It may not need saying how romanticism for guerrillas is ultimately an expression of the cult of redemptive violence, which is simply the cult of violent masculinity. By treating the armed faction as if it were identical with, or at least representative of, the common run of the people, the romantics get their morality on the cheap: they get to protest their compassion for innocent bystanders while holding on to a visible, organized, armed, and active force in the war to side with. Not having a side to cling to is, by comparison, terrifying, because it means really thinking about the helpless (i.e. the people who have neither mobile rocket launchers nor bomber jets) and having little more than your moral convictions with which to confront suffering.

And thanks to the moral laziness of the rally-‘round-the-flag crowd within the Left, armed factions like Hizbullah will continue to be applauded for acts of indiscriminate retaliatory violence (because, hey, they’re “doing something,” “resisting,” blah blah blah), all while they continue to demonstrate incredible callousness to the likely effects of their actions on the neighbors they are supposedly defending.

“There are so few wars of people’s liberation, for the people have so seldom risen–-only the armed faction. Listen-–the armed faction lies; they recreate the state through their action. When the people rise, it is not they, but the state which dies.” – Utah Phillips