THE PORNOGRAPHY OF COMPASSION AND THE COST OF EMPIRESeptember 18, 2001
THE PORNOGRAPHY OF COMPASSION AND THE COST OF EMPIRE
by Thomas Fleming
from http://www.chroniclesmagazine.org/News/NewsTF091801.htm
It has been a few days since our morning coffees were interrupted by news of
an airliner crashing into the World Trade Center, several hours of non-stop
replays of planes crashing, skyscrapers collapsing, trapped office workers
jumping out of windows to their death, countless hours of cell phone calls
from doomed stewardesses and passengers, of human-interest interviews with
hysterical survivors and sobbing relatives, two full days of Peter and Tom
and Dan and Barbara and Shep talking constantly without saying anything more
significant than "How did it feel," or "Senseless and tragic."
If we did not already know that there was something wrong in our national
character, our response to the events of September 11 would be enough to
convince any sane person: melodramatic commiseration, bewilderment, panic.
Many pundits and politicians are already talking about nuclear strikes
against Afghanistan (though the Israelis prefer Iraq), but this boldness is
hardly matched by the federal agencies that have kept most flights on the
ground for fear of a second round.
What are the stark facts? That probably Islamic terrorists, belonging to
organizations that routinely kill innocent people and have sworn an oath
against the "Christian" United States, succeeded in taking over several
airplanes and crashed three of them into three buildings, causing the death
of some thousands of people. It is a terrible thing to happen, for the
victims and their families, for the people living in New York and
Washington, and it raises serious questions, both about the competence of
U.S. intelligence and the wisdom of our foreign policy--questions that no
one either in the media or in government is likely to address. But, and I
do not mean this cynically at all, 5 to 10,000 dead people is not the end of
the world for the global economic community that is absorbing the
sovereignty of national states. The very least that we can say is that
death is the price of empire.
Human life cannot be reduced to a set of statistics, but it is important to
keep things in proportion. Something like 8 to 10,000 people die every day
in America, and that figure does not include the approximately 4,000 babies
killed by abortion. Roughly 150,000 people die every day around the world.
Perhaps 40 to 50,000 die every year in the United States in traffic
accidents, but we do not go into national shock for them. Of course,
traffic fatalities are accidental, and the terrorist strike in New York and
Washington, D.C., was cold-blooded murder. The President says this is a
war. If that is true, the first obvious fact to note is that men die in a
war--5,000 Americans soldiers died at Antietam. But soldiers are not the
only ones who die during war: How many civilians died when the allies
unleashed firebombs on Dresden or when the United States dropped nuclear
missiles on Hiroshima and Nagasaki?
We speak so glibly of "terrorism" without reflecting on the obvious fact
that throughout history, most terrorism has been carried out by governments
and not by private conspiracies. Terrorism is the attack on the lives of
non-combatants in order to demoralize a people and its leaders and change
their policies. What was the Dresden firebombing, which killed 40,000
civilians, but an attempt to persuade the German people to repudiate their
government? The object of the attacks on New York and Washington was not to
kill people but to demoralize our people and our government, and although
American businessmen are responding to the challenge with their customary
zest and courage, the American government is proving itself both morally and
intellectually incapable of understanding, much less dealing with the
crisis.
The politicians and the commentators say they are shocked and outraged by
this callous disregard of human life. But these same people, not long ago,
were justifying the U.S. bombing of civilians in Iraq and Yugoslavia and the
U.S. embargo of Iraq that has killed over 1.5 million non-combatants, and to
make matters worse, prominent politicians are calling for a no-holds barred
attack on nations--including their women and children--that harbor
terrorists. The cost in human life of Serbs killed in the NATO attack was a
mere 1,500, but 1,500 out of the Serb population of 8 million represents
roughly 20 to 40 times the maximum death rate projected for the World Trade
Center and the Pentagon. You can't have it both ways. If generic human
life is precious, that means the lives of Iraqis and Serbs and Afghans are
precious, not just the lives of Americans.
It is precisely U.S. policies toward Muslim peoples that has got us to this
point: We support their enemy in the Middle East, while pampering Muslims
everywhere else in the world where they are practicing genocide against
Christians. Osama bin Laden is not the problem. The problem is an
international religion that defines itself by its hatred of Christianity and
that elevates the terrorist to the pinnacle of sainthood. I do not think we
should be demonizing Muslims, but I do think we have to acknowledge that as
a group, to the extent that they are sincere in their faith, they are our
enemy.
