Use of violence

It was pointed out by a participant in the war in Algeria that if your opponent in this sort of struggle is a popular and efficient administrator, he is a greater danger to you than if he's a brutal and corrupt thug You will therefore try to shoot the nice chap and let the nasty chap go on damaging his own side; and a revolutionary war can therefore become a struggle in which the nice chaps kill the nice chaps and get nastier while they're doing it.

I am emphasising all the horrible features of a war of this kind because the obvious danger for the Western observer is that he tends to become starry-eyed about one side or the other; and I want to paint the picture of a war in which, as in all other wars, horrible things will be done by both sides.

Does what I am saying point to a posture of moral neutrality?

Well, an all out struggle at the grass-roots is clearly a good thing to stay out of if you can; you should only get into it if you feel your own interests are vitally affected by the outcome, or if you have better reasons for sympathising with one side or the other than I've so far indicated.

These reasons will be determined by your long term political beliefs, which had better be more carefully worked out than those of the naive left-winger or the naive anti-communist.

The best reason I know for taking the non-revolutionary side is that, other things being equal, the non-revolutionary is more likely to admit that his atrocities are atrocities than the revolutionary, whose besetting sin is his self righteousness—and may therefore stop committing them sooner.

If anti-communists think communists are devils, one reason is that communists insist that they are angels—a mistake Americans never make: they have too much political sense as well as too much sense of guilt.

To Be Concluded