A Wretchard Choice

Richard Fernandez, né Wretchard, the writer of The Belmont Club, doesn’t need my help publicizing his blog; I’m putting this comment of his up in my own blog more as a reminder to myself of how well he’s put this point. I argued the same in a letter to a friend of my father that I wrote about three years ago, but never sent (he didn’t want his angry friend to turn his guns on me, and I think he thought one of my generation responding to one of his, outside of family, unseemly). I doubt, however, that I put it as well. The crux of the argument, that I was making specifically in regard to the Iraq war, and which Wretchard Fernandez is making more generally, is: “We don’t want to go there,” “going there” being defined as “being forced to destroy with nuclear weapons vast segments of Islamic society.” Here are his words, as they appear in the third comment of this post, Thinking the Unthinkable: (should the link fail to work, he may have moved his archives over to his new home at Pajamas Media, here):

The argument has already been made and widely
accepted that Western society is guilty and deserves
collective punishment. Much of the Left believes this, an[d]
certainly Osama Bin Laden does. Terrorism is all about
collective punishment. That's why terrorists don't meet
armies or enemy forces directly. They strike at civilian
and other targets reasoning that one is as “guilty” as the
other.

The idea of collective retaliation is an old one. What was
the bombing of Dresden about? The Japanese, who
butchered civilians in Nanking and Manila knew all about
collective punishment. And so did the Brits, who used
poison gas and strafing runs against Iraqis in the pre-
World War 2 years. There is no way to prettify collective
punishment. It is so unavoidable that deterrence -- the
thing that kept the world in one piece from 1949 to
1989 -- was based on it.

Consider, that if in 1963 it was US policy to incinerate
every Russian man, woman and child in the event they
had to “duck and cover” -- American schoolkids were
taught to try to survive a nuclear blast -- then why is it
less moral to apply the same morality to terrorist
supporters and places of prestige?

In truth, they are equally immoral. And for myself, I think
it is futile and dishonest to twist it into a moral shape.
About all you can say is that it may be necessary.
Necessary to make these threats to keep the peace. So
maybe you can argue that we can threaten the immoral to
achieve the moral -- which is the prevention of war -- aka
deterrence.

This used to be called, back in grad school, the art of
“thinking the unthinkable.” At this point some people
mentally short circuit, raise themselves erect, throw back
their heads and announce “I shall not contemplate this.”
But after a while, they sit down and realize that heroic
poses aside, he's still stuck in the same bottle along with
all the rest of the trapped scorpions. Then they go back to
doodling.

For my part, I think the only unambiguously moral action
to take is work toward avoiding this fix to start with. That
means nipping WMD terror threats in the bud. Hitting the
enemy conventionally and precisely now. I don't hold
with the idea, so dear to many pacifists, that we should
just let things slide, because “nothing can be worse than
war” -- meaning limited war, against terrorists. Or holding
back from criticizing noxious ideologies. There is
something far, far worse than this.

And the Hoover piece gives us a glimpse into what that
worse thing is. We don't want to go there. Though we
seem to be doing our damndest to go there anyway.

“‘I shall not contemplate this.’” Turning the other cheek calls for this stance. I wrote a few days ago that it is ok to turn one’s own – ok to let one’s own self be destroyed by a terrorist bomb – but not ok to tell others to turn theirs. I.e., it is ok to fight to prevent injustice being done to others. That said, however, I believe in the professional pacifist. Jesus was not a Zealot, even if they were fighting for freedom from the Romans. Clergy generally refrain from taking up arms. Maxmillian Kolbe did so, but left no doubt as to his bravery. I am not a pacifist, and I’m not even against collective punishment (I am a teacher, after all), but when it comes to nuclear weapons … well, I have thought and written and sometimes spoken in favor of the bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, but if I had the key to the suitcase, if I were in charge of pushing the little red button, I don’t know if I could do it. Perhaps that makes me a coward, but perhaps deep down I hold to that law of morality, that one not do evil, even with the intention that good may come of it. Ech.

If there’s any certainty in all of this for me, I can say these three things: 1. better we colonize the whole of Islamia than nuke it all (note that I am not necessarily recommending this); 2. like one categorically opposed to the death penalty is an invalid juror, I would be an invalid President of the United States; 3. it is nearly, if not entirely, impossible to be sinless while living in this world, which is why the monastery has such appeal at times. As Wre- As Fernandez might say of the world, “it is futile and dishonest to twist it into a moral shape.”

A New-ish Cliché, Long Disproven

I am a subscriber to and enjoy Anu Garg’s A.Word.A.Day. The word itself is fairly often one I don’t know, and is accompanied by one or two quotations showing the word in context, as well as another at the bottom of the missive, presumably meant to communicate what Mr. Garg believes are wise thoughts. Sometimes the wisdom is true, but other times it is not. Mr. Garg seems to have a streak of pretty typical Western liberalism in him, all the details of which I cannot remember without looking back through a list of his quotations, but one of which is a penchant for – perhaps a conviction regarding – pacifism. (Take a look at his list of organizations which he supports, at the bottom of this page here, and you’ll see I’m correct about the general drift of his thought.) Thus this bit, which I regard as rather clichéd, but which may not have been at the time, from Tolstoy:

The struggle with evil by means of violence is the same as an attempt to stop a cloud, in order that there may be no rain.

