Blame Game

The vast majority of positions people are taking regarding the conflict in the Middle East are basically silly and unhelpful.

One way I could illustrate this is to take each of them as they come and rework them into interpretations of the French Revolution and its Reign of Terror.

So, Bono, for example, would be carefully trying to split blame between the bad boys of the Old Regime and the over-enthusiastic and over-committed newcomers.

This might seem like a more moderate and reasonable position than the one typically adopted by those who will instinctively suggest that the toffs had it coming or even ‘what actual evidence is there of guillotine usage?’ 

But historians are unlikely to be much impressed with either approach.

One thing you learn about bloody revolution is that the blame game essentially makes you an armchair participant and hobbles any attempt at serious analysis.

The October 7 pogrom started this new phase of the war just as the stormings of the Bastile and Winter Palace respectively started the two most famous European revolutions. Neither event is a self-contained explanation, but too often today ‘context’ is used more as a tool for suppressing sophisticated understanding rather than furthering it.

Deep-seated conflicts and radical upheavals in state power come about as a consequence of complex interactions between individuals, groups and the ideas which flow between and around them, plus a range of often peculiar, contingent circumstances, political, economic and social, which transcend — and ought to transcend — our ability to simplistically moralise about them.