Books: January 2025

Just and Unjust Wars: A Moral Argument With Historical Illustrations — Michael Walzer

⭐⭐⭐⭐ I took a moral philosophy class in college that has stuck with me, one reason being that the professor told us that semester he had been denied tenure and would be dismissed from the university. At the time I thought, “wow, that sucks,” but as I’ve gotten older the pure horror of it has set in: to have one of the few tenure-track professorships in philosophy and to lose it is brutal.

I loved that class and bring this up because the best parts of this book remind me of it. Part of what’s great about philosophy is to encounter some moral question, have a strong intuition about its answer, and then have the philosopher throw examples at you that break your intuition. Just one example: the violation of Belgian neutrality by Germany is clearly bad, but what about British violation of Norwegian neutrality in WW2? Books like this are a great reminder of how often we reason from outcomes rather than from first principles.

Walzer is fairly moderate when it comes to what makes war just or unjust. He gives states and soldiers a fair amount of leeway – although it’s not always clear to what extent Walzer is making a moral case versus describing existing conventions. He’s good at steelmanning what might seem like morally noxious stances, for instance, that retaliatory violence could be permissible in war. He thinks through the issues deeply and with compassion for the people who fight. There are places where he is more convincing (the use of the nuclear bomb was immoral) and places where he is less convincing (his arguments around the Vietnam War), but he’s clear and effective.

My favorite chapters: on the use of indiscriminate violence against civilians (fire bombing of Germany/Japan); on the nuclear bomb; on how technology changes the war convention (the introduction of submarines to naval warfare); the chapter on guerrilla war.

PS: picked this up because it is apparently frequently assigned at West Point.

La dimensión desconocida — Nona Fernández

⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐ In La Dimensión Desconocida, a blend of fiction and memoir, we follow the author as she follows a variety of real people who lived through Chile’s dirty war. At the center is “the man who tortures,” a real person – Andrés Antonio Valenzuela Morales – who participated in torture and forced disappearances during the dictatorship, later defected, revealed all to the press, and fled to France.

This book was headed for a 3/5 star rating but it won me over. So much has been written about Chile and Argentina’s dirty wars, the well would seem to have run dry. What the author does best is vividly capture how the dirty war stained everything about ordinary life with horror. Part of what was unique about the dirty war was how centrally located it was; the torture centers are not special institutions, not the concentration camp – they are regular homes, or offices.

What’s more: the torture was happening, and everyone knew. Nona notes this again and again: people are snatched up in broad daylight, out of a bus, and everyone can see but pretends not to. She could be sanctimonious about this but she is not; it is just a fact of life, she is not telling us she would have done differently. She is also surprisingly empathetic towards “the man who tortured,” whom we learn was basically a boy when he was compelled to participate. It’s an interesting balance: deeply critical and yet primarily conveying empathy.

The weight of the disappeared is captured movingly: the sheer terror of someone vanishing without a trace. There’s a devastating moment early on, when some of the first bodies are found, and the families who are searching first realize that what they are likely searching for at this point is bodies.

There’s also an incredible amount of history here that I did not know. I had no idea how deep into the end of the Pinochet regime disappearances and violent reprisals kept taking place.

The author is deeply involved in activism around historical memory in Chile. The book doesn’t grapple much with the fact that, for many Chileans, the dirty war was something more distant, either because of when they were born or because those in their social network were left relatively untouched. She makes small allusions to this – her son being too bored to join her at the marches – but to me, this is part of what’s interesting about debates over historical memory.

That said, the book effectively makes the powerful, simple point that being a dissident does not mean the government gets to torture and kill you. It does this by showing us again and again how cruel and cowardly the dirty war was.