The lesson of history is that we as a Human species can talk ourselves into absolutely anything if there’s a will behind that vision.
When Genghis Khan conquered the world at the tip of the sword, he glorified conquest and expansion of his borders, tending to glaze over the necessary maiming, murder and rape of entire towns and countries in this effort.
When Hitler uprooted and marched entire townloads of Jewish people in Europe over to concentration camps, he glorified national pride, a cleaning of the race, and overall good things for the German people, tending to glaze over the children and families he’s slaughtering in cold blood and using the same German people who would thereafter be scarred for life.
When Al-Qaeda attacked the US at home and abroad with persistent terrorist activities, they did so claiming to overcome a sense of US might and suffocating presence in their own homes, tending to glaze over their own murder, mayhem and systematic destabilization of the economy of the people they claimed to champion.
When Hamas attacked Israel in desperate and brutal assaults, they did so claiming to have no other way to resist Israeli expansion into what little remains of historical Palestine, tending to glaze over any culpability for the inevitable and aggressive response from Israel that would soon follow.
When Israel retalitated against Hamas, they did so claiming vengeance for attrocities done against them, glazing over both the slow colonization they are perpetrating on one half of the country of historical Palestine, as well as the actual bombardment of women and children in Gaza.
So what are we to do? If we happen to live in Nazi Germany in a rural village, or happen to be in the vanguard of Genghis Khan’s armies, or live in beautiful Israel where things do not feel so immediately bad: how are we to know if our leaders speak with knowledge of right or just conviction that they are good people?
The trick, in reality, is to mute the speaker, and watch the film in silence. Some of these folks with good and righteous claims have the blood of many innocents on their hands, and much of what they claim to be achieving isn’t actually being achieved.
While it is exceptionally hard to know what is right in any given time and place in our lives, what is WRONG is remarkably easy to tell apart. The blood of the innocent, the bystander, the “one-with-whom-you-could-have-spoken-to-before-harming” - that ever stains the hands of those who are in the WRONG. For we are not any of us long for this world, and our actions directly stains the story of our lives: even the most heinous of the acts of our enemies does not give us carte-blanche to leave our morals at the door.