I have to say, not being able to find the context using Google, I can’t quite make out what Tolstoy’s trying to say, or at least how he’s trying to say what it seems he is saying, that violence is equivalent to evil. The literal effort – using violence to prevent evil – implies a paradox between the means and the end, but the metaphorical effort – stopping a cloud to prevent the rain – does not contain that paradox, illustrating only the uselessness of the means because of the inevitability of the unwanted end. Perhaps he feels that stopping a cloud would cause rain, which would lead to the idea that violence causes evil, but of course stopping a cloud would not cause rain but would merely delay it, as it drifted its way through the cloud to an unblocked exit point. Perhaps, though I doubt it, he feels that evil is a natural, inevitable force that should be allowed to do its work unmolested. I have some sympathy with Tolstoy on the first point, believing in original sin as I do: evil will never be fully destroyed, while this world lasts. But evil is not a substance that is everywhere the same. The evil that leached out in 2001 is not the same evil that was prevented in the second half of 1945. More importantly, the people who avoided evil in 1945 are not the same who suffered it in 2001. Nor are the people who prevented it in 1945 the same as those who prevented it in 2002. It is a good to be saved from evil. It is good to save others from evil. Both actions change individuals in ways different from, and seemingly better than, succumbing to violence or watching others do so would.

I’ve not read Tolstoy, so I can’t say what value he gave to the defense of Russia by her soldiers against Napoleon, but from my historical perspective, he’s all wrong. Whenever I hear this violence-is-inherently-evil-and-useless meme, from Tolstoy, from Lennon, from Edwin Starr, from the Pet Shop Boys, this is what I think of:

What other response can there be? Nothing to kill or die for? Violence … breeds violence? Tell it to the men in this photo. This is what war is good for. It is one thing to turn the other cheek, but it is another to look on while the other fellow gets struck, and then, placidly or with an air of tragic regret, advise him to turn his.
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Thanks, by the way, to the folks at A Teacher’s Guide to the Holocaust for posting the photo above on their site. The photo itself is by Hugh C. Daly, from his book, 42nd "Rainbow" Infantry Division: A Combat history of World War II. Photos from this book seem to show up here and there around the web, and the book seems to be out of print, so I thought it allowable to use one. If I am incorrect in that assumption, please contact me to let me know. Thank you.

Crusaders are Bad; Jihadists are Good

The good folks over at Phi Beta Cons, a sub-blog of National Review Online, yesterday published a comment on, with a link to the video of, a scuffle begun between two men working for a Muslim school named Tarek ibn Ziyad Academy (often called TiZA charter school). This place has apparently been in the news quite a bit because their curriculum is suspected not to stay entirely on its side of the revered wall separating Church and State. They require ritual observations, such as the removal of shoes, various washings, and prayer times. They apparently also make it hard to leave until after Muslim instruction classes end, an hour after by school, by delaying busses until that time. This obviously leads to all sorts of questions regarding charter schools, school choice, and the rest, and not all of the answers are obvious. The main point I wish to bring up, however, is this: Tarek ibn Ziyad is a Muslim warrior who led the conquest of what Wikipedia calls Hispania – in other words, the Iberian peninsula, modern day Spain and Portugal – in the days when it was apparently run by the Visigoths. I just know that I’ll catch hell (assuming anyone’s reading) when I suggest that there are no public or semi-public schools named after Crusaders (there is one named after a Viking – Leif Ericson Scholastic Academy on Chicago’s West Side, oddly enough), but I can’t imagine a modern charter school – one set up with government funds – being able to set itself up with the name of a great Crusader. Richard the Lionheart Academy? Don Juan of Austria High School? Pope Urban II Kindergarten? I’d be surprised.

The Echo Chamber

The blogosphere seems to act like a gigantic echo-chamber at times, causing stories that don't make it big at first to get there if enough people mention them. As my modest effort to add to the echo chamber effect on this story of Hussein-Al Qaeda connections, I offer the final three paragraphs to Stephen F. Hayes's article on “Iraqi Perspectives Project: Saddam and Terrorism: Emerging Insights from Captured Iraqi Documents,” a study showing the sympathy between the objectives of Saddamite Iraq and Al Qaeda, not to mention monetary connections between the former and individuals working for the latter:

What's happening here is obvious. Military historians and terrorism analysts are engaged in a good faith effort to review the captured documents from the Iraqi regime and provide a dispassionate, fact-based examination of Saddam Hussein's long support of jihadist terrorism. Most reporters don't care. They are trapped in a world where the Bush administration lied to the country about an Iraq-al Qaeda connection, and no amount of evidence to the contrary--not even the words of the fallen Iraqi regime itself--can convince them to reexamine their mistaken assumptions.

Bush administration officials, meanwhile, tell us that the Iraq war is the central front in the war on terror and that American national security depends on winning there. And yet they are too busy or too tired or too lazy to correct these fundamental misperceptions about the case for war, the most important decision of the Bush presidency.

What good is the truth if nobody knows it?

Good Question