At this point in my reading of Simone Weil’s biography by Simone Pétrement, available in English, we are in 1938. Just before World War 2. It is fascinating to see how this young philosopher is haunted by the potential dehumanization brought about by the violence of war. She has seen the Spanish Civil War and drawn some conclusions. One of them is so strikingly principled and uncompromising that it keeps me wondering how far it would echo in a hypothetical negotiating room where all parties to a potential conflict would meet before the first shot is fired! I imagine TINY Simone uttering, with all her natural daring authority, that in a world respectful of what is human in each of us, no concession required from whichever party in order to keep peace alive can be as destructive as war itself. To me, this is pragmatism for peace. All her choices between war or peace are predicated on saving people’s lives from misery, from pain, from blind violence and death; on saving humanity from its own dehumanization. There is such a dark and almost hopeless side to her reason why she would, indeed, concede to her enemy rather than risk dehumanization. She believes that as soon as any political, temporal or religious authority has designated a group as ‘the other’, the outcast, the enemy, it has signed off on a license to kill without merci, remorse or punishment. And she adds that since the rationale for such violence should be the betterment of life for the victor’s people, there being so much death can only mean that human life is valueless.