Source: Garrison Center
by Thomas L Knapp
“‘You cannot qualify war in harsher terms than I will,’ Union general William Tecumseh Sherman wrote in an 1864 letter warning the citizens of Atlanta — which his advancing army had just occupied — to evacuate. ‘War is cruelty, and you cannot refine it.’ Over the last two years, Sherman’s words come to mind whenever an opponent of Israel and/or supporter of the Palestinians confidently asserts that the violence in Gaza is ‘not a war’ because it is so terrible. It IS a war, and that’s why it’s so terrible. … That many of the dead in all wars, and most of the dead in this one, are civilian non-combatants, doesn’t turn those wars into non-wars. It just turns them into worse wars.” (10/21/25)