I don't agree either. Now that technology allows individual actions to spread further, people need to learn to shut up and multiply.
The attack on Pearl Harbor killed 2335 American military personnel and 68 civilians. The Little Boy bomb dropped by the Enola Gay crew on Hiroshima killed 90-140,000 Japanese, mostly civilians. The whole Asia Pacific war consumed nearly 25 million people. Or consider the ratio resulting from the terrorist attacks 22 years and 7 days ago. Those planes killed 2,977 American victims (plus 19 hijackers), then the US went to war in Afghanistan and Iraq and caused 4.5-4.7 million deaths [1].
"You attack me, I attack you" works as foreign policy (or is at least justifiable) when your most devastating weapon is your own fists and teeth, or even as sophisticated as a stick with a rock tied to the end. To swing that stick again and again and again, for days, ending one thousand, two thousand, ten thousand times as many lives as were lost in the initial strike... That will not bring back a father, a brother, or an uncle. You might understand how a broken man might want to do that, but that can't be called justice. When your weapon is as small as Little Boy, or today as big as a network of ICBMs, and instead of standing face to face with your enemy and watching that human suffer you're pulling a bomb release from 30,000 feet or clicking a button from the other side of the world, that gut feeling of a desire for revenge, an attitude of "I want to cause pain" is not reliable.
The attack on Pearl Harbor killed 2335 American military personnel and 68 civilians. The Little Boy bomb dropped by the Enola Gay crew on Hiroshima killed 90-140,000 Japanese, mostly civilians. The whole Asia Pacific war consumed nearly 25 million people. Or consider the ratio resulting from the terrorist attacks 22 years and 7 days ago. Those planes killed 2,977 American victims (plus 19 hijackers), then the US went to war in Afghanistan and Iraq and caused 4.5-4.7 million deaths [1].
"You attack me, I attack you" works as foreign policy (or is at least justifiable) when your most devastating weapon is your own fists and teeth, or even as sophisticated as a stick with a rock tied to the end. To swing that stick again and again and again, for days, ending one thousand, two thousand, ten thousand times as many lives as were lost in the initial strike... That will not bring back a father, a brother, or an uncle. You might understand how a broken man might want to do that, but that can't be called justice. When your weapon is as small as Little Boy, or today as big as a network of ICBMs, and instead of standing face to face with your enemy and watching that human suffer you're pulling a bomb release from 30,000 feet or clicking a button from the other side of the world, that gut feeling of a desire for revenge, an attitude of "I want to cause pain" is not reliable.
[1]: https://watson.brown.edu/costsofwar/papers/2023/IndirectDeat...