The world and people have become even more fascinating for an inquisitive soul like mine. Let's start with a simple question that most probably is anything but: what is morality? Lets strip away the sermons and the think-pieces and you're left with…let’s call it a shared sense of what is owed to other human beings, and what is forbidden in the pursuit of power, wealth or survival. Simple enough on paper right? But then let me ask this, who gets to define it? Whose conduct is measured against it? Cos, here's the thing nobody wants to say out loud at the dinner party…. morality, as practiced in international affairs, isn't a universal ruler. It's a spotlight. And spotlights are operated by someone, pointed somewhere, and switched off whenever the operator wanders into frame.
The ‘Naughty Countries”. You know the ones. I’m sure if I woke you up in the middle of the night, you would have no trouble rattling them off… For most of our lives we have been force fed these names and we absorbed them. Cuba. Russia. China. Venezuela. North Korea. Iran. Say any of those names and a set of adjectives arrives pre-loaded: authoritarian, rogue, repressive, a threat to the rules-based order, regimes. Sometimes the label fits the facts. Cuba has political prisoners. Iran executes people, I think some states in USA do too. None of that is in dispute here. But are they the only ones?
What is worth noticing is the consistency of the outrage, and how selectively it's applied. A government jails a journalist in Caracas and it's a five-alarm human rights emergency, covered for a week. A journalist are deliberately killed by a drone strike or dies waiting for a visa in a country on the right side of the spotlight, and the story runs once, if at all, usually with the word "tragic" doing a lot of quiet work. Sanctions that starve ordinary Cubans or Iranians of medicine and dignity are described as "pressure" or "leverage." When the same tactic is used against a Western-aligned population, we call it collective punishment and reach for the word "crime." Someone can tell me something as anti this religion where telling me how foul another religion’s people are.
This isn't an argument that these governments are blameless. It's an argument that morality, applied honestly, should not care whose flag is on the wrongdoing.
The beauty and interesting part of it all is that history has left us a paper trail of quotes from the very people running the spotlight, quotes that would earn an ordinary head of state a seat in front of a tribunal. We have boats and fishing vessels being bombed in the ocean, no trial, no arrests, just because you can. You have Captain Orange, saying "a whole civilization will die tonight, never to be brought back again" or “power plant and bridge day”or Curtis LeMay, the American general who ran the bombing campaigns over Vietnam, said the quiet part loud: the aim, in his words, was to bomb the country "back into the Stone Age." Richard Nixon, discussing the secret and illegal carpet bombing of Cambodia, is on record wanting to hit it with everything that flies, whether it hit a person or a cow. Madeleine Albright, when asked on television whether half a million dead Iraqi children was a price worth paying for a sanctions regime, did not flinch. She said yes, it was worth it. Harry Truman, after the atomic bombing of two Japanese cities killed well over a hundred thousand civilians in an instant, called it the greatest thing in history.
Let's sit with that phrasing for a second. "Back into the Stone Age." "The greatest thing in history." These aren’t secret handshakes. They are declarations of intent to erase, delivered in full sentences, on the record, by men who died in their beds surrounded by honours and libraries named after them. Compare that to the fate of leaders from the naughty list, hauled in absentia before courts, sanctioned, isolated, turned into punchlines, for offences that, however real, rarely approach the scale of what was said and done by the people holding the gavel.
This is the part that should bother anyone who takes morality seriously. Not that accountability exists. That it is applied like a toll booth, waved through for some passports and not others.
Brings me to a topic that depicts selective memory oh too well. Let's take one region, without naming the players, and see if the pattern holds. There's a piece of land, at the crossroads of three continents, where for centuries a mixed population, several faiths among them, lived in something closer to uneasy coexistence than paradise, but coexistence nonetheless. Markets shared, neighbourhoods shared, holy sites within walking distance of each other.
Then came a letter, written by a foreign minister of an empire that did not own the land in question, promising a national home there to a movement organising itself abroad, while adding the now-famous caveat that the rights of the existing population should not be prejudiced. History is not short of documents that made a promise with one hand and took it back with the other in the same paragraph.
In the decades that followed, paramilitary organisations tied to that movement carried out bombings and assassinations against the colonial administration and against civilians, campaigns that the authorities of the day and later historians have described, using the vocabulary of the time, as terrorism. One of the more infamous episodes was the bombing of a hotel that served as the administrative nerve centre of the mandate, killing dozens, an act still debated today only in the sense that some try to dress it up as a warning that was ignored rather than an act of mass violence that succeeded exactly as planned.
Then came the founding of the new state, and with it, an exodus. Hundreds of thousands of the indigenous population left their homes, some fleeing violence, some expelled outright, villages emptied and in many cases physically erased from the map soon after. Similar to what is being carried out today in a neighbouring state. The people who left called it a catastrophe. The narrative of "a land without a people for a people without a land" was a powerful piece of propaganda. The reality was a land with a people, and those people paid the price for a tragedy that had happened elsewhere in Europe. They are still, generations later, waiting for the right of return that international law says they hold.
What followed for decades was a curious pattern: peace initiatives launched with great fanfare, negotiators shaking hands on lawns in front of cameras, followed by settlement expansion, assassinations of the more conciliatory leaders on both sides, and the quiet unravelling of whatever had been signed. The pattern of peace deal sabbotage that is playing out now, leads one to dig deeper to try and understand if what caused previous peace to disintegrate is what many loudly tout.
But, none of this requires villains and heroes to be useful. It requires only the willingness to apply the same moral test to the founding of that state that we apply so readily to the founding myths of the countries on the naughty list. Land taken, populations displaced, violence used to accelerate a political project. If that pattern earns a country a spot on the sanctions list when it happens in Havana or Caracas, intellectual honesty demands or at least should demand, we ask why it earns unconditional military aid and diplomatic cover when it happens elsewhere.
So what then is morality? Maybe, just maybe morality was never a fixed ruler at all. Maybe it has always been a story that power tells about itself, revised as needed, applied to others and suspended for oneself. I was in a conversation recently with someone who was shaken after visiting a memorial wall, distraught over a four month old baby killed by history's most obvious villains. I sat with that, genuinely. Then I said the quiet part…if that's disgusting, so is a four month old killed today by the ally's own forces. The reaction was instant, disgust. Somehow naming the second death was the crime. The first one just sat there, safely mourned.
The fix cant be that complicated, even if it's inconvenient. Judge the act, not the flag flying over it. Ask the same questions of the ally that you ask of the adversary. If mass displacement is wrong, it's wrong regardless of who signed the paperwork. If bombing civilians is a crime, it's a crime whether the plane took off from an airbase we like or one we don't. Sure there are those who'd say every conflict above has its own tangled history of provocation, security threats, and competing rights, that flattening decades of complexity into a morality tale about hypocrisy risks becoming its own kind of propaganda, just aimed the other way. And yes I get it. Butttt in spite of all that complexity, I’d say the basic test still holds. If we can't apply it evenly, we should probably stop pretending we're applying a moral test at all, and admit we're just keeping score for our own side. ;)
