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The Psychology of Belonging, Sacrifice, and Moral Innocence
A liberal thief steals from his family and gives to the outsiders. A conservative thief steals from his foes and gives to his family.
People can take something from others while honestly believing they are doing good. What they take might be money, land, someone else's time, or a community's freedom to keep its traditions. They may call the action protection, fairness, progress, or duty. Those words matter because they help decide which losses people notice and which losses they accept as necessary.
This essay asks how we learn to give ourselves that permission. Our families, cultures, religions, and schools teach us what deserves respect. They also teach us when breaking a rule or crossing a boundary can be honorable. Fear, ambition, and the desire to belong add emotional force to those lessons. As a result, a moral belief can serve two purposes at once: it can guide our behavior and protect the way we want to see ourselves.
The two thieves in the opening are figures of speech for different directions of behavior. Conservative behavior starts with a particular community and the responsibilities that come with belonging to it. Progressive behavior starts with a preferred future and asks the existing community to change in order to reach it. Here these words describe conduct, rather than permanent types of people or membership in a political party. Someone can act conservatively toward one group and progressively toward another.
Family also has a wider meaning in the opening. It includes the people, relationships, and traditions that make a community feel like home. Outsiders may be people beyond that community, an audience whose approval matters, or a future humanity said to benefit from a sacrifice today. A religion, government, or ideology can organize either kind of behavior. An ideology is a connected set of beliefs about how society should work.
The central question is how these beliefs become a sense of entitlement. Entitlement means believing that you have a right to something or a right to decide what should happen. A person moves beyond saying, “I want this change,” and begins saying, “My purpose gives me the right to require this change from you.” The thief metaphor draws attention to what becomes available once that permission is accepted.
How We Learn What Feels Right
Our first moral lessons come from people we depend on. Children notice which actions bring praise, which bring punishment, and which disappoint people they love. Rules become connected to feelings of safety, shame, pride, and belonging. A child usually encounters these rules as part of a world that adults already understand. Learning to behave well means learning a place within that world.
Growing up makes the picture more complicated. Parents disagree, teachers make mistakes, and respected people sometimes break the rules they defend. A teenager may discover that a family custom is unusual elsewhere or that a widely accepted belief has a history of disagreement. The discovery can be freeing, but it also creates responsibility. Once we recognize that people help make moral judgments, we have to participate in those judgments ourselves. We cannot always depend on an adult to guarantee the answer. [B]
Culture gives this process a particular shape. A rule may have started as a response to danger, a religious duty, or a practical need. Later generations can keep the emotional attachment even after forgetting the original reason. Someone may therefore experience abandoning a custom as betrayal without being able to explain what it protects. Another person may feel proud of rejecting it before understanding what its loss would change. Both responses have a history that reaches beyond the argument taking place today.
Religion can give these lessons lasting authority. A duty may seem binding because it belongs within a sacred understanding of life. That conviction can help someone keep a difficult promise or accept a personal cost. It can also support a mission to change other people's lives according to a religious purpose. Nonreligious beliefs can gain similar force when people treat progress, civilization, or the future as the final judge of every decision.
Fear helps explain why certain beliefs feel urgent. Someone who associates a close community with safety may fear that weakening its boundaries will lead to abandonment. Someone whose social position depends on being seen as enlightened may fear being associated with people that a respected audience looks down on. Neither person has to think consciously about that fear whenever they make a decision. The fear may instead appear as certainty about what a good person must do.
This means that changing a belief can threaten more than an opinion. It can seem to threaten a person's place in a family, a religious community, a profession, or a group of friends. To understand the strength of a conviction, we therefore need to ask what relationships help sustain it and what the person expects to lose by questioning it.
How Words Shape Permission
Language helps us decide what kind of situation we are facing. Calling someone faithful invites a different response from calling the same person stubborn. Calling a practice a tradition gives it a different place in a discussion from calling it backward. The description directs attention toward certain features of the situation before anyone has offered a full argument.
