Leadership Quote by John Conyers

The line lands like a cold memo from the moral front: war does not discriminate, even when governments insist it does. John Conyers, a long-serving Congressman with deep ties to civil rights and the antiwar wing of Democratic politics, frames civilian death as the one outcome you can count on - the bipartisan, borderless constant beneath every speech about precision, necessity, or liberation.

Its power is in the deliberately flat phrasing. "Play no favorites" borrows the language of schoolyard fairness and applies it to mass casualty, a tonal mismatch that exposes the euphemisms policymakers use to sanitize violence. Conyers is calling out the comforting fiction that there are clean wars and controllable consequences. By refusing to name a particular conflict, he makes the sentence portable: Vietnam, Iraq, Afghanistan, Gaza, anywhere the phrase "collateral damage" is deployed like a legal waiver.

The subtext is an indictment of how civilian deaths get laundered into abstraction. "Violent hostilities" is bureaucratic language, and Conyers lets that bureaucracy hang itself; it sounds like a Pentagon briefing, but the conclusion is moral, not strategic. Civilians are not a rounding error; they are the predictable product of choosing force.

Context matters: Conyers often pushed for congressional oversight of war-making and for accountability when executive power expands under the cover of crisis. This sentence is less a plea for sympathy than a warning about political self-deception: once violence is normalized, innocence stops being a category that policy can protect.