Into the gap

It is right that the murder of many people be mourned and lamented. It is right that a victor in war be received with funeral ceremonies. Tzu & Le Guin, Tao Te Ching, page 38 How are we to prevent war? asks Virginia Woolf in the winter of 1937, as photos of the Spanish Civil War pile up on her desk, with their broken bodies and broken buildings, and Hitler and Mussolini gather forces to the east, and her own government’s war budget reaches new extremes. War, she asserts—and you will agree—is a horror, a terror that must be stopped. As well we know, confronted as we are with real-time video of genocide in Palestine, the massacre of school children in Iran, a fascist leader not abroad but in our own demolished house, asserting his right to make war wherever he likes, whenever he wants, including in our own cities, as armies under other names murder and disappear our neighbors with impunity. But, Woolf asks, what is she to do, what are the daughters of educated men to do in the face of…