Monster Forgiveness
Mercy, Warmaking, The Message & Activist Allyship
A crazy old German philosopher once warned us, “beware that, when fighting monsters, you yourself do not become a monster.” He was joking of course. There are no monsters. Or, rather, there are only monsters on every side of every war. In a war, there are no good guys and bad guys. There is just our side and the other side. Our atrocities and their atrocities. —CJ Hopkins
Last week, I reconsidered the value of my most favored material object. For a number of years, it had been a very particular teaspoon. In my daily ritual, since COVID, I have been preparing myself a pot of {Earl Grey, Assam, Darjeeling} tea. 0.6 liters of water boiled in an electric kettle, diffused into a Japanese iron teapot with exactly one teaspoon each of leaves and turbinado sugar. That teaspoon which was purchased in Atlanta in 1995 is emblematic of me keeping house. It is the last of the set. Since I have, in the past month or so, purchased a shiny new flatware service which is hardly as solid or hefty as that of 30 years ago, I have wondered if a teaspoon is just a teaspoon, considering that I didn’t make either with my own hands. Yet the attachment continues. Not this morning, however. I had a Red Bull instead.
In the second of the Great Books series I am listening to, I discovered that I have a great deal in common with Joan Didion. Somewhere in my memory somebody may have told me so - if there is a non-gonzo subset of that which was Gonzo, I may occupy that niche of literature. Alas, I still retain the capacity to be entranced by the esoteric and I will never give up on Borges or McCarthy.
All of this has much to do with a passage as of yet unidentified from somewhere in this weeks reading, that forgiveness is what happens when love meets justice.
Forgiveness is what happens when love meets justice.
I would like this to be one of Cobb’s Rules, a set of aphoristic first principles I haven’t visited in quite some time. We should look in on those and see what I was smoking back in the days of the early blogosphere. At any rate, there’s a bit of qualification necessary. Forgiveness is what should happen, particularly if we take for granted that we humans ought to love each other. If we don’t love or even respect each other just by nature of the fact that we are human, a lot of humanism falls through the net of ethics onto the hard floor of physics. Murder is possible under the laws of physics, therefore, given a sufficient amount of time, murder is inevitable. Then again, so is justice. What are the odds?
I have long made the distinction between healing and curing. The man who is healed has no problem with forgiveness. The man who is merely cured may still hate the hit and run driver since his insurance paid for his wrecked car and whiplash. So I suspect this morning (after Iranian ballistic missiles) that many of us are falling through various ethical nets. The question is still[!] the right of Israelis to war against their enemies.
Punishment & Pacification
War may very well be the most inefficient path to justice, but war is the most effective method of punishment. So to draw a quick comparison, the oppressed may simmer for generations, but they will not be pacified until they exact revenge. It is in the nature of war, but specifically that of making peace that determines what measure of justice is accomplished in fact and in legend. In this way, it is only those who have exhausted not only their will to fight, but their will to hate, who are ready for forgiveness. In being healed, there are no grudges remaining. To exemplify, that would be the difference between myself and the Wogs of the Future, for those of you who might be particularly in touch with the metaphors of America’s Negro Problem. Most discussions of slavery bore me, primarily because they don’t motivate or activate in me any latent resentments. I am healed.
Yet there are those who, without necessarily being race hustlers, find the old metaphors satisfying. I daresay that there are those who would consider themselves quite humanist who find the activation and sustaining of such metaphors quite useful in domestic and geopolitical affairs. So you will hear particular trigger words in their rhetoric which signal a kind of ascent to would-be future warriors.
In anticipation to the complications I may discover in my upcoming appreciation for Musa al-Gharbi’s new work, I am carving out space for non-haters who nonetheless are ready to unleash the puppies of resentment and don’t mind feeding them at arm’s length. So what if they become dogs of war? We’re just saying we’re uhm, allies, or you know, we understand their desire for revolution, and after all it is genocidal apartheid, right?
So we have a contingent of sentiment that feels the oppression factor of Gazans in particular and Palestinians in general and Brown People of the Global South by metaphorical extension. Such sentimentalists tend to assume I might be swayed by allusions to Jim Crow because I call myself black. In fact, I am more swayed by military history. Hmm, did that make Dan Rather Gonzo in Vietnam? Certainly more than the Scud Stud in the Green Zone of Baghdad.
Endless Activism
What does it take to satisfy allyship at arm’s length to combatants who will not be healed or cured in any foreseeable circumstance? The current Administration despairs of any escalation that might provide, after acute suffering and chronic despair a military victory for one side and exhaustion and unwillingness to fight for the other. I wonder how anyone so situated might find room for forgiveness as it is defined here.
So I should be clear. I carry a kind of curious respect for soldiers, who are generally first to understand and bear the costs of mortal combat. In this week I have also viewed for my edification The Bridge At Remagen, an ironically deadly bit of military history in which leadership on both sides have reasons to both save and destroy the last major bridge over the Rhine in the closing months of WW2. A friend of the Axis only wants their side to prevail, regardless of the details. A friend of the Allies only wants their side to prevail. What happens and why is in neither friend’s hands, but that doesn’t stop them from believing what they believe.
In war, all civilians external to the conflict are either scholars or fanboys. All fanboys are idiots or useful idiots, and the useful idiots generally fund the scholars. I should also have a curious respect for refugees, but that is my moral defect. Maybe that’s because for most of my life I always figured an able-bodied man such as myself would be drafted or taken prisoner. So while the historians and scholars are squirreling up their fact-nuts while the bombs are still dropping, everybody who’s not fighting is blathering and endless yarn of misery and hearsay. War takes the blame for everything in human events and for those who don’t do or die, they are ceaselessly wondering why. Many with too much conviction.
