The Lesser of Two Evils: The Burning of Children Instead of Paper

Our apologies, good friends, for the fracture of good order, the burning of paper instead of children, the angering of the orderlies in the front parlor of the charnel house. We could not, so help us God, do otherwise.

For we are sick at heart, our hearts give us no rest for thinking of the Land of Burning Children. And for thinking of that other Child, of whom the poet Luke speaks. The infant was taken up in the arms of an old man, whose tongue grew resonant and vatic at the touch of that beauty.

And the old man spoke; this child is set for the fall and rise of many in Israel, a sign that is spoken against. Small consolation; a child born to make trouble, and to die for it, the First Jew (not the last) to be subject of a “definitive solution.” He sets up the cross and dies on it; in the Rose Garden of the executive mansion, on the D.C. Mall, in the courtyard of the Pentagon.

That was Father Daniel Berrigan’s statement read in court in October 1968 during the trial of The Catonsville Nine. On May 17th, 1968, with Democratic President Lyndon Johnson presiding over 500,000 + American troops waging war against Vietnam, nine people, including Father Daniel Berrigan and his brother Father Phillip Berrigan, entered a draft board in Catonsville, Maryland and removed draft files of those who were about to be sent to Vietnam. They took these files outside and burned them with home-made napalm, a weapon commonly used on civilians by the U.S. forces. They were sentenced to federal prison.

Less than a month after their sentencing, the Republican Richard Nixon was elected U.S. president on a campaign promise that he had a “secret peace plan” to end the U.S. war against Vietnam. He did the opposite, intensified the war, spreading it to Laos and Cambodia, killing millions. He was reelected in 1972 while committing this carnage. He won 49 out of 50 states. The war ended in 1975 with a U.S. defeat.

My name is Aaron Bushnell, and I am an active duty member of the United States Air Force. I will no longer be complicit in genocide. I’m about to engage in an extreme act of protest but, compared to what people have been experiencing in Palestine at the hands of their colonizers, it’s not extreme at all. This is what our ruling class has decided will be normal.

That is the statement of Senior Airman (SRA) Aaron Bushnell, 25 years-old, who martyred himself when he immolated himself outside the Israeli embassy in Washington, D.C., on Feb. 25, 2024, to protest the Israel/U.S genocide of Palestinians. Aaron had previously said: “What would I do if my country was committing genocide? The answer is, you’re doing it. Right now”

Right now is still now, 16 months later and ongoing.

I am writing this on a piece of paper but you will most probably read it on a screen, the same screens that have provided ample news and views of the burning of Palestinian children in Gaza, another new Land of Burning Children. If you have not seen such pictures, it is because you have turned away in what Jean Paul Sartre called “bad faith,” knowing what they contain and demand of your conscience, but hiding that radicalizing truth from yourself.

Those pictures demand, at the very least, that you condemn and never support those who carry out these atrocities – in the U.S.A. that means Joseph Biden and Donald Trump, first and foremost, neither of whom you can you ever again support by saying he is or was “the lesser of two evils” – just as Martin Luther King, Jr. did when he was jolted by photographs of dead and napalmed Vietnamese children in early 1967 in William Pepper’s Ramparts magazine’s photographic essay, “The Children of Vietnam.”  King was so sickened by the photos that he, against all advice, publicly turned vociferously against the U.S. war against Vietnam, and was therefore assassinated by the U.S. government the following year, one month before the Catonsville protest that was less than three weeks before the assassination of Senator Robert Kennedy.

If you follow King’s example and reject evil, you will not be assassinated, but you will have redeemed your soul.

Thanks to Ray Bradbury’s novel Fahrenheit 451, many know that paper burns at Fahrenheit 451.

But at what temperature do children burn?  Do you need to know?

The history of American presidential politics has often been a tale of the election of “the lesser of two evils.” And that justification has been used time-and-again to support the savage killing of innocent people around the world. The presidential elections of this century tell that story very clearly, just as many decades of history confirm U.S. support for Israel’s ongoing attempts to exterminate the Palestinian people.

The lesser of two evils apologists have been very active in recent years, defending their indefensible politicians.

A good friend of mine, a small monetary contributor to the Democratic party and a consistent voter for Democratic presidential candidates, has long accused me of going easy on Donald Trump. This began during the presidential campaign in 2016, but had its roots previously in my critique of Barack Obama (following that of Bill Clinton and George W. Bush) who in the words of the late Glen Ford of Black Agenda Report “may go down in history as the most effective – and deceptive – imperialist of them all.” He wrote this in the foreword to Jeremy Kuzmarov’s searing documentation of Barack Obama’s war crimes of bombing seven Muslim countries, destroying Libya, and engineering a coup d’état in Ukraine, Obama’s Unending Wars. My friend’s opinion is shared by many other friends and extended family members who won’t read my writing. Without saying it, they imply that I am an apologist for Mr. Trump and unfairly oppose the Democratic warmongers, Obama and Biden, whom they consider peace lovers.

