From: Damien Broderick (damienb@unimelb.edu.au)
Date: Fri Jun 06 2003 - 01:25:42 MDT
At 11:22 PM 6/5/03 -0400, someone called Max Plumm, perhaps a nym (google
knows very little about this entity) wrote:
> It was Damien who chose to use the phrase
>"oily omelette" in his harsh response to Spike.
A sorrowful acknowledgement, in context, that perhaps control of oil
reserves in the middle east is a legitimate *realpolitik* motive for war on
Iraq by a high-tech, oil-dependant coalition.
> I have never read a post of Damien's in which he refers to a Vietnamese
>Communist "re-education camp omelette", a Castro or Mengistu's "famine
>omelette", or even a Saddam Hussein's "oily omelette".
The occasion hasn't arisen.
But the general point seems to me this: there is a moral asymmetry between
one's standpoint on
(a) issues where one's democratic representatives and their affiliates are
making decisions on one's behalf,
and (not-a) choices made by people outside one's sphere of influence.
If your deputy is acting in a way you regard as deplorable, it's up to you
to speak out. If someone over in the next town or nation is doing so, you
might take a keen interest, but you generally have a lesser moral
responsibility to speak out.
If Australian, British or US decision makers act, allegedly in my behalf,
it's far more urgent that I take stock of their actions and speak up for or
against their choices. If someone in Vietnam, where I have no stake or
control at all, acts abominably, I might speak up as a concerned, distant
observer, but the moral situation is rather different, I think.
When Palestinian youths blow up Israelis, I am horrified; when Israeli
soldiers blow up Palestinians, I am also horrified, perhaps more so, since
it seems to me, from this great distance, that the power imbalance is in
the Israelis' favor.
When I hear that Saddam and his sons and regime tortured and murdered
people, I am horrified; when I hear that US jails contain a million or more
prisoners many of them incarcerated for using marijuana and subjected in
prison to rampant rape and brutality, I am horrified as well. In the
absence of those *realpolitik* global considerations, I think that friends
of America should be acting by preference to save the victims in the US
prisons rather than those in the Iraqi prisons. But we do live in a real
world, so I admit that to sequester the oil reserves for me and my friends
and for technological civilization it might, after all, be worth expending
the lives of the willing and those of the innocent victims. The guilty
victims can rot, as we all agree. But let's not pretend that this choice
led to an almost bloodless war. There was plenty of blood.
Damien Broderick
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