These are the parents of the spared. We, the spared, have our convictions about conflict and war, and people as old and senile as Joe Biden must be heeded, legally. He was neither soldier nor refugee.
The Forgiveness of Peace
So I propose the test of all of these soldiers, scholars, idiots, fanboys, refugees and people of various convictions for their multi-variant, multi-lingual, multi-cultural reasons are damaged. That is to say morally damaged by their proximity or distance from the death and destruction. If there is any abiding truth in the matter of forgiveness, love and justice, then we should expect evidence of all three after the cessation of hostilities. We should also see the expectation of these in all parties during the hostilities. A warrior respects a warrior. A hunter prays upon the death of his prey. A refugee.. well there’s the matter of agency. I don’t have any answer for them, but that certainly in peacetime they will not forget nor forgive the idiots. I might expect the extraordinary refugee to survive the damage with his humanity intact.
All this is to say without hesitation that in Mr. Coates’ latest book, The Message, we witness the elevation of damage to virtue. Even if he is a literary virtuoso, that conversion doesn’t work.
What is the difference and the distance between The Message and ‘No Justice, No Peace’? I don’t know. I haven’t read the book. Yet I am highly suspicious of the essential dodge of being a partisan ally. If one must pick a side in military conflict, all one can draw on is the expectations of the combatants and of their leadership. Why are they fighting? What do the fighters do? What are the means, and what are the ends? Well that would require a marvel of complex cogitation to figure all of that out beyond a shadow of a doubt. Perhaps we could be Kantian about it and hope the ‘best man’ wins. How does one do that without being subject to the miasma of the interwebz? One can reduce the number of sources to the reportage of soldiers and refugees, but even that is polluted these days.
Look To History
We can look to history. We can take polemicists at their words. We can listen to the man on the street, wherever that street may be. The moral universe is not infinitely complex. The truth is perceivable. We look to honest brokers, fully aware of their biases. You’ve seen mine, going back decades. I despise the idea of Islamicists with nukes and I especially despise propaganda that disguises what soldiers and refugees actually do on the ground.
I have an Evernote archive of 57 articles in a Notebook called ‘Iranian Nukes’ I can’t tell you how much I despise Evernote. One day I’m going to covert all of it to a place where it can be shared, but Evernote doesn’t even make decent PDFs. I have stalled on this post because I have not found a decent way to convert and share this article which is likely to disappear in due time.
In the meantime, I am now reading Pax by Tom Holland which does a supremely excellent job of chronicling the rise of the Flavian Dynasty of Rome and their successful siege of Jerusalem. Historians don’t generally use the terms justice, love or forgiveness. These are concerns of moralistic 3rd parties who get to blather into the interwebz. Revenge is more real. We have this historical account (among many) of what rulers will do in order to subjugate and pacify.
What’s extraordinary about Holland’s account in contrast with our tweets is how many soldiers and refugees as well as leaders take into consideration their level of commitment, and their own history of such. We are right today to consider the convictions of those who understood that the whole of their lives were committed to a side.
A Final Note
As long as war is deadly, then death will be the only lasting measure of commitment. As long as we live and breath the free air of non-combatants, all we can do is forgive.
A crazy old German philosopher once warned us, “beware that, when fighting monsters, you yourself do not become a monster.” He was joking of course. There are no monsters. Or, rather, there are only monsters on every side of every war. In a war, there are no good guys and bad guys. There is just our side and the other side. Our atrocities and their atrocities.
If you accept the premise that all human interest in war is monstrous, then the only hope for humanity is found in the forgiveness of monsters.
Maybe a teaspoon is just a teaspoon.
My responses to this are too short. I’ll try not to be glib, or curt, or sarcastic.
Hamas & Fatah make war in the same manner that Nazi Germany & Soviet Russia did. The Nazis (and the Japanese) were completely defeated and remade from the ground up because, at long last, they prefered peace on our terms to war on our terms. That’s what must happen to Hamas & Fatah. If you emulate the tactics of Nazis & Communists, you should be treated like them.
Execellent note on Roman methods of war. They viewed every war as an existential war of national survival. They made deserts and called them “peace”. Every Jew was expelled from Jerusalem for centuries.
There was forgiveness and national reconciliation after our Civil War. Too many people have forgotten, or are ignorant of, the vast number of Americans killed.
Monsterous acts were committed during that war & forgiven.
In my experience there are many kinds of forgiveness. And I can acknowledge that "forgiveness is what happens when love meets justice" is a kind of forgiveness. It's new to me, though. You've given me something to think about.
I believe there can be forgiveness without love or justice. I forgave my father long ago for the abuses he leveled against his children. But it was not out of love (except perhaps self-love) and I certainly was not expecting any justice. What he got was my complete and utter indifference.
I think, too, that forgiveness is directional. Someone wrongs me and I can forgive them without them ever knowing I have done so. In that case it's something I do for myself. It releases me from the burden of anger or having to plot some sort of revenge and suffer the consequences. It frees me where as that asshole is still an asshole. Is it love that has protected both of us from harm? I don't know. Was there Justice? Perhaps. Seeking forgiveness with justice might make the quest a fool's errand, doing little more than fuel a vicious cycle.
Also, the teaspoon is already lost.