To the editor: In an April 11 opinion piece in The New York Times, historian Benny Morris urges an all-out Israeli assault on the city of Rafah in southern Gaza as essential to Israel's security.
In Professor Morris' advocacy of the primitive ethic of 10 eyes for an eye, he displays a deluded devotion to what the late Sandisfield theologian Walter Wink called the ideologies of “the domination system” and “the myth of redemptive violence.”
During my 76 years, I and others of my generation have witnessed a long lineage of public intellectuals who have served as enablers of and apologists for large-scale state violence.
Through reading journals of news and opinion, including the Times and The Berkshire Eagle, we have sadly witnessed the toxic effects of the careers of other prominent such writers, including Henry Kissinger, Walt and Eugene Rostow, George Schultz, Madeleine Albright and Condoleezza Rice.
Since 1961 — when I started to read newspapers closely — these people have in succession promoted and helped facilitate huge massacres around the world, most famously in Vietnam, Indonesia, Cambodia, Laos, Lebanon, El Salvador, Iraq and Afghanistan.
All this killing has been done in the name of our so-called national security.
That vague and perniciously euphemistic phrase has been habitually invoked by acolytes of lethal state power to justify the murderous havoc wreaked by our nation and our client states on poor and powerless people all over the earth for too long.
John Breasted, Great Barrington