same. Fight fire with fire, as they say.) But you can shudder with horror at everything that happened on October 7th; and you can despise the history of Judenhaas with every fiber of your being; and you support Israel’s war against Hamas as a proper seeking of justice and peace — you can do all these things without stooping to the level of moral obscenity.

Makoto Fujimura:

Hope, first of all, must be realistic. That is, hope can be hope only if it admits that which is darkest while urging toward the light.

Nothing glib, or blind, or deflective toward the depth of despair could be a contender for hope. If hope has not first been silenced before the profundity of evil and loss, then such a two-dimensional offering is more scandalous than fruitful. Realistic is not so much concerned with practicality as it is about truthfulness.

Volodymyr Zelensky:

“We are not ready to give our freedom to this f—ing terrorist Putin.”

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Thousands of bits of paper are falling into ballot-boxes today, all over the country. It is a little thing, and can be done very easily, but mighty consequences may hang on the result.

Private Wilbur Fisk of the Second Vermont, November 1864

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If you are confronted with two evils, thus the argument runs, it is your duty to opt for the lesser one, whereas it is irresponsible to refuse to choose altogether. Those who denounce the moral fallacy of this argument are usually accused of a germ-proof moralism which is alien to political circumstances, of being unwilling to dirty their hands. . . .

Politically, the weakness of the argument has always been that those who choose the lesser evil forget very quickly that they chose evil. . . . Moreover, if we look at the techniques of totalitarian government, it is obvious that the argument of “the lesser evil” . . . is one of the mechanisms built into the machinery of terror and criminality. Acceptance of lesser evils is consciously used in conditioning government officials as well as the population at large to the acceptance of evil as such.

Hannah Arendt, Responsibility and Judgement

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and it was you who taught them. The only plausible meaning of this opaque clause is that if you resent these disagreeable leaders with whom you are saddled, you have only yourself to thank for fastening the administration of your society on morally dubious figures who can now be exploited by your conquerors.

Robert Alter, commentary on Jeremiah 13:21

Brian Kaylor:

We’ve seen throughout history the bloody impact of people setting off to kill some new group of “Amalekites.” Puritan leaders justified the genocide of Native Americans in the colonial period of what is now the U.S. by comparing the Native Americans to the Amalekites. As John Winthrop gave his sermonon “a model of Christian charity” to Puritans heading to the new land, he invoked the command for Saul to kill Amalek. That’s the same sermon famous for his line about the new land being “a city upon a hill.” The speech frequently quoted by politicians today to cast the U.S. as a divine city on a hill (instead of what Jesus said about the city being his followers) also includes the theological foundation for genocide against Native Americans. It’s not so shining of a speech after all.

“In America, thinking about Amalek in the 18th century also was refined through the coalescence of an ideology of America as a ‘redeemer nation’ called to defeat evil wherever it threatened Christianity,” historian John Corrigan wrote in The First Prejudice: Religious Tolerance and Intolerance in Early America as he warned about the “rhetoric of extermination” that came from the use of the Amalek story. “And the transition from colonial status to new nation lent a particularly urgent and pointed tone to the Amalek rhetoric, as Americans made efforts to explore the continent, draw and defend boundaries, and situate themselves as the dominant power in North America.”

More recently, the rhetoric of Amalek was used by some Hutu preachers in Rwanda to justify the genocide of Tutsi people there in 1994, and it was invoked by U.S. preacher John MacArthur to justify the U.S. invasion of Iraq. Theology can be deadly.

Below is a transcript of an article written by Ralph Kennison, I believe from The Kennebec Journal around 1961. “Hum” Reynolds, seen crouching under the table to the left, was my great grandfather.

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Many times our Service Departments are called on to do unusual jobs, but the most unusual to date recently came to the Augusta Service Department—and the boys came through!

Shortly before Christmas the division office received a telephone call from a local doctor who has great faith in the Company. This doctor, a World War II Veteran, had an injury that impaired circulation in his legs. Recently, complications and a diabetic condition stopped circulation to the danger point, and he was in danger of gangrene and the possible loss of a leg.

The conversation brought out the fact that part of the treatment in a Boston hospital consisted of sleeping on an oscillating bed. Oscillating beds, while made commercially, were very high in price, and beyond the possibility of delivery in time. Question—Could we make an oscillating bed?

We said we would try if we knew what was needed, and these were the specifications: A bed spring was to he suspended on a fulcrum in the middle, and was to have a travel of 9 inches above and below the horizontal at both head and foot. No pictures or detailed specifications were available, but it was believed that the commercial beds were operated by a small motor of about one-quarter horsepower. And, and this was the big one, the complete cycle of oscillation was to be once in two minutes. This meant a reduction in speed for an ordinary motor of 3500 to 1, from 1750 rpm to ½ rpm.

