It isn't just "freedom" they hate (Moral Relativism/Blame the Victim Alert!) (And BARF!)

It isn't just "freedom" they hate
Those who rained terror upon the U.S. may have had real grievances -- and we shouldn't feel guilty about discussing them.

Editor's note: We have received dozens and dozens of essays in the days since Sept. 11 from people -- many of whom have never written for publication -- who attempt to apprise us, or their friends, or complete strangers, of new depths or doubts in their thinking, sharp turns in their opinions, incredible longing for change. These are days of personal and public reckoning, of vigorous confession and debate. We thought it would be nice if some of this could happen, where it often has, in this site -- a static forum, but, we think, enlightening nonetheless. We will run these stories for as long as it makes sense. Thank you for reading.

Sept. 22, 2001 | A few weeks ago I reread "Slaughterhouse Five," a slim novel about the Allied firebombing that turned the city of Dresden into a pile of rubble overnight. Kurt Vonnegut, who witnessed the firebombing as a prisoner of war and was one of its few survivors, wrote in the first chapter (a chapter about the impossibility of writing the book): "There is nothing intelligent to say about a massacre."

I watched the twin towers of the World Trade Center burn, and the second one collapse, from the Pulaski Bridge connecting Brooklyn and Queens. With me were several dozen other New Yorkers from the neighborhoods of Greenpoint and Long Island City -- Eastern European, African-American, Anglo-American, Latino, Arab, Asian. There was no sound attached to the unbelievable sight, and we returned the silence, our hands covering our mouths. I could only think in words -- "I'm watching so many people die." I couldn't turn the words into pictures or meaning; I didn't have the imagination for it.

Over the next few days there would be countless stories of the almost nonchalant heroism of New Yorkers, and I believed them all, easily. People filed down the stairs of the World Trade Center in an orderly fashion, even though everyone thought they were going to die. One thousand people made a human chain leading out of the smoke, because nobody could see. Over 300 firefighters died trying to save the lives of those trapped in the towers. A man called his wife and said he was about to carry his wheelchair-bound friend down the stairs; neither was heard from again. A Hasidic man from Brooklyn stopped running to pick up an Islamic man from Pakistan, who had fallen to the ground as the cloud of debris swept toward them. Even Mayor Giuliani was, I thought, spontaneously and reassuringly human -- the only politician I saw whom I could tolerate watching, the only one who didn't even try to say anything intelligent about the massacre on that first day.

But eventually one has to start saying things, even when the most logical things have a touch of absurdity to them. And as if to both prove and disprove the impossibility of saying anything intelligent, Vonnegut would write a few pages later: "I have told my sons that they are not under any circumstances to take part in massacres, and that the news of massacres of enemies is not to fill them with satisfaction or glee."

One of the more chillingly surreal moments in the days following the attack unfolded, for me, at the memorial service in Washington, during the "Day of Prayer and Remembrance" on Friday. Everyone who was anyone in D.C. packed into the church, including most of the country's living ex-presidents. As the television audience, we became witnesses to a most extraordinary ritual of hypocrisy and deceit, culminating in the words of George W. Bush that "this nation is peaceful."

The vast majority of American people may be peaceful, but our government is not. And it is, as always, the people who pay the price. I wondered how many of the ex-presidents sitting in those pews would agree with Palestinian intellectual Edward Said, whose response to the attack was: "No cause, no God, no abstract idea can justify the mass slaughter of innocents."

I wondered what could be in the mind of Jimmy Carter, for example, whose administration initiated the policy of arming and training the fundamentalist pawns on what his national security advisor Zbigniew Brzezinski referred as "the great chessboard" in Afghanistan, feeding a war that has cost an estimated 1.5 million lives. This is not counting those lost in the World Trade Center on Sept. 11, whose deaths may turn out to be a direct, rather than simply an indirect, continuation of this very "game" -- since it soon included the arming and training of Osama bin Laden himself. The Afghan people, as journalist James Ingalls wrote, are "no strangers to the terrorism of bin Laden and his friends," thanks in part to Carter and subsequent administrations, but that won't save them from becoming the main targets of American retaliation.

