B
BornInMarch
Guest
What do Che Guevara, Boudica, Vladimir Lenin, Nat Turner, Nana Sahib, and Maximilien Robespierre all have in common? If you answered that “they all fought in open rebellion against unfair governments and are now idolized for this” then you would be correct. But you would also be correct if you answered that “they all ordered or sanctioned the murder of children and other innocent civilians”.
There seems to be a double-standard in how we apply our ethics to the past. Most often we judge people from the past in the same way we would judge people from the present; murder of civilians is evil, murder of children is evil, rape is evil, and people who engage in these activities are condemned as monsters. And this is the way it should be; the majority of religions and philosophies followed today run on the premise that morality is objective and that things evil today were just as evil yesterday or 1,000 years ago.
Yet when a “rebel” from the past commits a heinous atrocity, a disturbing number of people are more than willing to justify and defend the person and their act. If an Emperor orders his soldiers to kill every man, woman, and child in a city whose mayor refused to surrender then it is considered the epitome of sadism and a clear example of the evils that humanity commits against itself.
But replace “Emperor” with “Rebel Leader” and suddenly murdering children becomes acceptable. People laud it as justified, or even praiseworthy. In Colchester and Londinium, two cities Boudica massacred in her rebellion, the present day population has built statues of her to honor her war-crimes. In Bibighar (a place where a member of the Sepoy Rebellion paid butchers to murder and dismember a hundred women and children), the Indian Government actually tore down an existing memorial and replaced it with statues of that rebellion’s leader (people who at best sanctioned the Bibighar Massacre and who at worst ordered it). Both of these are the equivalent of building a statue of William Calley in My Lai with the words “Hero” inscribed underneath.
When questioned on this, many will either ignore the rebel atrocities (often refusing to acknowledge the atrocities in their rebuttals), will accuse the enemies of the rebels as being worse (forgetting that your enemies sins do not exonerate your own), or stating that the murdered civilians and children deserved to die for the transgressions of their parents or their government (forgetting Ezekiel 18, specifically “The one who sins is the one who will die. The child will not share the guilt of the parent, nor will the parent share the guilt of the child.”).
We as a species need to stop doing this. We need to stop applying ethical double standards and exonerating monsters simply because they make a convenient symbol for our nationalistic tendencies or because they fit an ideological narrative we like. We need to stop glorifying and excusing monsters, we need to admit that sometimes in a conflict both sides are evil, and we need to stop dishonoring the victims of atrocities by building statues of their murderer over their graves. If we don’t than there will just be more mass murders and more dead children.
There seems to be a double-standard in how we apply our ethics to the past. Most often we judge people from the past in the same way we would judge people from the present; murder of civilians is evil, murder of children is evil, rape is evil, and people who engage in these activities are condemned as monsters. And this is the way it should be; the majority of religions and philosophies followed today run on the premise that morality is objective and that things evil today were just as evil yesterday or 1,000 years ago.
Yet when a “rebel” from the past commits a heinous atrocity, a disturbing number of people are more than willing to justify and defend the person and their act. If an Emperor orders his soldiers to kill every man, woman, and child in a city whose mayor refused to surrender then it is considered the epitome of sadism and a clear example of the evils that humanity commits against itself.
But replace “Emperor” with “Rebel Leader” and suddenly murdering children becomes acceptable. People laud it as justified, or even praiseworthy. In Colchester and Londinium, two cities Boudica massacred in her rebellion, the present day population has built statues of her to honor her war-crimes. In Bibighar (a place where a member of the Sepoy Rebellion paid butchers to murder and dismember a hundred women and children), the Indian Government actually tore down an existing memorial and replaced it with statues of that rebellion’s leader (people who at best sanctioned the Bibighar Massacre and who at worst ordered it). Both of these are the equivalent of building a statue of William Calley in My Lai with the words “Hero” inscribed underneath.
When questioned on this, many will either ignore the rebel atrocities (often refusing to acknowledge the atrocities in their rebuttals), will accuse the enemies of the rebels as being worse (forgetting that your enemies sins do not exonerate your own), or stating that the murdered civilians and children deserved to die for the transgressions of their parents or their government (forgetting Ezekiel 18, specifically “The one who sins is the one who will die. The child will not share the guilt of the parent, nor will the parent share the guilt of the child.”).
We as a species need to stop doing this. We need to stop applying ethical double standards and exonerating monsters simply because they make a convenient symbol for our nationalistic tendencies or because they fit an ideological narrative we like. We need to stop glorifying and excusing monsters, we need to admit that sometimes in a conflict both sides are evil, and we need to stop dishonoring the victims of atrocities by building statues of their murderer over their graves. If we don’t than there will just be more mass murders and more dead children.