The suffering of inocents in war and beyond
Dermot Roantree [from Studies editorial, Summer 2026] :: In the months after the capitulation of France to the Germans in June 1940, Simone Weil wrote a remarkable essay on the Iliad, Homer’s account of the ferocious assault on Troy by the Greeks. [1] There was just one hero in this war, she judged – not Achilles, the champion warrior of the Greeks, not Agamemnon, their commander, nor even King Priam of Troy or his brave son Hector. ‘The true hero,’ she begins her essay, ‘the true subject, the centre of the Iliad is force.’
For Weil, force is a fundamental structuring condition of human relations. Our interactions all take place in the shadow of this transforming agent – ‘that x that turns anybody who is subjected to it into a thing’. Taken to its limit, she says, it turns a human being into a thing quite literally: ‘it makes a corpse out of him.’ The Iliad is replete with scenes of humans being reduced to mere matter. The ‘noble drivers’ of the chariots who are slain on the battlefield lie there, ‘dearer to the vultures than to their wives’. Hector’s corpse is dragged behind Achilles’s chariot. His wife, not knowing of his demise, has the maids prepare a hot bath for him, but ‘already he lay, far from hot baths.’ ‘Nearly all of human life,’ Weil remarks, ‘then and now, takes place far from hot baths.’
What concerns her just as much as the brutal killings in war is the exercise of force in the many other circumstances of common life: the relations of domination, of oppression, of threat. Nobody is spared from this. ‘Perhaps all men,’ she muses bleakly, ‘by the very act of being born, are destined to suffer violence.’ And even those who are victors in one moment may well be victims in the next. The joy of victory is only ever short-lived. What perdures is the relentless dehumanising drive, the reduction of persons to things, that infests social interaction even in times of peace.
There is a related judgement, though more political than ontological, in Hannah Arendt’s account of the dehumanisation of minorities as totalitarian regimes take shape. To appear as a bearer of rights one must belong to a political community – must share in its discourse, be recognised as an equal, and live under its laws; but with a totalitarian government, those who fall outside the dominant community may be stripped of their ‘right to have rights’ [2]. The sovereignty of each individual turns out to be radically subordinated to the state’s sovereignty. And so, undesirable people may be rendered ‘stateless’, giving the lie to the Enlightenment promise of ‘inalienable rights’. Without the recognition and protection of a state, a person is expelled from the realm of the bios politikos – full, politically embedded human life – and reduced to a kind of mere humanity.
Weil and Arendt, in their different ways, displayed a more widely felt disenchantment with modern rationality. The Frankfurt School leaders, particularly Theodore Adorno and Max Horkheimer, similarly believed it had failed in its promise, and intimations of the same verdict were apparent in post-war existentialism, sociology, and political theory, as well as in literature and theology. The two world wars, the Holocaust, other genocides, the expansion of consumer capitalism, and the tight bureaucratic management of society – all of these demonstrated the purely instrumental nature of much public reasoning. It had become the opposite of what it promised. Instead of bringing emancipation, it brought domination. It put into effect a totalising logic of technocratic efficiency and social control. And when that’s how the thinking goes, the intrinsic worth of every human being is forgotten, and the solidarity of humanity is no longer persuasive. War, and all the destruction it brings, becomes more thinkable.
According to the most recent Global Peace Index, [3] there are nearly sixty ‘active state-based conflicts’ in the world at present, the most since the end of World War II. ‘This is the 13th deterioration in peacefulness in the last 17 years,’ the report notes, adding that levels of militarisation are up, conflict is more international, and the successful resolution of conflicts is at its lowest point in fifty years. As Pope Leo remarked to the diplomatic corps in January, ‘war is back in vogue and a zeal for war is spreading.’ [4] A diplomacy that seeks consensus, he lamented, is being replaced by ‘a diplomacy based on force’; the only peace it seeks is the submission of the enemy ‘as a condition for asserting one’s own dominance’.
The pope was even more direct in his Palm Sunday homily on 29 March. No one can use Christ to justify war, he insisted: ‘He does not listen to the prayers of those who wage war, but rejects them, saying: “Even though you make many prayers, I will not listen: your hands are full of blood”’ (Isa 1:15). This was not, as some Catholics thought, a repudiation of just war theory. The moral context of just war theory has always been that war is tragic, always a condition in which grave injustices thrive – the dehumanisation of combatants, their desensitisation to cruelty, and the infliction of violence on civilians, to be sure, but underlying these there is the unleashing of what St Augustine calls the libido dominandi, [5] the lust for domination. And so the bar for a just war is set exceedingly high. It is intended to restrain, not to legitimise.
What makes all wars morally perilous is the near impossibility of maintaining jus in bello, right conduct during war, even when there is a reasonable claim to jus ad bellum, the right to go to war in the first place. But how far beyond any commitment to right conduct have we gone when the most powerful president in the world threatens to destroy a whole civilisation, or when his secretary of defence takes pride in an army characterised by ‘maximum lethality, not tepid legality’ and rejects ‘stupid rules of engagement’ that would tie the hands of his soldiers, all the while invoking ‘God’s almighty providence’. And language of this kind is no longer exceptional: a Hezbollah leader declares that the people of Israel will pay the price for their government’s belligerence – effectively echoing Osama bin Laden’s repeated insistence after 9/11 that as the American people voted for their government they are not innocent; Netanyahu tells his forces as they invade Gaza to remember God’s command in the Book of Samuel to annihilate the Amalekites, their men, women, and children, and even their farm animals; his finance minister, Bezalel Smotrich, insists that starving two million Gazans might be ‘justified and moral’; Russian politician and former president Dmitry Medvedev refers to some Ukrainians as ‘various cockroaches that have bred in the Kyiv insectarium’ – the list is long. Nor does it stop at rhetoric, of course: there are reports from most present-day war zones of the strategic use of sexual violence, the abduction of children, the summary execution of civilians, and the blocking of humanitarian aid. It is exceedingly rare that armed forces, no matter how good their claim to jus ad bellum, manage to show restraint, proportion, and respect for noncombatant immunity.
