The “free world.”
One rarely hears that exceptionalist conceit anymore, yet “authoritarianism” remains the go-to branding of what The Free World fundamentally opposed and what democratic nations still treat as innately adversarial. Now, however, a perplexing hybrid of “democratic authoritarianism” undermines that long-held distinction.
Despite worldwide accusations of genocidal intent towards Palestinians, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu continues his once-lauded democracy’s unconscionable retaliation against Hamas. Russian President Vladimir Putin continues to target all Ukrainians in his equally unconscionable nationalistic land grab’s “denazification and demilitarization” of a sovereign neighbor, while out of the other side of his mouth asserting that “Ukrainians” have no right to exist. Both wars openly violate international law, basic rules of engagement and fundamental humanity.
Some say the U.S. and NATO nevertheless need to tend to their own deficiencies and leave others to their chosen world view and domestic unrest, even if those others choose to impose their own interventionist geopolitical agendas.
Everyone wants peace. Except those who profit from conflict. Today the enabling of conflict abounds in a runaway e-world addicted to anger, divisiveness, and the seductive paradox of hateful “resistance” and “resilience.” Even once die-hard anti-war organizations now find themselves conflicted in what used to be an absolutist stance, advocating for and practicing peace.
Now Putin apologists are defending Hamas as being yet another understandably provoked party having no choice in its commitment to violence. Israel’s long-standing policies of apartheid and colonial oppression have some arguing that the carnage of Oct. 7 was only a long-overdue and reasonably expected “I am Spartacus” act of rebellion.
A blindfolded Lady Justice, even with sword in hand, would likely find that scale-tipping wholly unconvincing. Palestine may well be justified in fighting for freedom, and deserving of champions, but, at least in the movie version, Spartacus didn’t fight his oppressors by indiscriminately slaughtering unarmed citizens to further his cause.
Right or wrong, equivalence and proportionality arguments only serve to perpetuate the concept of violence as a justified answer to conflict. Constant warfare would more likely end if all violent conflict, whatever its equivalence and proportionality, was unequivocally condemned. Apologists for violence, from whatever side, are only sustaining the impediments to peace. Perceived moral violence is the perennial false path to achieving any possible conversion of hearts and minds to constructive disagreement.
Proselytizing increasing distrust of all institutions – especially democratic ones such as the often imperfect mainstream media – or, worse still, favoring autocratic alternatives or conspiracy theories, only fuels discord.
Israel has now killed more civilians in Gaza than Putin has killed in Ukraine, more than twice as many, but not for any lack of trying on Putin’s part. If Ukraine hadn’t had immediate NATO assistance in cobbling together its own ad hoc Iron Dome, Putin’s depopulation and material devastation of Ukraine would be far greater still. That lesson hardly bodes well for proponents of disarmament or neutrality who think Ukraine’s defense should never have been funded.
If NATO started arming Palestinians, or if UN forces intervened militarily on their behalf, would that be more morally acceptable, and, if so, to whom? Certainly not to those still condoning U.S. arms shipments to Israel.
Sadly, there’s no congressional proposal or populist will to defund war in general, or even to rein in the military-industrial economic engine, but rather a cruel partisan motion to abandon what meets the criteria of a “just war” in Ukraine while fully funding a horrifically unjust one in Gaza, or funding both if an even more heartless expansion of our own inhumane immigration policy is successfully coerced.
Why is war still such a difficult problem to solve?
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