Ronald Reagan wasn't there, of course, and I wished I could imagine that he was at home soul-searching about his bombing of civilian targets in Libya in 1986 or his continuation of aid to Israel after the slaughter of 20,000 civilians in the 1982 invasion of Lebanon. In any case, Reagan's successor George Bush Sr. was there, and even Americans must remember the Persian Gulf War, in which "we" killed an estimated 113,000 Iraqi civilians in the few weeks of the official war alone, and which paved the way for subsequent presidents to bomb Iraq whenever the spirit, the polls, or the economy moved them.

Bill Clinton was there, of course. In addition to continuing the aerial bombardment begun by Bush, President Clinton continued the barbaric embargoes against Iraq, which still result in death by starvation of 4,000 to 7,000 Iraqi civilians per month. Clinton also has his share of experience in "anti-terrorist retaliation" and its "collateral damage" -- one of the most well-known in the Muslim world is his direct order to fire 13 cruise missiles into the Al Shifa pharmaceutical plant in Khartoum, Sudan, which deprived an impoverished nation of desperately needed drugs and caused uncountable deaths. (The United States' claim that the plant was involved in the manufacture of chemical weapons was never substantiated.)

In short, there was not an ex-president in that church who did not have the blood of tens of thousands of Arab and Muslim civilians on his hands, and who did not commit these acts in the name of the American people. And now the American people, who may be paying an incalculable price for the actions of our leaders, are expected to believe that the hijackers, if they were Muslim, had no interest whatsoever in any of these atrocities committed against their people and in their lands, but were simply madmen intent on destroying "freedom" for no other reason than that they didn't like it. Even more, we are expected to believe this so absolutely that there can be no further discussion on the matter.

As if, even in the midst of all our own talk about retaliation (including the purported acceptability of civilian casualties) there is not even the slightest possibility that this was itself retaliation. As if others take any more kindly to the massacre of their people than we do to the massacre of ours. As if we believe that the massacre of other people is not even worth considering, and as if it could not be this belief itself -- this racist arrogance -- that helps push people to such levels of desperate inhumanity. As if the very discussion of these possibilities is itself to participate in terrorism.

Even in Europe there seems to be a growing frustration and hand-wringing incomprehension of the degree to which the American public seems ignorant of our own government's actions. There are glimmers of this on BBC, and an article in the London Guardian on Sept. 13 was titled "They Can't See Why They Are Hated: Americans cannot ignore what their government does abroad." (Incidentally, if the hijackers turn out not to be related to bin Laden or even the Islamic world, then the premature rush to bomb Afghanistan is proof in itself of the regard in which our government holds the lives of the Afghan people.)

But maybe we're not as ignorant as the Guardian reporter imagines. Amid all the war propaganda there are signs that many Americans question our government's relation to the rest of the world, and many are prepared to resist the war that is about to be waged in our name and which, by all current indications, will be another mass slaughter of innocents. (The war has already begun with the U.S. demand that Pakistan cut off the food and other supplies that are keeping some of Afghanistan's already starving people alive, a beyond-vengeful act that will have no impact on the ultra-wealthy bin Laden.)

It is not in spite of its horror and inhumanity that we seek to understand this tragedy; the horror of the tragedy is why we want to understand it and to point our future in a different direction from it. We should not feel guilty or apprehensive about using every bit of knowledge and comprehension we can muster to make any sense of what happened on Sept. 11. It is the least we can do.

I always thought there was hardly anything a liberal hated more than when a person that commits a crime, and his defenders turn around and try to blame his victim for the fact that the crime occurred. So why is it that now, all of a sudden, every leftwinger in the country is blaming us for being invaded and bombed, resulting in the loss of 6000 lives?

Moral relativism is thriving. How can we effectively counteract this, this ... disgusting line of argument?

(Also, notice how, amusingly, Salon can't even figure out if the newspaper is called LGNY or GLNY. Always on the ball, they are.)

