The frequent futility of separating good guys from bad

As long as we try to understand the worlds of politics and history by picking good guys and bad guys, we're going to spend all our time in flame wars on Facebook. If we want to understand, it's best to let go of the broad "good guys-bad guys" model and get that it's mostly about winners and losers.

Take American Indians and the white settlers. Long before Europeans got here, many of the indigenous tribes fought over territory and took prisoners as slaves. Then the Europeans came, and they were so much better at war. They had guns, and diseases the natives had no defense against. So the English, who became the Americans, were the winners, and they got to write history books and the movies and TV shows, in which the Indians were bad guys, and the white folks were good guys.

Now, for the past few decades, there has been a movement to make the Indians the good guys, and the white folks the bad guys. But really, both did both good things and bad things. The difference is that the white people won.

Similarly, we're taught as kids that the English were bad guys in 1776 because colonists faced taxation without representation. That citizens in the District of Columbia, Puerto Rico and American Samoa also have no votes in Congress is rarely mentioned, because . . . Americans are the good guys.

This is mostly how conflict goes: Peoples are just peoples, with positive and negative tendencies. They think of themselves as good and those in conflict with them as bad. And one group wins and the other loses.

There are exceptions. In World War II, the Germans really were bad, not because they sought world domination, which is oddly normal, but because they sought genocide. In the Civil War, the Northern political leaders and soldiers whose fighting led to the freeing of the slaves were acting in the service of a far more honorable cause than the Southern leaders and soldiers fighting to keep those slaves in chains.

But most societal conflicts are not that clear cut. And one great example of how cloudy such a conflict can be is the battle between the forces of Christian Western Europe and America and the forces of Islam.

The Islamic State butchers who turned Paris into a city of pain are bad guys. But the families of the 30 staffers and patients at a Doctors Without Borders hospital killed by U.S. bombing in Afghanistan last month likely think the same of us. Consider as many as 100,000 civilians killed by U.S. forces in the Iraq War and we're the bad guys. Consider 3,000 innocents murdered on 9/11, and the culture that spawned our attackers is. Iran in 1979 when the hostages were taken? Terrible Tehranians. Iran in 1953, when a duly elected government was overthrown by the United States and the murderous shah was empowered? Ugly Americans.

Israel and the Palestinians? Two peoples, both capable of truly noble and truly horrific acts, both of whom want the same territory. Being a Jew, I naturally side with the Israelis, but it's not a good guy-bad guy issue. It's a land war.

You can play this game all the way back to the Crusades. There have been noble and peace-loving acts on every side, and hateful and violent acts on every side, all along.

We must win the war against ISIS and its ilk, who are truly bad guys. Because that's what has to happen for my loved ones and my beloved nation and culture to be safe. And because these jihadists are murderous, violent, misogynistic, backward menaces.

But I don't need to demonize Muslims to believe that, or pretend we are, even on our very worst days, the good guys.

Blind faith in our own nobility and the evil of "the other?" That's the kind of thinking that convinces bombers it's OK to blow up babies, as long as you're one of the good guys.

Lane Filler is a member of the Newsday editorial board.