"This screaming gave us goose pimples. They were the screams of thousands of people being murdered. It traveled through the silent spaces of the city from among a red glow of fires, under indifferent stars, into the benevolent silence of gardens in which plants laboriously emitted oxygen, the air was fragrant, and a man felt that it was good to be alive. There was something particularly cruel in this peace of the night, whose beauty and human crime struck the heart simultaneously. We did not look each other in the eye."
Czeslaw Milosz re the genocide of the Warsaw Ghetto
Living in Berkeley, California, while the U.S. military bombed and killed hundreds of thousands of Vietnamese, an atrocity [Milosz] compared to the crimes of Adolf Hitler and Joseph Stalin, Milosz again knew shameful complicity in extreme barbarity. “If we are capable of compassion and at the same time are powerless,” he wrote, “then we live in a state of desperate exasperation.”
And now we come to Gaza where thousands of civilians have been bombed and killed in the same of what? Cynically so Netanyahu can retain the seat of power? To gain more land? In revenge for the Hamas attack. What do we consider proportional response?
History is littered with disproportionate responses to perceived injustice, real or perceptual. We humans do love our revenge.
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