War and Violence

I will not actively support the War in the Middle East or any other war or armed conflict for that matter. 

Regardless of the underlying motivations, all violence enmires the partakers in a lasting debit of evil which can never be offset. Once these things are done, there is no undoing them — committing any kind of evil in the name of good is an ethical compromise one is obliged to regret on some profound level, regardless of circumstances. 

However — and this caveat comes from my own life experience of growing up in peacetime in a household with parents and other close relatives who had not been given much choice in the matter,  around a generation before my own birth — when a group of people constituted as a national group with a clear collective identity and the impulse to live freely and fairly, are faced with the existential threat of hostility from a neighbour who consistently expresses that animosity in a broadly anti-liberal, fascistic, annihilation-centric fashion, such being the situation of both Ukraine and Israel today, I will not criticise their urge to self-defence (or even their chosen methods), at least not without checking the baggage of my own peacetime privilege at the cloakroom beforehand.

As a child, my instincts were essentially pacifist. But these ideals were time and again tested by the facts of recent European (...World history) and I found myself having to compromise, mentally. Not the same compromise of the person who actually pursues uninhibited violence as a means of self-defence, but enough to know where I would stand should I ever face the same situation as my immediate forebears.

I would still be encouraging myself to constantly evaluate the terms of that compromise, based on my understanding that evil is in a sense always more lasting than good.