No promise was made other than that we would try, and then let him know. We called Ernest Haskell, Service Foreman, told him that our ability to produce had been challenged, and asked him if he wanted to try. His answer was instantaneous:

“Yes. If anybody can make junk parts go together, I think we can.”

Tough Problem

Servicemen Kenneth Willet and Harold Heath were given the assignment. It was even a problem to know where to start. A gear reduction motor reducing the speed to 24 rpm was located in New Jersey, and the manufacturer agreed to ship immediately. Due to the Christmas rush, it did not arrive for five days. In the meantime, the doctor badly needed the bed. How could it be made out of angle iron and old parts, and above all, how was the speed to be further reduced 48 times without big pulleys and countershafts?

About this time “Hum” Reynolds heard about the deal, and thought he could help. “Hum” is one of our appliance salesmen, but lives on and runs a farm, is an all around handy man, and has a junk pile of parts that “might come in handy sometime.” From this pile he produced a worm gear reduction from an old Everybody’s Washer.

From that point on, “Hum” worked all his spare time with the service men, and did all the welding to save the delay of having it done outside. This second gear reduction with proper pulleys and a vee belt did the trick, one revolution in exactly two minutes. The Yankee ingenuity of Willett and Reynolds and the machining of bearings, cranks, shaft extensions and lever arm by Harold Heath produced a bed which the doctor says is better made and better looking than those used by the hospital, and yet it was produced without a picture to go by. The cost, about half the commercial price. The time, one week, far superior to any commercial delivery.

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The work of a democracy devoted to such an idea is to lead a sufficient number of individuals to share a moral vision about power, liberty, justice, security, and opportunity in the hope that people—and peoples—might be in closer harmony with the good. As a multitude of individuals, a nation possesses a collective conscience—one manifested in how that nation chooses, through the means of politics, to view rights and responsibilities.

Jon Meacham, And There Was Light

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Meacham’s excellent biography of Abraham Lincoln has one very clear, overarching theme: the existence, and perseverance, of character and goodness amid(st) many flaws — both the cultural flaws (and evils) of Lincoln’s time, and the personal flaws of Lincoln himself.

W.E.B. Du Bois put it most profoundly:

Abraham Lincoln was perhaps the greatest figure of the nineteenth century. I love him not because he was perfect but because he was not and yet triumphed. The world is full of illegitimate children. The world is full of folk whose taste was educated in the gutter. The world is full of people born hating and despising their fellows. To these I love to say: See this man. He was one of you and yet he became Abraham Lincoln.

Though this quote from Du Bois comes from Meacham’s final chapter, I have to think that he had it ringing in his head from the beginning, if it wasn’t the inspiration for the project itself. For this is the theme throughout the biography: An imperfect man trying very hard to do the right thing.

It’s so easy to overlook the simplicity of that statement, but trying very hard to do the right thing (especially for any extended period of time, let alone for one’s whole life) is a vastly neglected gift of consciousness, not its natural fruit. Lincoln has always stood out for this effort-that-is-character — because it is so very rare. But he should stand out even more so because that character which history knows him for persisted no less for the flaws alongside it.

“Imperfect” is, of course, a soft word for some of Lincoln’s flaws. (By almost any standard today, Lincoln would be, at least at times, quite guilty of bigotry and even racism.) This is not a hidden attribute in the book, but a feature. “Viewed from the genuine abolition ground, Mr. Lincoln seemed tardy, cold, dull, and indifferent,” Frederick Douglass said. But, he added, “measuring him by the sentiment of his country, a sentiment he was bound as a statesmen to consult, he was swift, zealous, radical, and determined.”

The embarrassing fact is, most of us could probably congratulate ourselves, rightly congratulate ourselves, for holding better ideas of racial equality than Lincoln did, and yet still not come comparatively close to his depth of character.

Perhaps the biggest explanation for this type of thing is plain and simple humility. Whatever views Lincoln held, he held them with deep, patient concern and at least potential uncertainty. He was always ready to stand his ground, but he was also ready to learn a better way. As Horace Greeley put it, “Mr. Lincoln was essentially a growing man.”

Here is how Lincoln himself put it to Maine’s Republican Senator Lot M. Morrill:

I don’t know but that God has created some one man great enough to comprehend the whole of this stupendous crisis and transaction from end to end, and endowed him with sufficient wisdom to manage and direct it. I confess that I do not fully understand and foresee it all. But I am placed here where I am obliged, to the best of my poor ability, to deal with it. And that being the case, I can only go just as fast as I can see how to go.

Again, going back to Du Bois, the profundity lies in the way that such praiseworthy character and humility can (and must) not only “emerge from the gutter” but coexist within it.

