This is the most recent item in a debate about humanitarian intervention. Click here to read the previous contributions by Richard Just, David Rieff, Leon Wieseltier, and Michael Kazin.

In 1940, as the Wehrmacht marched into Paris, Simone Weil wrote in her journal, “[T]his is a great day for the people of Indochina.” The remark is generally greeted with horror, by respectable opinion in Western Europe and North America, anyway, and mocked as an emblematic instance of the European (and by extension, American) self-hatred that the French writer Pascal Bruckner had in mind in his book, The Tyranny of Guilt: An Essay on Western Masochism. At first glance, even allowing for the fact that Weil’s observation did not impede her from trying to volunteer to fight for the Free French against the Nazis, the scorn heaped upon her by writers like Bruckner seems warranted. Weil was indeed filled with self-hatred, and like the medieval Christian mystics fetishized suffering, writing in Gravity and Grace that it “saves existence.”

But there is a problem with such dismissals: As a matter of historical fact, Weil was also incontrovertibly right. The collapse of the French empire in Indochina made independence possible. Anyone doubting this need only look at the fact that when the Nazis were defeated one of the first things the French did was re-establish their rule, successfully demanding at the Potsdam Conference in 1945 the return of their possessions in Southeast Asia. This was not India, where to Churchill’s discomfiture, by the end of the 1930s, British elite opinion was increasingly coming to the view that independence was inevitable. To the contrary, when a French army under General Leclerc—the same General Leclerc who had been one of France’s great heroes in the fight against Nazism, and whose 2nd Armored Division had liberated Paris in 1944—arrived in Saigon in October, 1945, it was with the intention of definitively crushing the Vietnamese independence movement. It would take nine years of war, hundreds of thousands of Vietnamese and tens of thousands of French dead, and General Giap’s victory at the Battle of Dien Bien Phu, for Vietnam to secure its independence. Had Simone Weil not starved herself to death (whether intentionally or unintentionally is not clear) in Kent in 1943, refusing the extra food she needed because it was more than the official ration for her fellow-citizens in Nazi-occupied France, she would have been within her rights to say that the victory over Nazism was a black day for the people of Indochina.

The questions raised by Weil’s almost obscene historical dispassion—and surely it is the most extreme argument against interest any philosopher has ever advanced, with the possible exception of Nietzsche’s atheism of the abyss—are anything but matters of historical curiosity. The world does not just look different depending on where you are from, what nation, people or tribe (or in many cases, gender) you belong to, your social class, or your faith or the lack of it, it is different. I have chosen to begin with Weil’s example because of its ferocity and the discomfort and unhappiness it must necessarily evoke (I certainly feel it). But the same could be said of practically every great historical conflict with global implications. If you are a Navajo, you would have to be insane not to feel differently about the establishment of the United States than, say, an Italian-American. If you are a South Asian with any historical memory at all, you are hard-pressed to accept the narrative of the conflict between Britain and Japan in World War II as one between good and evil.