The Met Opera HD broadcast of Juius Caesar last Saturday was not just striking for its superb cast of 9 principals (nearly a minyan!). It struck me that Caesar's repulsion at the sight and thought of his adversary Pompeii being beheaded (in a mistaken attempt at sycophantism by Ptolemy) was a brilliant moral lesson. Cast as it was in British Raj, British soldiers against Indian aristocracy, while disconcerting, also brought the opera into our own imperialist century.
When was the last time adversaries in a war called a truce and maintained some modicum of respect for each other? Is it even possible? We are always the moral superior fighting tyrants and psychopaths. And the world is full of tyrants and psychopaths (the governor of Nevada perhaps one). The US put Japanese military leaders on trial after WWII but did not do the expected action of executing the Emperor -- for a very good reason. Scholars were heavily involved in how we behaved in Japan both during and after the war. The military was counseled that executing the Emperor would both demoralize a nation that needed to become functional (albeit with what appears to have been an astonishly successful policy of disarmament and peace) and also incur such wrath that the population might not cooperate. The military establishment in Japan dragged their country, their citizens, through hell and starvation to satisfy an imperialist mania. So we are comfortably sitting in our barcaloungers observing war after war our military establishment begins. It seems more humane to recruit combat-hungry men to meet in a coliseum and duke it out as proxies.