Re: Fw: Arab NGO statement on terror attack in the United States

From: Phil Graham (phil.graham@mailbox.uq.edu.au)
Date: Sat Sep 15 2001 - 07:54:09 PDT


At 01:59 PM 15/09/2001 +0100, Bruce's fwd message said:
> > >Arab NGO's denounce the criminal terrorist attack on American and non-
> > >American innocent civilians on Tuesday.
> > >
> > >Arab human rights organizations have always based their advocacy for
> > >individual and collective human rights on one standard; they have always
> > >denounced all barbaric attacks on Palestinian and Iraqi as well as other
> > >civilians.

There is another paradox in all of this. It's about "innocent civilians". I
heard Mr Bush (Maha Bush -- sounded like "Mahbus" when Saddam used to say
it on the telly for those scrabbling through the quatraines, Nostradamus is
no. 1 on Amazon now) prattling on about the attack violating "the sanctity
of human life" in order to stir up a bit of passion for some retaliatory
violence. This "sanctity" mantra gets repeated by all the hawkish types in
order to violate it. Well of course Tuesday was a violation of life -- mass
murder, etc.

But then there is this other discourse about 'innocent civilians' --- the
whole of warfare since the twentieth century has been about the mass
slaughter of civilians, maybe 100 million, maybe more. Goebbels was quoted
as saying (roughly) "A thousand deaths is a tragedy. A million is a
statistic". We're not only illiterate, historically, socially, etc. We're
innumerate. We have no sense of proportion. A million deaths *is* a
statistic. 10 million innocent civilian lives vs 100 million innocent
civilian lives -- which is worse and why? Can we even *imagine* what 100
million dead people look like? 10 million? 1 million? 50,000?

I can't.

What scale of human tragedy, bitterness, hatred gets left behind piles of
corpses that size?

So --- someone tell me --- what turns an 'innocent civilian' into someone
who it's okay to kill? Conscription? A gun? A uniform? An order? A set of
protocols? A law? A prayer? And then, once we sort that out, who gets to
kill them and how?

When is killing anybody okay?

Never.

That's when.

Who is it okay to kill?

Nobody.

That's who.

Regards,
Phil (a civilian, but innocent? I don't think so).

  



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