Even small grammatical choices can affect judgment. Experiments have compared accounts of accidents that emphasize a person's actions with accounts that emphasize what happened to an object. Descriptions that put the actor in the foreground led participants to assign more blame and higher financial liability. An effect also appeared when participants could watch video evidence. These findings show that wording can influence a particular judgment; they do not show that language controls everything a person believes. [E1]
In everyday moral debate, the effect can begin with the role people give themselves. A protector expects to defend people who depend on him. A reformer expects to overcome restrictions that stand in the way of improvement. Each role directs attention toward a real concern. However, it can also make other concerns seem less important. The protector may focus on a threatened relationship, while the reformer focuses on an opportunity that the relationship appears to block.
A useful question is what disappears from view when a particular description becomes accepted. A decision called generous may draw attention to its recipient while leaving out the people required to provide it. A change called necessary may leave little room to ask who decided it was necessary. The language does some of the moral work by making one part of the situation easier to recognize than another.
When a Belief Becomes Part of Who We Are
A belief can become important because of what it allows us to feel about ourselves. Someone may think, “I am a loyal person,” or, “I am someone who understands what society needs.” Evidence against a particular decision can then feel like evidence against the person's whole identity. Defending the decision becomes a way to defend the self.
The philosophical study of where values come from is called a genealogy of values. It asks what experiences and needs helped a moral judgment develop. Resentment, frustrated ambition, or a wish for reassurance can help produce a principle that eventually feels independent of those feelings. A person may come to see an opponent's success as proof of wrongdoing and his own opposition as proof of virtue. Finding such a possible motive does not settle whether the principle is true. It gives us another part of the belief to examine. [N]
What we inherit can make this especially personal. We receive a language, care, and opportunities before we can earn or choose them. Recognizing that help means recognizing that we did not create all the conditions of our independence. That recognition can lead to gratitude and responsibility. It can also trouble someone who wants to see himself as entirely self-made.
One possible response is to reverse the relationship. A person may begin treating the community that raised him as a community that needs his instruction. People whose support he once received must now justify themselves before the future he wants to build. This can give reform a psychological reward beyond the reform itself. An uncomfortable feeling of owing something becomes the more comfortable feeling of knowing better. This is one possible explanation of conduct, rather than a claim about everyone who challenges an inherited practice.
Possessions and achievements can become part of the same struggle. A home may represent a family's history, while a public achievement may represent someone's belief that his life matters. The desire to have something is connected to the desire to be someone. Giving up control may therefore feel like losing part of an identity, even when an outside observer sees only a practical disagreement over an asset. [S]
Groups can carry these patterns across generations. A government, school, or religious institution can teach a story about what it has achieved and why its mission deserves respect. New members learn the story and gain standing by continuing it. They do not all have the same private motives, but their decisions can keep moving in a similar direction because the institution rewards that direction.
Sincere belief alone does not prevent harm. Psychological research and theory describe moral disengagement: ways people weaken the self-restraint that would usually make an action feel wrong. They may connect it to a worthy cause, describe it in softer language, spread responsibility among many people, or pay less attention to its consequences. A person can continue to value goodness while finding a way to excuse a particular harmful act. [E2]
The Permission to Improve Other People
Progressive behavior compares the existing world with a future thought to be better. Its direction comes from that comparison. The danger explored here begins when the comparison also becomes a ranking of people. Those who explain the future see themselves as ahead, while those attached to the present are treated as falling behind. Disagreement can then look like a failure to understand rather than a difference in purpose.
Education can support this attitude when learning becomes a general claim to authority. Expertise can help someone identify a problem, but knowing how to explain a situation does not automatically mean knowing how the people involved should live. Arrogance enters when the expert treats the difference as unimportant. Local experience may be dismissed because it does not use the expert's vocabulary. The same person can then propose a change and decide which objections deserve to count.
There can also be a surprising dependence beneath this confidence. Someone may speak with great authority to the people he wants to change while remaining anxious about approval from a respected audience elsewhere. He needs that audience to recognize him as intelligent, generous, or advanced. To keep its approval, he may show that familiar loyalties will not stop him from carrying out its preferred goals.
This is the relationship described by the word supplication. To supplicate is to seek favor from someone whose response matters to you. In the essay, it describes a person who gains standing elsewhere through concessions that people close to him must absorb. He may experience himself as independent because he has broken with home, although his choices now depend heavily on another group's judgment.
