Orwell? Is that you on the Far Left?
Four the Fifth Estate
Sophia: Hello, Christopher. Your reflection on the recent conflict has drawn you here. You believe a cause, if just, demands an unflinching, absolute commitment, a willingness to employ maximum force to secure its end. Is that a fair summary?
Christopher: (Sipping a glass of scotch that materialized in his hand) It’s more than fair, Sophia. What good is a battle half-fought? To engage in something as dreadful as war and then to wage it with a timid hand—it's a betrayal of the men and women sent to fight, and a prolonging of the very misery one hopes to end. If a malignancy must be cut out, you don't use a butter knife. You use a scalpel and you go deep.
Sophia: I understand the logic of effectiveness. A gentle violence is a paradox, a self-defeating proposition. But tell me, when that surgical steel cuts "deep," as you say, how do we prevent the scope of the operation from expanding until the patient is consumed by the cure? Is the cost of being "ruthless enough" ever truly factored in? Does the pursuit of an absolute victory not blind one to the moral limits of power?
I don't think the war in Afghanistan was ruthlessly enough waged.
— Christopher Hitchens (1949-2011)
Christopher: Morality in war is a luxury afforded by peace. In the face of a totalitarian darkness, the only ethical choice is the one that extinguishes that darkness quickest. The failure to use the required force—the fear of being judged "too harsh"—that is the real moral failure. It allows the evil to persist.
Sophia: And yet, that very force becomes its own kind of darkness, does it not? The victor's hand, once used to vanquish evil, can become accustomed to striking. When a cause is deemed absolutely just, the means used to serve it often escape scrutiny. Tell me, Christopher, who acts as the ultimate Fifth Estate on the exercise of such power—who holds the ruthlessness itself to account?
Christopher: (A faint smile touches his lips) Why, we do, Sophia. Those of us armed with a pen, a microphone, and an utter contempt for platitudes and easy pieties. Those who refuse to cheer a poorly executed war or a soft-headed peace. That accountability must come from outside the machinery of state. It has to be the unapologetic and rigorous voice of scrutiny.
Sophia: An admirable goal. But the "unapologetic and rigorous voice" is, like any instrument, only as good as the hand wielding it. Even the sharpest critique can become just another form of self-certainty, a demand for a different kind of extreme. True wisdom, it seems to me, lies not in choosing between degrees of ruthlessness, but in seeing the limits of force itself—and knowing when to put the knife away entirely.
Christopher: A noble thought, Sophia. But only after the job is done.
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