WSS 83 Editorial
I’m a great believer in honesty. When a mistake is made, I believe the best course of action is to put your hand up and say so, not try and hide it or deny it. Yesterday I received a complaint about my editorial for WS&S 83. At first I thought - “That can’t be right”, but on re-reading it, I can see how my words could be misunderstood and with hindsight (always a wonderful thing), it could have been worded better and more clearly. So here is my apology: I am truly sorry if anyone was offended by my editorial and please allow me to explain.
It was inevitable with an ultramodern topic that we’d ruffle some feathers. The article on the Chechen war was particularly risky, though I thought author Eoghan Kelly did an excellent introduction on this tricky subject.
So what went wrong in my editorial? It is always tricky to compress complex, nuanced ideas into a short editorial of some 300 words and I simply tried to put in too much. I spoke about conflicts and armies I wouldn’t game and compressed this information into a single paragraph. I’m not interested in gaming the Intifada or the civil war in Lebanon. Part of the reason for that is the ongoing violence, another part is very personal. I was going to collect and play and Israeli/Arab conflict with a good friend who sadly passed away in 2006. That took the motivation out of me.
I won’t game Da’esh and the continuing bloody conflicts in Iraq and Syria. Nor will I collect Schutzstaffel for family-related reasons. However, by listing these one after the other in a single paragraph, I appear to give them equivalency - accidentally giving the impression in some readers’ minds that I considered these as being the same. They are certainly not equivalent - no comparison was intended.
The continuing conflict in Israel and Palestine is in no way comparable with the medieval barbarity of Da’esh (so called ISIS), nor with that of the SS. I am truly sorry if my editorial gave that impression. I do believe modern conflicts are probably best played as fiction; perhaps based on fact, but not in fact. In future I will be very careful about wording my editorials!