The difference becomes clearer when we follow the cost. A student leader who gives up her own weekend for a project accepts a personal sacrifice. If she commits other members' time without asking them, then receives public praise for the project's generosity, much of the sacrifice has been assigned to others. The project's benefits may be real. The question is how she came to feel entitled to make that commitment on their behalf.
Close relationships can make this easier. Family members, friends, or loyal supporters may be expected to understand and remain even when they object. Their reliable attachment seems safer to risk than the uncertain approval of an outside audience. If they endure the loss, their endurance can later be remembered as agreement. Yet continuing a relationship is not the same as having freely agreed to every demand made within it.
How a Taking Becomes Normal
The history of Native American land shows how this permission can operate through a government. U.S. expansion displaced Native nations through removal policies. Later, the Dawes Act of 1887 divided land held by tribes into individual allotments, meaning pieces assigned to individual members. Land left outside those allotments could be opened to non-Native settlement as surplus. The Bureau of Indian Affairs records a reduction from about 138 million acres before allotment to 48 million by 1934. Removal, reservations, and allotment were different stages and methods of controlling Native life. [H1–H2]
The word surplus was important. It made land that belonged within a community's way of life sound like land that was left over. An outside authority decided what an acceptable holding should be, then made the remainder available to other people. At the same time, individual farming and property were supposed to help assimilate Native people into the wider society. Assimilation means absorbing a group into another society's dominant way of life. [H2]
The thief metaphor identifies the claim to decide both what Native communities could keep and what they should become. The behavior was progressively directed in the specific sense used in this essay: an existing society was to be changed according to an order presented as more advanced. Calling the change an improvement made the loss easier for those imposing it to accept. Land illustrates the process because it makes a transferred power easy to see, but the same question can concern time, resources, culture, or decision-making.
A modern comparison appears in the language of taxing the rich. A political argument may describe a large concentration of wealth as an abnormal condition and redistribution as a way to make society fairer. Taxation and the dispossession of Native peoples have different histories, legal settings, and consequences. The comparison concerns a step in the reasoning: someone first decides what another person should be allowed to keep, then treats the amount beyond that limit as available for a larger purpose.
Regulation can move authority without directly transferring ownership. A person may still own an asset but need permission for certain uses or changes. Taxation transfers resources more directly. Voting gives these decisions a claim to public approval, although the people supporting a demand may differ from the people paying most of its cost. Winning a vote explains which proposal has been authorized. It does not, by itself, explain why every part of the proposal is justified. [P1–P2]
This creates a problem within progressive normalization. Normalization means establishing what will count as normal or acceptable. A movement can promise freedom from one form of control while increasing another authority's control over resources and conduct. The benefit it offers may be real. Nevertheless, its moral purpose can make it harder to ask what claims have been set aside and whether the people affected had a meaningful say.
When People Refuse the Improvement
Resistance becomes especially difficult for someone whose identity depends on being a benefactor. If the people affected understand the proposed improvement and still reject it, they challenge the idea that better knowledge automatically gives him the right to decide for them. He can recognize that they have purposes of their own. Or he can protect his position by deciding that their refusal proves they are ignorant, unreasonable, or unable to understand their own interests.
The second response also protects him from uncertainty. If the cause guarantees his goodness, questioning it can feel like questioning his worth. Treating the cause as unquestionable saves him from having to judge each action and accept responsibility for the choice. Philosophically, this is called the serious attitude. The word serious here describes treating a chosen purpose as an absolute authority. People may then become tools for reaching the goal that gives its supporter a secure identity. [B]
Sometimes changing people's behavior is no longer enough. Their reasons for refusing must also be weakened. A family bond, religious duty, historical memory, or belief about human dignity may continue to support disagreement even after a new authority has taken control. Those foundations give people a way to judge the authority rather than simply accept its judgment of them.
A project seeking lasting control may therefore turn toward education, language, and memory. It can try to influence which traditions children respect, which histories they feel proud of, and which loyalties they learn to regard as embarrassing. If the source of resistance disappears, the next generation may no longer recognize the earlier loss as something worth questioning.
