I am reading a lot of agonizing about war-mongering and collateral
damage. As a person who very recently lived in New York, who had friends
working close to Ground Zero (all, thank God, OK as of last check) I
would like to add the following.
Five thousand (5,000) people are currently dead somewhere in the rubble
of the World Trade Center. These people were ALL civilians, average
working type clerks, secretaries, cleaning personnel, computer
programmers (except for the firemen, who chose to be in harm's way out of
a sense of duty to their fellow New Yorkers). As was pointed out in some
news article, the VIP's, the real Capitalists, aren't at their desks at 9
AM. The dead were regular, normal CIVILIANS. Like in collateral damage
(?!).
But note: in this case the objective was not to take out some military
target, with the civilians just unfortunate bystanders. In this case the
civilians were themselves the target. This is not just a "statement"
about someone's suffering. This is mass murder and itself the cause of
unimaginable suffering. There are five thousand times how many families
who are grieving today. Not capitalists, not military, just average
people like me and you.
Is it somehow that civilian American blood just isn't as red as, say,
civilian Afghan blood? If it's wrong to kill Afghani civilians (and it
is), isn't it also wrong to kill American civilians?
If Jay had been one of those five thousand, had been one of those people
jumping from the top floors as the only alternative to burning alive, how
would you have felt? Would you have talked about justified revenge for
imperialist wrongs? If it had been Eugene's wife and child on one of the
highjacked planes, dying horribly with no hope of rescue, would he have
been so quick to talk about Afghani anguish as justifying American
bodies? Perhaps it's just a little too easy to rhetoricize when it's not
the blood of people you know.
So these militants (not terrorists, of course, just "somebody else's
freedom fighters") must be allowed to on about their business of making
political statements with civilian blood because bringing them to justice
might involve collateral damage? Perhaps we should excuse Milosevic
because, after all, the Serbian militants were only living out their
distress at the collapse of the old order in Eastern Europe?
No, I don't recommend carpet-bombing Afghanistan. And a lot of the
people I work with are fine, normal people who are also Muslims. But I
know one person who was the only survivor of a large German-Jewish family
because when Hitler came to power, and threatened to destroy the Jews,
they didn't believe it. They thought it was all rhetoric to comfort the
Germans in their anguish at the Depression's effects. She believed
Hitler, and left, and every other member of her family who stayed behind
was exterminated in the death camps. When bin Laden and company say they
mean to destroy America with terrorism, they mean it. This isn't the
"end of the beginning", to quote Churchill, it's only the BEGINNING of
the beginning. As someone in the field of public health, I am now
reading all I can get about disaster response and counseling, because it
looks like it's going to be a busy season.
And if it's you or yours, next time, remember I told you so, and remember
the contempt you have been showing for the victims and their families on
this list.
Rachel Heckert
PS If you really believe the conflict between Islamic civilization and
the West is a recent development, try getting out a history book and
checking out the Crusades (a millennium ago), one cause for which was
Moslem interdict of European shipping on the Mediterranean Sea, or the
battles in which Roland stopped the invading Moors at the foot of the
Pyrenees (if he hadn't all Europe would be Muslim), the days when the
Ottoman Turks reached the gates of Vienna, and so on. Islam is a complex
faith with many facets, and one of them indeed is quite martial. And as
for terrorism against civilian targets, one of my childhood memories is
of Algerian terrorists bombing in France in the Algerian civil war.
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