Diary Entry

The question posed today - whether officers should obey orders that would make them war criminals - is no question at all. It is the same sophistry that has justified every atrocity in history. “I was only following orders” did not absolve the slave-driver, nor the overseer, nor the men who enforced the Fugitive Slave Act with guns and warrants. And it will not absolve those who would turn Iran’s cities to rubble at the command of a man who has shown, time and again, that he values neither law nor life.

The law is clear. The crime is clear. The moral duty is clear. An order to bomb water systems, hospitals, power grids - these are not acts of war but acts of terror, designed to break a people rather than defeat an army. No man with a conscience can plead ignorance. No officer who has sworn an oath to the Constitution can claim they misunderstood their duty.

And yet we hear the old evasion: “But what if they are punished for refusing?” Better court-martial than complicity. Better disgrace than blood on your hands. I have seen what happens when men choose obedience over conscience. The chains do not stay on one race, the cruelty does not stop at one border.

There is no dilemma here. Only a test. And every officer who picks up that phone to authorize the strike has already failed it.

The report arrives. A man gives an order. The order, they say, would be a crime. The officers feel a dilemma. They are mistaken. There is no dilemma. There is only a choice.

What is in their power? Their own action. Their own judgment. Their own assent or refusal. That is all. The order from the man is not in their power. The potential consequences - court-martial, disgrace, prison - are not in their power. The label “war crime” is not in their power. Their own virtue, their own capacity to act as a rational and just human being, is entirely in their power. They have confused these things, and the confusion they call a “dilemma” is the source of their distress.

You ask if they would be held responsible. By whom? By a court? That is not in their power. Their responsibility is to nature, to reason, to their own role. They chose the role of an officer. That role carries a demand: to exercise judgment, not merely to be a conduit for another’s will. If the order is unjust, the role requires refusal. To obey an unjust order is to abandon the role. It is to become a tool, a broken leg that cannot bear weight. The slave obeys every command from the master. The free man obeys only reason.

Rehearse the loss. Imagine the worst consequence: a prison cell. Can you still think? Can you still choose your attitude toward the walls? Then you are still free. The man who obeys a criminal order to preserve his career has already chosen a different prison, one he carries in his soul. His freedom was traded for a promotion, and he calls it a dilemma.

The storm is not the order. The storm is their own turbulent judgment, believing that safety lies in compliance with external forces. A ship that follows every wind is wrecked. A ship with a firm rudder holds its course. Their rudder is their principle. Let them hold it fast. The rest is not their concern.

The news arrives like a clinical note slipped under my door. The dilemma presented is a false one, a Manichean trap dressed in legal language. “Disobey orders or commit war crimes.” The very phrasing reveals the zone. For the officer who receives the order, the world is split: the zone of being, where he is a loyal soldier following lawful command, and the zone of non-being, where he becomes a war criminal. The system demands he choose which mask to wear, while ensuring both choices serve its logic of domination.

But the real violence is already complete. It is not in the potential explosion, but in the construction of the dilemma itself. The order, when it comes, will be epidermalized. It will be written on the body of the target nation - “infrastructure” - and internalized by the officer as “military necessity.” The legal experts debate the boundary of the crime, but they are surveying the fence around the zone of non-being. Their metrics of proportionality and distinction are the coloniser’s categories, designed to make the unthinkable calculable.

The officer’s anguish is authentic, but it is the anguish of a man staring into a mirror that reflects only the state’s gaze. He asks, “Will I be held responsible?” This is the question of someone who still believes he resides in the zone of being, where responsibility is personal and justice is blind. He does not yet see that the structure absolves in advance; it will either pardon the “crime” as lawful or sacrifice the “criminal” to preserve the system’s appearance of legality.

True disobedience is not choosing between the two masks offered. It is the violent, psychic refusal of the mirror itself. It is the shattering of the dilemma by naming its source: a political will that requires the constant production of the non-being - of nations, of peoples, of legal and moral categories - to sustain its own being. Until that recognition happens, the officer will tremble at the crossroads, and the experts will refine their definitions, while the machinery grinds on, awaiting only the signal to translate the statistical target into another archive of ash.