There is a further psychological reward for the people imposing the change. A surviving tradition is a reminder that their order was not the only possible order. Other people once understood life differently and may choose to do so again. Destroying that foundation weakens resistance while removing an uncomfortable reminder that the new authority still needs justification. Possessing control may feel insufficient until the competing source of judgment has also disappeared.
Tibet illustrates how a struggle over political control can reach into identity. Chinese forces entered eastern Tibet in 1950. The Seventeen Point Agreement followed in 1951, and the Dalai Lama fled into exile in 1959. Beijing describes the transformation as liberation from feudal serfdom and development under socialism. The Dalai Lama's account describes the agreement as coerced and records its rejection. These accounts show the different meanings given to the intervention and the authority claimed for it. [H6–H8]
The issue later extended directly into schooling. In February 2023, independent UN experts warned that residential schools appeared to be assimilating Tibetan children culturally, religiously, and linguistically into the majority culture. Their statement expressed concerns about reported policies. The example matters because childhood is when people first receive a language, a sense of belonging, and a history through which to understand themselves. Power over education can therefore reach further into a community's future than control of its territory alone. [H9]
Chinese communism opposed political liberalism. Ancient empires also did not belong to that later political tradition. The comparison in this essay concerns a form of behavior: claiming the right to transform another community according to a preferred order. An authority may call its mission civilization, liberation, or development. In each case, the psychological question is how that mission gives its supporters permission to dismiss the community's refusal.
What the Guardian Protects
Conservative behavior begins with responsibilities inside a particular circle. A person recognizes that certain people have claims upon him because of the relationship they share. As he becomes more independent, he can accept responsibility for relationships that once supported him. What he inherited becomes something he undertakes to carry forward.
The guardian represents this commitment. His attachment can require him to give up comfort, safety, status, or opportunity for people he has promised to protect. He understands that his decisions will become part of the circumstances others inherit. Because he will not live forever, protecting the community also means caring about a future he may never see.
This helps explain why the guardian's pride can be different from a desire for public recognition. It comes from having stayed responsible when leaving would have been easier or more impressive to outsiders. The relationship requires something from him. Its value does not depend entirely on an audience deciding that his choice was admirable.
Conservative behavior in this sense can support major political change. The American Revolution broke with British rule while asserting the colonies' authority over their own future. The Declaration of Independence explained their claim, and the Treaty of Paris in 1783 recognized U.S. independence. The victory was a recovery of sovereign authority—the power to govern—within the political community claiming it. Revolutionary methods served a conservatively directed loyalty. [H10–H11]
The signatories of the declaration also placed their lives and fortunes behind the undertaking. They appealed to a wider audience, but they were accepting a responsibility rather than simply seeking praise for a loss imposed on someone else. Seeking outside recognition becomes supplication when it replaces the obligations the person was supposed to serve. The difference concerns whose future is being committed and whether the people claiming honor have placed their own security at risk. [H11]
However, an earlier victory cannot permanently define a society's behavior. The United States resisted British authority and later acted as an expanding outside power toward Native nations. It defended self-government within one circle while claiming power over communities beyond it. This is why the words progressive and conservative must remain connected to actions and relationships. An institution can change direction, and its treatment of one group does not automatically explain its treatment of another. [H1, H10]
The guardian's responsibility must also remain active. Later generations may inherit the reputation of an earlier sacrifice without accepting its demands. Loyalty then becomes a source of honor rather than an obligation to living people. The guardian's moral force depends on continuing to bear responsibility for the community invoked in his name.
When an Empire Decides Another Community's Future
The same questions appear in the Levant, the eastern Mediterranean region that includes present-day Israel, Palestine, Lebanon, and Syria. Roman forces destroyed Jerusalem and the Temple in 70 CE. Military power gave the empire control over important parts of Jewish collective life. The Arab-Muslim conquests of the seventh century later placed the region within a different imperial and religious order. Jerusalem was taken from Byzantine rule, and Jewish communities continued under Muslim rulers. These events had different circumstances and outcomes. [H3–H4]
What connects them in this argument is an outside power's claim to rule a community whose history and obligations it did not create. An empire can present its expansion as the spread of order, civilization, or a sacred purpose. The people subjected to it may experience the same action as losing control over their future. The thief metaphor identifies that taking of authority. The question is how the ability to rule comes to feel like a right to rule.
