Guest Post: Cameron on “A Response to a Most Remarkable Conversation”

In the course of war, many of the same effects are found — people die, lose their limbs, are buried under fallen masonry, blinded, orphaned, widowed — but on these occasions they are brought about by the hands of other humans, by human decision and choice.

If, as I say, I detest earthquakes, how shall I not also detest war?

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And yet I feel kinship. I have a clan background: my father, and his father, and his father’s father were Scotsmen, all of them military men.  I understand the honor that is due to one’s forebears, and I salute them.

I was born and raised in England. I love and honor the country of my birth, its sweet hills and trees and rivers, and there is a quality to those gently rolling hills that I will never forget, which is home to me.  I studied in Oxford, in one of the great halls of learning, and it allows me to feel kinship with all those who have studied in the great universities and monasteries, from Oxford to Kyoto. I have lived for much of my life in America, and love, too, my adopted country. 

And thus I understand what it is to be on one side of a dispute, not because that side is perfectly right and just in all matters, but because one belongs with that land or those people: they are one’s own.

My father, when I was a boy, told me the story of how another clan became in 1692 the enemy of our clan. It seems they accepted the hospitality of our clan allies, then rose in the night to slaughter their hosts.  They thereby defiled their own honor by abusing the principle of hospitality — for, as a Scottish historian put it, “the Highlander, like the Arab, attached an almost sacred importance to the guest participating in his bread and salt”. 

I have passed down to my own eldest son the same story, but I have also made it clear to him that I hold no continuing grudge nor enmity against that other clan, and that I do not believe my father did either.

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Here, then, is the crux of the matter as I understand it, in Leah’s words:

Regardless of whether someone is our enemy or not, they are still, at the end of the day, human. They still have families, and in their milieu are probably viewed as good and decent people. Much the same way that we view ourselves. Somehow, in conflict this gets lost. That may be okay for fighting, but it isn’t when it comes to trying to bring an end to conflict. 

We seem, thank God, to have arrived at the point where the idea of resolving the terrible conflict in Afghanistan is at last recognizably on the horizon.  Secretary Gates said recently that “political reconciliation ultimately has to be a part of settling the conflict” — which seems to me to bode well for a dialog of this sort, preliminary though it is.

But I do not see the possibility of fruitful dialog just as a means to some form of political solution — to me it is more than that.

When the people of Israel escaped by night from captivity in Egypt, they were at first pursued by the army of Pharaoh. When they arrived at the Red Sea, God parted it so that they could make their escape.  The sea then closed on Pharaoh’s army and drowned them, and the Israelites rejoiced, singing a song of thanks.  In the Jewish lore of the Talmud, it is recorded that on that night the angels too wished to sing, and that God refused to hear their song of praise, rebuking them with the words, “my creations are drowning in the sea, and you will sing songs?”

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Vengeance dies hard, though, doesn’t it? 

If I kill your soldier I have killed an enemy — but you have lost a father, a brother, a son, and left a widow, an orphan: your grief is then greater than my satisfaction, your thirst for revenge keener than my fear of it, and so you strike down one of mine, thinking you have killed an enemy — but losing me a father, a brother, a son, leaving me a widow, an orphan — and so the plague rolls on.  You have visited anguish on me, I shall visit anguish on you.

Gandhi said it: An eye for eye, and soon the whole world is blind.

I choose, personally, to follow the principle of forgetting in such matters.  Injustices are legion, and the roots of today’s struggles can in many cases be traced back across centuries, even millennia. Both perpetrators and victims are human.

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There will be some who ask if this does not make a “moral equivalence” between one side and the other, and is not one side — “ours” — righteous, and the other evil? 

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