And what an enemy! While we are hyping ourselves into hormonal hysteria
over the death of people we do not know, they are training for the next
assault. As Srdja Trifkovic pointed out, imagine what sort of will these
terrorists possess, to spend months in the fleshpots of Florida with only
one thought: How to die killing the most Americans. No group of communists
could possibly have been entrusted with such a mission. For so many
intelligent men to will their own deaths is proof, living and dying proof,
both of their resolve and of the power of their religion.
I do not envy them their contempt for human life. Christianity teaches the
contrary message, the value of human life and the preciousness of human soul
s. And, although Christianity is a universal faith, it does not (unlike
libertarianism) teach us to despise our neighbors and fellow-countrymen as
nothing more than buyers and sellers in a planetary economic system. The
thousands of Americans who died so terribly in the WTC and the Pentagon are
important to us, not merely because they are generically human but because
they are American. Unfortunately, they were working in a symbol of a global
system that seeks not to transcend but to destroy all petty loyalties to
nations and religions.
No, the problem is not Osama bin Laden or even U.S. foreign policy in the
Middle East. The larger threats are represented by insurgent Islam and by
an American leadership that views other nations and traditions as only so
much land to be homesteaded. The events of September represent one battle in
an ongoing war between two systems that seek to take over the earth: Islam
and the post-Christian religion that leftists see as a planetary state and
"conservatives" see as benevolent American hegemony.
The temptation is to make scapegoats of all the Muslims and Arabs (including
Christian Arabs) or blame the Israelis for getting us into this mess. Mobs
have attacked Muslims on the street, and in Australia, the yahoos burned
down a Lebanese church. What an irony for the Lebanese, to have escaped
Islamic persecution in Lebanon only to be persecuted as Muslims in a
Christian country. If Christianity has anything to teach us, it is that
people are not "symbols" but human beings, and the fact that a human being
may work for George Soros in New York or live in Iraq or Afghanistan does
not provide the slightest justification for murdering him. If we are to
draw any lessons from these past few days, it should begin with a national
self-examination of what we think we are doing in the world. As our local
talk show host Chris Bowman said amid all the rejoicing the day the Berlin
Wall came down, "If America is now the only remaining superpower, it means
we are the only remaining target for every terrorist group that is
dissatisfied with the way the world is going."
September 11, 2001, is a graver crisis than December 7, 1941. Of course FDR
did his best to get us into the war, but once we are attacked by Japan and
war was declared by Germany, the course of action was very plain. Today,
however, we do not precisely know who the enemy is, and if we choose to
respond in kind, we may be facing more terrible acts of terrorism within the
United States. More than rumor suggests that Islamic terrorists have
stockpiles of chemical and biological weapons. Any coherent strategy would
include: 1) a courageous PR demonstration by American political leaders
going to New York and facing possible assassination, coupled with an
immediate return to normalcy; 2) a crackdown on Muslims entering the country
and a review of all non-citizens in America whose countries of origin are
the source of Islamic terrorism--this includes Pakistan, Syria, Egypt, and
Saudi Arabia and not just Iraq and Afghanistan; 3) a tough new policy in the
Middle East forcing the Sharon administration to withdraw all Israeli
settlers from occupied lands and return to Israel's original borders; 4) a
swift and violent response against the terrorists and their state
sponsors--but only once we have actually determined the facts.
What we will do, in fact, will be the opposite. We will rush to the support
of Israel without doing anything about the threat of Muslims resident in the
United States; we will refuse to impose a policy of ethnic profiling, but we
will strip ordinary Americans of their civil liberties; and we will probably
kill thousands of civilians who had nothing to do with the attacks. Welcome
to the Bush family's New World Order.
If we are to be an empire, so be it. That choice is not up to me--and
probably not up to any of us. But if the United States continues to walk
down this road, we had better throw away the crying towels and tear up all
those human-interest stories the networks are so fond of. In the
cost-benefit calculation of empires, the death of 5 to 10,000 of our
fellow-citizens (an outmoded concept) counts for nothing.
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