I’m going to be thinking a lot about this over the next year, about what it means to recognize character within the flaws — in leaders especially, but also in the everyday anyone. Of course, that will mean asking many muddy questions. What constitutes only a flaw and what constitutes corrupt character? What sort of flaws are “forgivable” and for what degree of character are they forgivable? And when do we make the call to sacrifice “practicality” in order to keep our integrity, and vice versa?

Again, Lincoln is a perfect case study here, because he absolutely did both of these things. Many times he conceded to practical considerations, but he also often stayed the course, come what may.

But I am specifically encouraged to look for character, for moral strength, in the places where I am not predisposed to find it. Real moral strength is such a funny and difficult thing to pin down. Sometimes the people I like the most fail to show it. And quite often the people I like the least show more of it than anyone else. So it goes and so it has always gone — and we all do well, we all gain, to admit it.

It follows and ought to be true that the exact same humility and depth of character which history rightly continues to praise in Abraham Lincoln, despite his flaws, can also be found in others today, despite their flaws.

As Lincoln said after winning reelection,

What has occurred in this case, must ever occur in similar cases. Human-nature will not change. In any future great national trial, compared with the men of this, we shall have as weak, and as strong; as silly and as wise; as bad and good. Let us, therefore, study the incidents of this, as philosophy to learn wisdom from, and none of them as wrongs to be avenged.

It’s not an easy philosophy to learn wisdom from, involving a lot of hard work and uncertainty. But as long as we are so fortunate as to be, as Meacham put it, “buffeted by the demands of democracy,” we are also duty-bound to seek and to find, not what is evil or inevitable, but what is good and what is possible.

And no one knows what effect anyone might have. All of the things that history knows Lincoln for, all the things that we know his era for, and especially the good things — they were not inevitable. They were surprises. Surprises that came about because someone, somewhere, however imperfectly, was trying with their “whole soul” to do the right thing.

For Lincoln . . . [t]he task of history was to secure advances in a universe that tends to disappoint. Goodness would not always be rewarded. The innocent would suffer. Violence would at times defeat virtue. Such was the way of things, but to Lincoln the duty of the leader and of the citizen was neither to despair nor to seek solace and security with the merely strong, but to discern and to pursue the right.

Peggy Noonan:

Speaking generally, if you are middle-aged or older, chances are good you feel sympathy for and old loyalty toward Israel. The young are more prone to antipathy toward Israel, sometimes accompanied by rage, sometimes by almost violent accusations against the colonialist oppressor state. At the bottom of today’s progressive politics there is blood lust. They speak of justice and equity but that’s not what they want, they want dominance. It’s all about the will to power. Progressive students have absorbed the idea it’s good to be militant in your views, it shows you’re authentic. No, it shows you got the talking points.

Two years ago, Azmat Khan published a breathtaking report of civilian airstrike casualties in Iraq and Syria between 2014 and 2018. To anyone actually willing to hear it, I’m sure the conclusion will come as an entirely sarcastic shock: We kill far more civilians than we ever admit — and we do it unapologetically. When Khan published the first half of her report, I put up a series of quotes which basically says everything I ever hope to say on the topic. One of those quotes, you will notice, is not like the others. Instead, it shows how the official (whitewashed) narrative which we are sold (by every single administration) and which we quickly buy (from every single administration) is simply a means of excusing ourselves for murder. (Or, as Günther Anders would have called it, it is “war by tele-murder.”)

Given the horrific recent events in Israel, and what will surely be a horrific response, it’s not surprising I found myself revisiting Khan’s work.

Here are a few quotes from the second half of Khan’s report:

It was a system that seemed to function almost by design to not only mask the true toll of American airstrikes but also legitimize their expanded use. […]

But they also have come to understand that on occasion, and with no warning, a bomb might pierce the sky, inexplicably targeting their homes, killing their families and neighbors in a terrifying instant.

And they knew that if this were to happen, it was unlikely anyone would ever tell them why. […]

This was not an error. According to U.S. rules of engagement, military planners can knowingly kill civilians, including children, if the anticipated casualty rate is not excessive in relation to the anticipated military advantage of destroying the strike target. […]

“I am on fire now,” she said, her voice robbed of all its signature warmth. “Why did you kill them? They were innocent. They didn’t do anything.” Now she was weeping. “They were turned into just flesh. […]

“But they didn’t gain any advantage,” she said. “The only thing they did is they killed the children.”

Imagine for a minute that you leave your home on an errand and while you are gone a missile strikes your home, killing your entire family. Picture this happening exactly where you now live. You return from your errand to find that your house is now rubble and your family — your baby, your spouse, your siblings, your parents — are buried and burned inside it. And if that is not bad enough, try to imagine that you are never told who fired that missile or why they did it. You are never even told that anyone is sorry they did it. Maybe, just maybe, you will be told that someone did it because (they believed) your neighbors were involved in terrorist activities. Again, just pause, take a minute, and imagine this happening exactly where you live right now.

