Much More Harm

The mutual protection that people of a group provide to one another, protection from transgressors inside and aggressors from outside, is one of the most basic principles without which no human being can live a peaceful life.

The principle of having empathy for people from another group is also fundamental.

In wars, those two principles seem to clash.

The only possible solution seems to be finding the point where these two principles meet: you don't attack peaceful neighbors, and when you have to strike in self-defense you never aim at civillians, and do the best you can to mitigate civillian harm.

There will still be collateral damage, but the moment you take away the right of a group to fight to defend itself trying to balance those two principles, you are rewarding the leaderships that promote aggression and don't care for their own people.

Because we will be "forgeting" who started situations and releasing them from the responsibility to provide safety for their own.

Collateral damage is always tragic, but rewarding aggressive and careless leaders will have evil consequences that are neither hipotetical nor abstract. Nor are they new.

This logic of how things work in our planet should not feel so counterintuitive. It only goes to show that the concern for human life should not be limited to seeing war casualties and suddenly being outraged.

There is a part of the World where life is not valued. We just can't magicaly make life on that side of the fence to have the same logic that it has in peaceful places.

But we can, and must, be clear with leaders that don't value the life of their own people.

And we certainly must be ready to show some kind of response when the resources of some region start being alocated for ideologies, capacity and plans of aggression.

Why are we hesitant in considering tyrants as enemies, and then want people under their rule not to be subject to the consequences of those ideologies?

There is nothing gained in being blind to diferences in human Societies. Each people have their own traditions that obviously must be respected, but the valuation or devaluation of human life must be seen as a primordial and not abstract aspect of reality.

We can't go all the way and suddenly protect everybody in the World as if their were our own children, but the more firm we are with our standards, the more we make them clear, not being friends with people who treat human life as disposable, suspecting them, and, honestly, being always against them, always fighting them in some form, the more we will be acting in favor of life.

Until then, each and every sudden outburst of global "concern" can and will be used to cause much more harm than relief.