Face to face

Our zoom-life made it pretty clear that face-to-face interactions communicate more than electronically mediated ones (or interactions mediated by letters, if you want to go back that far).

Doing something yourself involves more of you than hiring it done, or pressing keys to trigger it.

It involves more of yourself to bayonet a prisoner than to pull the lanyard on a big gun. The latter might kill more people, but the killers are disconnected from the dead. They pretty much never see them.

The artilleryman is a bad example, since most of the time he's shooting at people who are trying to kill him or his friends. It may not be easy, but it is self-defense. Instead of him, think of men who plant bombs to kill random people who are not trying to kill them. In this particular case the brothers hung around to enjoy the carnage, so their victims were people bleeding in front of them, not abstractions. But some stay away from the scene, presumably for safety's sake.

I can see an argument that remote murder, especially random remote murder, could be more heinous, in that it makes murder easier by removing the need to think of the other as subhuman, and in that it makes it impossible for victims to do anything differently to avoid being murdered, and so is a crime against the whole society.

But whether that is true or not, to murder a man face to face is going to stain more of you in the process. When you went into the house you had murder in your heart, which God already judges, but when you cut off the baby's head you put thorough-going murder in your hands and arms and eyes and ears. It will take a miracle to cleanse you; you are stained in a way the distanced killer is not.

Israel sowed the wind and reaped a whirlwind, but Hamas has sown the whirlwind.