There is not one American that I have ever met, not one I have heard of or could dream of, who can even pretend to imagine putting up with that situation. It would be unfathomable. And yet we have systematically inflicted that fate on countless other innocent people around the globe.

And when I say “countless” I mean both in astonishingly high numbers and I also mean it quite literally: we have no idea how many because we are explicitly not counting them. That is the point behind Khan’s investigations. As she put it in her first report, “Not only was there no record of disciplinary action, or full investigations in roughly 9 of every 10 cases, but only a quarter included any further review, recommendations or lessons learned.” She adds, “Of the 1,311 assessments [obtained] from the Pentagon, in only one did investigators visit the site of a strike. In only two did they interview witnesses or survivors.”

Floating around the universe is a perfectly good adage about putting ourselves in other people’s shoes. It might simultaneously be the most needed and the most neglected. And for the absolute simplicity of its message, that neglect carries an immensity of destruction.

If you have not read Khan’s reports, you should do so. This is not one of those things that is “worth your time.” This is something that is, as an American citizen, absolutely morally reprehensible to remain unaware of.

I often think about a challenge from Neil Postman where he tells his reader to “ask yourself a series of questions”:

What steps do you plan to take to reduce the conflict in the Middle East? Or the rates of inflation, crime and unemployment? What are your plans for preserving the environment or reducing the risk of nuclear war? What do you plan to do about NATO, OPEC, the CIA, affirmative action, and the monstrous treatment of the Baha’is in Iran? I shall take the liberty of answering for you: You plan to do nothing about them.

Postman was nothing in if not blunt about this subject. Here he is primarily concerned with what advances in communication technology, starting with telegraphy, did to change (and trivialize) the information we receive. This matters for a number of reasons, but one of the most critical is that long ago we reached a point where every single day, for 24 hours a day, we are “sent information which . . . [does] not permit the right of reply.”

Am I permitted the right of reply? That seems like a question we should all start asking ourselves more often. When politicians and pundits and “know-nothings” (to steal a category from Abraham Lincoln) start raving about wiping foreign enemies off the face of the earth, or about leveling entire regions filled with civilians, you can be sure they have not earned the right of reply.

Some have recently advised caution for Israel insofar as they might learn from the mistakes the United States made after 9/11. But I haven’t read any that go far enough with that caution. I’m not capable of categorically answering ‘yes’ or ‘no’ to everything the U.S. has done in the name of the “war on terror” in the last 20 years. But what I would at least ask of any American is to consider the possibility that, even after 9/11, we still did not have the right of reply that we gave. Did we have the right to defend ourselves? Absolutely. But the right to send troops to the other side of the globe and kill thousands of civilians in the name of that “self-defense”? Like it or not, that is what happened. And it’s what continues to happen, and what continues to be encouraged.

Put differently, it should not be a mental or moral stretch to ask, as Anne Applebaum asked (though for different reasons), “Could it be that the planes that hit New York and Washington did less damage to the nation than the cascade of bad decisions that followed?” I sometimes think that history could practically be defined as the record of people who have refused to learn this lesson, studied by the people who also refuse to learn it — and, of course, the cascade of suffering that follows. (I think often of this wonderful interview with Alice Herz-Sommer. “It goes up and down and up and down and up an down. In the whole, people don’t learn. People don’t learn.”)

This does not mean that Israel should not defend itself or that it should not attack Hamas. It does mean that they should not be excused for killing civilians, killing children, in the process. And we should not be excused for encouraging it, no matter how unknowingly we do so.

The title of the post I referenced above is “not for me.” The sentiment behind it — don’t kill children for my safety or my benefit — comes from the quote I used from Wendell Berry, in an essay titled “The Failure of War,” the end of which is worth quoting again:

Here is the other question that I have been leading toward, one that the predicament of modern warfare forces upon us: How many deaths of other people’s children by bombing or starvation are we willing to accept in order that we may be free, affluent, and (supposedly) at peace? To that question I answer: None. Please, no children. Don’t kill any children for my benefit.

If that is your answer too, then you must know that we have not come to rest, far from it. For surely we must feel ourselves swarmed about with more questions that are urgent, personal, and intimidating. But perhaps also we feel ourselves beginning to be free, facing at last in our own selves the greatest challenge ever laid before us, the most comprehensive vision of human progress, the best advice, and the least obeyed:

“Love your enemies, bless them that curse you, do good to them that hate you, and pray for them which despitefully use you and persecute you; That ye may be the children of your Father which is in heaven: for he maketh his sun to rise on the evil and the good, and sendeth rain on the just and on the unjust.”

That is a right of reply that everyone has. It may ultimately be the only one we have.