British and French imperial planning later used the language of international administration. The Sykes–Picot agreement of 1916 planned areas of influence within Ottoman territories. Britain later administered Palestine under a League of Nations Mandate, while France administered Syria and Lebanon. The mandate gave Britain powers and obligations, including support for a Jewish national home and safeguards concerning the other inhabitants. Palestinian Arabs sought independence. Both Jewish and Palestinian aspirations developed within political arrangements shaped by external powers. [H5]
A community can therefore remain on its land while losing the power to decide important parts of its life. It may have to pursue its future through promises and institutions controlled elsewhere. Seeking help can create another difficulty: an external protector may also gain influence over the community it protects. The guardian's effort to preserve a group can become tied to another authority's larger ambitions.
How Communities Can Negotiate Boundaries
An alternative is to build institutions through which different communities can negotiate. The aim is to share certain powers while keeping a recognized ability to protect local interests. A community then has a place within the arrangement even when others do not admire its traditions or agree with all its choices.
Switzerland offers an example. Its federal system shares power among the national government, cantons, and communes. Cantons are regional states, and communes are local municipalities. This arrangement helps accommodate different languages and religions within one country. It did not develop without conflict: the modern federation followed the liberal cantons' victory over a Catholic-conservative alliance in the Sonderbund War of 1847 and the constitution of 1848. [H12–H13]
The important feature for this essay is continuing local authority within a common state. Communities can accept shared rules while retaining a political place from which to question proposals. Progressive change has to work through procedures for agreement, while conservative attachments accept limits that also protect other participants. The arrangement reduces dependence on whether a powerful outsider happens to approve of a community's way of life.
Lebanon's National Pact of 1943 sought a different agreement among religious communities. Christian and Muslim leaders accepted commitments that included giving up rival external directions: French protection on one side and union with Syria on the other. The pact also formalized the division of public offices by religious community, a system known as confessional government. Later disputes over representation and power combined with foreign interventions. [H14]
France's earlier rule under a mandate, Syrian military deployment from 1976, and Iranian support for groups that developed into Hezbollah in the 1980s involved different goals and periods. Each placed local relationships within wider political projects. Lebanon's wars also involved domestic struggles and other foreign actors, so outside intervention alone does not explain them. [H14–H16]
The psychological danger appears when a group's power at home depends on a patron elsewhere. A patron is an outside supporter whose help may create obligations. The group may gain protection but lose some freedom to negotiate within its own country. Its leaders can begin offering local interests in exchange for support or recognition from outside. An agreement becomes harder to sustain when one participant can escape its limits by turning to a stronger external authority.
The comparison with Switzerland therefore concerns how agreements work. Different religious communities do not automatically produce either stability or failure. What matters here is whether they can keep negotiating within shared institutions or whether outside projects gain the power to determine their choices.
The Story We Tell Afterward
After a decision, people have to live with its memory. The person who acted may remember the good purpose, the pressure, and the praise that followed. The people affected may remember what they lost. Their accounts can differ because the same event occupied different places in their lives.
Accepting the second account can become difficult when the decision helped build the actor's identity. Admitting a mistake may seem to threaten much more than one judgment. It can reopen the story of whether he has been loyal, generous, or wise. The desire to keep that story intact gives morality another role: helping him remember his past without feeling that he must question who he is.
A philosophical term for one way of avoiding responsibility is bad faith. It involves hiding from aspects of our own freedom or situation that we find difficult to accept. In this essay, it appears when someone treats a role as if it had made the decision for him. The official says he was administering policy; the faithful supporter says she was obeying the cause. Those descriptions may explain part of what happened, but they do not account for every choice made within the role. [S]
Institutions can preserve a similar account across generations. They teach members which achievements deserve pride and which questions threaten the group's good name. A history of taking can be remembered as a history of giving if the account always begins with the beneficiary and leaves out the people required to provide the gift. Future members receive a story in which the group's goodness seems already established.
