In Suketu Mehta's Maximum City, he writes of the old story, "the powerful wish of minorities all over the world to be the oppressor rather than the oppressed." His descriptions of the conflicts between India's Hindus and Muslims reminds me of William Vollmann's observation that while we kill each other for many reasons, some excuses have more justification than others. We kill, and are killed, for land, for love, for lust; we kill to protect, or so we say, whether it be ourselves we are protecting or others. We kill to possess, and we die in an effort not to be possessed. We fight for power, for status, for things, both to preserve what we have and to claim that which we feel others possess but that we deserve. And we find a way to be both oppressor and oppressed, to dance with justification and to blur the boundaries between awareness and deception within ourselves.

Eleventh-century Christians invaded the Holy Land in part because of a sense that their holy sites had fallen into pagan hands, in part for a hunger for Eastern wealth, and in part out of retaliation for Muslim incursions into Spain in the 7th century (a Spain which would, in fact, remain largely in Muslim hands until well after the fall of the last Crusader citadel in Palestine). Saladin reacted to the Crusaders; the Crusaders reacted to him. The Fourth Crusade sacked not a Muslim city but the Eastern center of Christianity for many reasons, among them jealousy and spite and the sense that the decadent lords of Byzantium no longer deserved what they held.

Genocides in Rwanda, Cambodia and the Sudan are a witness to oppression; the challenge, often, is what happens when the tide turns and the oppressor becomes the oppressed. When Israelis fight Palestinians, images are often of Israeli tanks and poorly armed opponents. But there was once a different day, a different time, and the "oppressor" wore a different face. And there are those even today who preach the eradication of Israel and who hunger for the day when it is their hand that holds the whip, the gun or the controls of a nuclear-weapons system. In ancient Greece, when Athens fought Sparta during the Peloponnesian War, both sides ended up the loser in the sense that each committed an escalating series of atrocities against the other, alternating between victory and defeat, between oppressor and oppressed, in which the earlier acts of the enemy justified the perpetration of some new horrific behavior.