Targeting civilian populations and destroying towns, villages and all the infrastructure they rely on is by no means a new phenomenon. In a recent work, Irish economic historian Cormac Ó Grada revises upwards the received figures for the deaths of noncombatants during the two world wars of the twentieth century. Including all causes – bombing campaigns, famine, disease, genocide – the civilian death toll of World War I numbers between 15 and 20 million, and that of World War II comes out between 45 and 50 million. And clearly this is not all ‘collateral’ damage. As Ó Gráda writes,
Both world wars caused several famines. Both spawned genocides, above all the Jewish Holocaust. Both targeted civilians as a means of winning: during World War I through blockades and forced labour, during World War II through expropriation and far more forced labour, and through aerial bombing on a massive scale, culminating in the atomic bombs dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki in early August 1945. [6]
How can we account for the ease with which the world reverts to such nihilistic brutality in times of war? It’s important first to note that this dehumanising tendency is not confined to combatants. War evidently brings on a decisive change in attitude among the civilian populations too. Ó Gráda again:
During World War II, more so than during World War I, most if not all the warring parties countenanced civilian deaths on a mass scale. Lofty prewar commitments to sparing civilians evaporated once the dogs of war were let slip. Given the lack of an enforcement mechanism, laws agreed upon in peacetime were nearly always broken whenever they got in the way of military goals. Meanwhile, both sides accused the other of atrocities against civilians and reaped the propagandistic rewards to be had from such claims. Eventually civilians, too, called for retaliation and revenge against enemy civilians. War transformed how people felt about civilians … [7]
Which brings us into the realm of a particularly disquieting aspect of the mysterium iniquitatis, the mystery of human evil: How is it possible that people who seem to live ethically during the ordinary course of their lives, people who are consciously committed to a moral code, find it easy to perpetrate or at least to defend the most heinous of crimes in wartime and beyond? Or as the subtitle of American psychologist Albert Bandura’s book on the subject goes, how do people ‘do harm and live with themselves’? [8]
Bandura notes that ‘people do not usually engage in harmful conduct until they have justified to themselves the morality of their actions’. He then charts and classifies the multiple strategies by which they construct ‘persuasive self-exonerations’ in order to selectively disengage from the moral dimension of violent behaviour. They resort to euphemistic labelling, for example (collateral damage, surgical strikes); or they claim the actions are justified by religious ordinance (jihad, crusade); or are necessary for a higher purpose (defending freedom, combating evil, creating a better peace); or they deflect responsibility (‘the government has its reasons’, ‘they gave us no choice’, ‘it’s in God’s hands’); or they dehumanise or demonise the victims (the Gazans are ‘human animals’, migrants are ‘the worst of the worst’); and so on. J. D. Vance’s notorious distortion of the concept of the ordo amoris, reducing a brutal deportation policy to the playing out of ordered Christian love, checks a number of these boxes.
There is a powerful counterimage to Vance’s in a late essay by Simone Weil, published posthumously in Awaiting God. [9] She recalls a detail from the medieval legend of the Grail. That miraculous vessel, guarded by a king who, as punishment, was afflicted with an excruciating wound, would belong to the first seeker who saw the king suffering and asked him, Quel est ton tourment? – ‘What is your torment?’, ‘your agony?’, sometimes translated as ‘What are you going through?’ It is the compassionate question of a person who pays attention and shows concern for a sufferer – a real person, right here, right now, grieving, starving, lonely, wounded, homeless, despairing, living in fear. Weil remarks, ‘The love of our neighbour in all its fullness simply means being able to say to him: “What are you going through?”’ [10]
This is the precise opposite of the moral disengagement that animates and legitimates wars and that perpetuates structural injustice in times of peace. It is a refusal to allow suffering to remain invisible.
——
1. Simone Weil, The Iliad, or the Poem of Force, trans. by Mary McCarthy (Pendle Hill, 1991; 1st edition, 1956).
2. See in particular Hannah Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism (Harcourt Brace & Co., 1973. Originally published in 1948), pp. 296–298. See all of Chapter 9; ‘The Decline of the Nation-State and the End of the Rights of Man’.
3. See www.visionofhumanity.org/wp-content/uploads/2025/06/Global-Peace-Index-2025-web.df
4. Pope Leo XIV, ‘Address of Pope Leo XIV to Members of the Diplomatic Corps Accredited to the Holy See’, speech, 9 January 2026, www.vatican.va/content/leo-xiv/en/speeches/2026/january/documents/20260109-corpo-diplomatico.html
5. See especially St Augustine, The City of God, Book I and XIX.
6. Cormac Ó Gráda, The Hidden Victims: Civilian Casualties of the Two World Wars (Princeton University Press, 2024), p. 3.
7 Ó Gráda, The Hidden Victims, p. 2.
8. Albert Bandura, Moral Disengagement: How People Do Harm and Live with Themselves (Worth Publishers, 2016). See especially Chapter 2, ‘Mechanisms of Moral Disengagement’, pp. 48–103.
9. Simone Weil, ‘School Studies and the Love of God’ ,in Awaiting God, trans. by Bradley Jersak (Fresh Wind Press, 2012).
10. This version is from the 1951 translation by Emma Crauford, titled Waiting for God and republished by Harper Colophon Books (New York, etc.) in 1973, p. 115.