Moral relativism and cultural relativism are impediments to thought. As such, we should expect them to hobble the minds of those who are infected by them. Those people ought to be unable to reason -- demonstrably, this is the case -- which, by implication, should make them unemployable for most tasks in our sophisticated economy. So they get jobs where no reasoning is required. In the case of Ms. Pursley, she got one in that part of the opinion-editorial marketplace that panders to people who share her disease.

Let's always be candid about what the U.S. does militarily. It's certainly true that we should always be able to justify our military actions, and under ordinary circumstances those actions should strive to separate combat targets from innocent bystanders. The terrorist tactic of immersing one's fighters in a civilian population, turning the civilians into "innocent shields," thwarts this moral desire, or at least makes it much harder to obey. Terrorists know this, and exploit the moral qualms this gives us of the civilized world as far as they can.

Although I've differed with several of Washington's decisions to intervene in the affairs of other lands, our military has been scrupulous in straining to separate combatants from civilians. Their imperfect success at doing so is not due to lack of effort, but to the efforts of their adversaries, terrorists in particular, to hide behind innocent bystanders. The moral balance, excepting Bill Clinton's fatuous strike against that Sudanese pharmaceutical plant, is entirely favorable to us. If leftists and blame-America-first types are going to throw a moral argument at us, I'd say that this is the appropriate response.

Freedom, Wealth, and Peace,
Francis W. Porretto
Visit the Palace Of Reason: http://palaceofreason.com

Dear Francis, would you please explain who the terrorists were and where they were hiding before the 'scrupulous' 80 day bombing of Belgrade?? You obviously watch lots of TV so you could'nt have missed that 'smart bomb' coverage of a missile hitting the train going over the bridge. Commentary was that it was empty. Rah rah for technology say the 'Miller time ' boys. Only problem was that the Government later admitted that it was a civilian train. Can you spell children, women etc? By the way - I would bet that there are less than 1 in 100,000 Americans who know and can identify why the US/Nato were there (let alone find it on a map). If your post was high sarcasm- I apologise ( but you are wasting it on this post)

I think the article failed at the end. Still I believe that there is enough guilt to go around. Every day a man must draw a line in the sand and say this far you may come but approach no further. Someone stepped over the line in the sand, someone must pay, and with heavy hearts the marks of death are drawn upon the foreheads of those often least responsible. America was founded on the idea of a more equitable system of justice. It was founded on the belief of the natural society, yet now we see a world governed by systems of symbols. Some symbols mean this some symbols mean that, we trade some, save others, waste some and transform some. The honest word of incouragement, the silent hand of help, the brotherhood of our fellow man, the things that defined us in ages past, now need some tragedy to be the general order of the day!?... and even then they must become symbols to be manipulated. If a hand is raised let it be done with a heavy heart, if not then let it strike me dead.

By Mark Twain, "The War Prayer"

O Lord our God, help us to tear their soldiers to bloody shreds with our shells; help us to cover their smiling fields with the pale forms of their patriot dead; help us to drown the thunder of the guns with the shrieks of their wounded, writhing in pain; help us to lay waste their humble homes with a hurricane of fire; help us to wring the hearts of their unoffending widows with unavailing grief; help us to turn them out roofless with their little children to wander unfriended the wastes of their desolated land in rags and hunger and thirst, sports of the sun flames of summer and the icy winds of winter, broken in spirit, worn with travail, imploring Thee for the refuge of the grave and denied it-for our sakes who adore Thee, Lord, blast their hopes, blight their lives, protract their bitter pilgrimage, make heavy their steps, water their way with their tears, stain the white snow with the blood of their wounded feet! We ask it, in the spirit of love, of Him Who is the Source of Love, and Who is ever-faithful refuge and friend of all that are sore beset and seek His aid with humble and contrite hearts. Amen.

It is troubling for someone raised Christian to harbor within his heart the thoughts expressed by Twain's poem.

No mention that it was Russia who invaded Afganistan.

No mention that it was Iraq who invaded Kuwait.

No mention that people in Lebanon were attacking Israel before they invaded Lebanon.

The author has a very selective memory and grossly distorts history.

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