The phrase moral innocence names the comfort this story offers: the belief that our conduct has left us free of blame. The two thieves show different ways behavior can gain that comfort. Progressive conduct can authorize giving up another community's present for a preferred future, sometimes reaching as far as the values that allow it to refuse. Conservative conduct draws its moral force from belonging and the burdens accepted to sustain it. Understanding either direction requires following the claimed obligation into the lives that must fulfill it.
Every day, we face boundaries involving other people's resources, time, trust, and choices. Culture gives us words for deciding what to do. Religion or ideology may give the decision a larger purpose, while fear makes some alternatives hard to accept. Nevertheless, we still participate in the choice. The thief in us is the possibility that we make another person's world available to our purpose while keeping our good opinion of ourselves. The taking becomes hardest to recognize when we have learned to experience it as the very thing that makes us good.
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Philosophical Sources and Their Relevance
These philosophers help explain how values develop, how a purpose becomes part of someone’s identity, and how people avoid responsibility. The two thieves and the discussion of progressive and conservative behavior are the argument of this essay. The historical cases come from different political traditions. Comparing their behavior does not mean that ancient empires and communist governments shared the same liberal political philosophy.
[N] Friedrich Nietzsche. The Genealogy of Morals (1887). Translated by Horace B. Samuel, T. N. Foulis, 1913. Preface, §§1 and 6; First Essay, §§10–14; Second Essay, §§4–8 and 19–22.
Nietzsche asks where values come from and what needs they serve. He studies resentment and the connection between debt and guilt. These ideas help explain the essay’s questions about entitlement and what people feel they owe. The suggestion that someone may become a reformer partly to escape feeling indebted is an interpretation developed here, rather than a general explanation supplied by Nietzsche.
[B] Simone de Beauvoir. The Ethics of Ambiguity (1947). Translated by Bernard Frechtman, Philosophical Library, 1948. Part II, “Personal Freedom and Others”; Part III, especially “The Antinomies of Action.”
Beauvoir explains how children first receive values from an adult world they did not create. Growing up brings responsibility for making judgments. Her account of the serious attitude shows how people can treat a chosen cause as an unquestionable authority and make living people serve it.
[S] Jean-Paul Sartre. Being and Nothingness (1943). Translated by Hazel E. Barnes, Philosophical Library, 1956. Part One, Chapter Two, “Bad Faith”; Part Three, Chapter One, section IV, “The Look”; Part Four, Chapter Two, sections on existential psychoanalysis and possession.
Sartre connects what people want to have with the people they want to become. He also examines bad faith, or ways of avoiding uncomfortable aspects of freedom and responsibility. These ideas support the discussion of possessions, identity, and moral roles. Applying them to institutions is part of this essay’s interpretation.
Research on Language and Moral Judgment
[E1] Caitlin M. Fausey and Lera Boroditsky. “Subtle Linguistic Cues Influence Perceived Blame and Financial Liability.” Psychonomic Bulletin & Review 17 (2010), pp. 644–650. DOI: 10.3758/PBR.17.5.644.
The experiments compared descriptions that emphasized an actor with descriptions that emphasized an event. Participants assigned more blame and higher financial liability after reading the actor-focused versions. An effect also appeared when video evidence was available. These results concern particular judgments in experiments; they do not show that language determines an entire culture’s morality.
[E2] Albert Bandura. “Selective Activation and Disengagement of Moral Control.” Journal of Social Issues 46, no. 1 (1990), pp. 27–46. DOI: 10.1111/j.1540-4560.1990.tb00270.x.
Bandura explains ways people weaken the moral restraint that would usually stop them from harming others. These include connecting conduct to a good purpose, using softer words, sharing responsibility, and overlooking consequences. His theory helps explain how people can keep a good opinion of themselves while excusing harm. It is not a diagnosis of a political group.
Consent and Public Authority
[P1] John Locke. Second Treatise of Government (1689), Chapter XI, §§138–140.
Locke links taxation to consent through the majority or its representatives. He also treats protecting property as a purpose of government. This supports asking both who authorized a demand and why that particular demand is justified.
[P2] John Stuart Mill. On Liberty (1859), Chapter I.
