Justice

There is a sentence that ends arguments before they begin: “war is hell, both sides do terrible things, so there is nothing to choose between them.” It sounds like maturity. It is in fact the opposite of looking, a refusal disguised as worldliness, and it collapses the moment you actually examine what is being fought over Ukraine. Because what is happening there is not one war fought by two morally comparable armies. It is two different things at once, occurring on the same map and called by the same name. One is a deliberate, years-long campaign to exterminate a civilian population. The other is a disciplined defense that strikes only military and economic targets. To see them as a single phenomenon — “the war,” with its regrettable excesses on both sides — is already to have lost the thread that connects the facts to any honest judgment. ...

There is a phrase I keep hearing, and every time I hear it I feel a chill, because I know exactly where it leads. The phrase goes: if Russians don’t pour into the streets to stop this war, then they are all accomplices — every last one of them. It is meant to sound morally uncompromising. In fact it is the opposite. It is a slogan that hands an enormous, undeserved gift to the very people who started the killing. And I want to explain, as carefully as I can, why I believe collective responsibility is real and inescapable — and why collective guilt is a poison that has only ever produced fascism and Bolshevism. ...