Other friends and associates, traditional Democrats, enthusiastically voted for Barack Obama in 2008 after eight years of lies, crackdowns on civil liberties (the Patriot Act, etc.), and the endless savage wars waged by Republican George W. Bush’s criminal administration. The eight prior years of Democrat Bill Clinton’s reversal of economic safeguards for the poor, his endless bombing and sanctions against Iraq resulting in his acceptable deaths of more than 500,000 Iraqi children, and his destruction of Yugoslavia and the bombing of Serbia, gave them pause, but Bush’s policies were so evil that Obama seemed like a breadth of fresh air in comparison. [Admission: I have voted for one U.S. president in my lifetime – McGovern in 1972.] But soon Obama showed them his true colors and they became disconsolate. And when in 2016 it became apparent that the Democrats, led by Obama and Hillary Clinton conjured up Russiagate to make certain that the reality-TV Trump not get elected but he did, they moved gradually toward Trump’s camp. Now they say that I have been too hard on Trump, who, they maintain, is a man of peace, despite his complete and longstanding support for Israel’s genocide of Palestinians, his interventions in Syria and the bombing of Yemen, his policy on Ukraine during his first term that was a continuation of the policy pursued by the Obama administration, and his lack of an executive order when taking office this year ending all support for Ukraine.

Both sides tout their peacemaker presidents as they may, shouting peace, peace, while there is no peace. That the U.S. has a permanent warfare state seems lost on them. That they are being played by a sycophant media that thrives on gamesmanship while supporting the warfare state never really penetrates their thinking.

Nevertheless, between easy and hard, I have given much thought to their judgments, only to conclude that both groups are falsely driven by desperate emotions, ahistorical naïveté, and wishful thinking. For it was clear before every presidential election since 1964 (with the possible exception of Democratic Senator George McGovern in 1972) that we were being taken for a ride by bi-partisan thugs for the American Empire, Trump surely not excluded. But pipe-dreams prevailed and the empire rolled on, driven by a propaganda machine second to none.

That propaganda machine is now so powerful because it is so obvious. It’s like those advertisements that mock the products that they are selling only to sell more. Considering themselves too smart for such stupidity, the most well-meaning and intelligent individuals are caught in its tentacles; they have had their minds occupied by its cognitive infiltration. Something so obvious just couldn’t be true for them; couldn’t convince anyone but the most stupid. This is Guy Debord’s The Society of the Spectacle.

Do they consider the sights and sounds of the U.S./Israel genocide of Palestinians real? Do they ask, “What is Truth?” Do they, like Pontius Pilate, wash their hands and declare their innocence of the blood of Palestinians even as they stand behind their chosen presidential genociders?

Yet I have concluded that it is not primarily propaganda or intelligence that has created this bifurcated checkmate, this stasis of thinking wherein two sides aggressively assert their leaders’ good intentions as opposed to the other. What is presented as terribly complex and confusing is unheard-of-simple, to paraphrase the great Russian poet and novelist Boris Pasternak. It is heretical to say so, but it is so: Too many people have lost their minds, they are alienated from their own experience and the logic of simple facts. And by doing so have buried their consciences. The Scottish psychiatrist Ronald Laing put it this way in 1967:

There are forms of alienation that are relatively strange to statistically ‘normal’ forms of alienation. The ‘normally’ alienated person, by reason of the fact that he acts more or less like everyone else, is taken to be sane. Other forms of alienation that are out of step with the prevailing state of alienation are those that are labeled by the ‘normal’ majority as bad or mad.

The condition of alienation, of being asleep, of being unconscious, of being out of one’s mind, is the condition of the normal man.

We need only consider the one simple example of Israel’s ongoing genocide against the Palestinians. It has been going on in plain sight for sixteen months under President Biden and four months under President Trump with his full continuing U.S. support. No American can honestly say they didn’t know this genocide was being carried out by their country. According to Israel’s Defense Ministry, as reported on May 28, 2025 by antiwar.com, “The US has delivered 90,000 tons of bombs, guns, and other military equipment to Israel since October 7, 2023, to support the genocidal war against Palestinians in the Gaza Strip, according to numbers from the Israeli Defense Ministry. The Defense Ministry said Tuesday that the 800th plane carrying US weapons arrived in Israel in the morning, and 140 ships have also delivered US equipment in the nearly 600 days since October 7.”

Knowing about this genocide where well over 50,000 + Palestinians at a minimum, more than a third of them children, have been killed, burnt alive, bombed apart, and far more wounded and starved to death with Biden and Trump’s full support, should make any person who has retained one scintilla of humanity reject these bloodthirsty killers instantly and forever.

But it is not so. They retain the support of their ardent followers. They excuse them. Men who burn children alive are not rejected outright, but are found to have redeeming qualities by their political supporters. Something so inconceivably terrible is happening in full view, but what it signifies about Biden and Trump, the Democrats and the Republicans, is let slide, as if genocide were just a minor foible. These men are often elected by their followers as the lesser of two evils, as if the genocidal slaughter of innocents were a lesser evil. As if …. so many as ifs. So many excuses.

Yes, it is unheard-of-simple. While there are endless U.S. wars of aggression and massive slaughters of innocents one could cite to make a case against the support of U.S. leaders, this one example should suffice. You either unequivocally accept or reject those who support genocide. No ifs, ands, or buts.

At what temperature do children burn? Do you really not know?