A few paragraphs from The Elements of Love by Sam Keen.
Ginny
The flower of compassion can bloom at any moment, even in the ambience of enmity.
A friend told me a story of a kind that has been repeated countless times in the history of warfare. "We were in a firefight not too far from Da Nang. Charlie had us surrounded, and we were taking fire from every side. We called for air support, and the choppers came and rained death all over his parade. I got a clear shot at one gook and saw him fall. When everything was quiet, I went over to look at my kill. He was about twenty or twenty-five--it's hard to tell with slants--and he had on the black pajamas, so I knew he was pure enemy. But then I started going through his pockets, and I found a little packet of pictures, wrapped up in a silk handkerchief, of him and his wife and a couple of kids. After that it was a lot harder for me to go into combat. Sometimes, if I had to, I aimed for a leg or an arm, or if we weren't in danger, I just shot into the bushes. I've never been able to get that guy out of my mind. I can't get over the feeling that he was just like me. He didn't want to be in the goddamned war, and he didn't have anything against me except that I was in his country."
Compassion is apocalypse, the true revolution, the end of warfare and the politics of power. It destroys the hierarchy of values, the mythology of superiority, that is the basis for tribal and national society. It dissolves our political loyalties as citizens of (self-)righteous nations and gives us a new identity as members of a commonwealth of sentient beings. No more S&M, top and bottom, superior and inferior. The true revolution in human affairs can never come by armed violence because those who live by the sword will continue to live by the sword ad nauseam. The power game, in any of its forms, destroys the compassion that is the only basis for lasting community.