Mill points out that the people exercising collective power may differ from the people over whom it is exercised. His discussion helps explain why majority power needs examination. It does not establish that every tax or regulation is theft.
Historical Sources and Context
The sources below support the historical events and arrangements described in the article. Official statements show how their authors explained their actions. The psychological interpretation of those actions belongs to the argument of this essay. The cases illustrate different processes rather than define the character of whole peoples.
[H1] U.S. Bureau of Indian Affairs. “Federal Law and Indian Policy Overview.” Sections on removal, allotment, reorganization, and self-determination.
The figures for Native land and the sequence of U.S. policies come from this overview.
[H2] U.S. National Archives. “Dawes Act (1887).” Statutory text and historical introduction.
Explains allotment and the effort to assimilate Native people. Describing this conduct as progressively directed is this essay’s interpretation; it is not a claim about membership in the later American Progressive movement.
[H3] Kfir Arbiv. “Evidence of the Roman Attack on the Third Wall of Jerusalem at the End of the Second Temple Period.” Atiqot 111 (2023), pp. 103–118.
Archaeological evidence concerning the Roman siege in 70 CE and the destruction of the Second Temple.
[H4] Michael Ehrlich. “Judea and Jerusalem,” Chapter 5 in The Islamization of the Holy Land, 634–1800. Arc Humanities Press, 2022, pp. 97–120.
Describes the change from Byzantine to Muslim rule and Jewish life under Muslim rulers.
[H5] United Nations, Division for Palestinian Rights. “Historical Timeline” and “History of the Question of Palestine.” League of Nations. Mandate for Palestine (1922), especially the preamble and Articles 1–2.
The UN material covers Sykes–Picot and the British Mandate. The mandate itself sets out Britain’s powers and obligations. France administered Syria and Lebanon within the wider regional settlement.
Read the source | Mandate text | Historical overview
[H6] Jigme Yeshe Lama. “The Seventeen Point Agreement: China’s Occupation of Tibet.” Origins: Current Events in Historical Perspective, May 2021.
Explains the events of 1950–1959 and disagreements over the agreement’s authority.
[H7] State Council Information Office of the People’s Republic of China. “Successful Practice of Regional Ethnic Autonomy in Tibet.” September 2015.
The Chinese government’s own explanation of the changes as liberation, reform, and development.
[H8] Office of the Fourteenth Dalai Lama. “Birth to Exile.”
The Dalai Lama’s institutional account of coercion surrounding the agreement and its rejection in 1959.
[H9] Office of the UN High Commissioner for Human Rights. “China: UN Experts Alarmed by Separation of 1 Million Tibetan Children from Families and Forced Assimilation at Residential Schools.” 6 February 2023.
Independent UN experts expressed concerns about reported assimilation through residential schools. Their statement is an expert intervention, rather than a court judgment.
Read the source | Archived reproduction
[H10] U.S. National Archives. “Treaty of Paris (1783).” Treaty text and historical introduction.
Articles 1–2 address independence and boundaries. The introduction also explains the treaty’s connection to western expansion.
[H11] U.S. National Archives. “Declaration of Independence: A Transcription.” 4 July 1776.
The declaration explains the colonies’ claim and includes the signatories’ pledge.
[H12] Swiss Federal Department of Foreign Affairs, Presence Switzerland. “Federalism.”
Explains how power is shared and how local authority relates to religious and linguistic diversity.
[H13] Swiss Federal Archives. “The Swiss State and Its Citizens after 1848.”
Explains the constitution of 1848 and the conflict between liberal and Catholic-conservative cantons.
[H14] Thomas Collelo, editor. Lebanon: A Country Study. Federal Research Division, Library of Congress, 1987.
Includes the French Mandate, the 1943 National Pact, the division of offices among religious communities, and the civil war.
[H15] UN Secretary-General. Report pursuant to Security Council Resolution 1559 (2004), S/2004/777, 1 October 2004.
Records Syrian military deployment from 1976 and addresses Lebanese sovereignty and foreign forces.
[H16] U.S. Congressional Research Service. Iran: Regional Perspectives and U.S. Policy, R40849, section on Lebanon.
Describes Iranian involvement from 1982 and support for groups that developed into Hezbollah.
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