"I mourn the loss of thousands of precious lives, but I will not rejoice in the death of one, not even an enemy. Returning hate for hate multiplies hate, adding deeper darkness to a night already devoid of stars. Darkness cannot drive out darkness: only light can do that. Hate cannot drive out hate: only love can do that."
- Martin Luther King, Jr.
2 comments:
Amid all the clamor and huffing and puffing, we need the voice of King more than ever. Thanks.
My brother, who is backing (slowly) away from the Right Wing he once embraced, asked me yesterday, why I wasn't rejoicing. He should have known better. But we're friends as well as brothers so I told him, if indeed bin Laden had been killed only two days and not 8 years ago, then we've murdered literally millions to get to him.
There was a satire of The X-Men a few years back, a hijacking on a city bus, Wolverine Logan was at the back and thinking "Must... slash... through... passengers... to... get... Hijackers...."
Every person killed by the war, even those who actually were Taliban or al Qa'eda, which seems to be a very very tiny minority, had at least 5 close relatives. (That's a math formula I arbitrarily set for myself years ago and it appears to be working like magic) so killing one person nets you 5 new enemies who aren't going to give a Flying Fiddler's Frootloop about whether you think you're right or even if you actually WERE in the right, they'll just see that Americans, identities disguised by featureless uniforms, non-existent or unreadable nametags, killed their loved ones.
That's the backside of the anonymity of Uniforms. Sure you can't identify and therefore prosecute any individual. And it helps them to think as though they were less than human, just Units within other Units.
(It doesn't help much, once they're not within the Military and the several-times-daily affirmation of that attitude and outlook, it fades away... sometimes slower, sometimes, real damn quick)
So all the people on the receiving end of their "only following orders" are going to hate the Uniform and equate every American with it. When they in the heat of battle or in propaganda shows or written on their equipment something say something about how they're killing for Christ the people will hate Christ and Christianity as well.
The perpetrators ought to, after so many centuries of this kind of shit, realize that those are the inevitable consequences.
That "down from the trees and onto your knees" version of Missionary Work, conversion by the sword, has a long and rich tradition of Massive Failure. Especially when the people doing it come from an upstart "culture" that is much younger than and probably built upon the Culture they're trying so hard and zealously to "civilize".
Assuming that it's not a fresh-killed bin Laden that got dumped into the ocean, then it's another round of Them lying to Us.
Either way it's not a cause to rejoice.
My brother also mentioned that it was the good ol' fashioned American Tradition of Revenge. That's not a valid motive for killing in any court in the world. An eye for an eye is a statute of limitations, you can only take the eye of the person who did it to you and only one per customer. You can't saddle up the posse and just take down the persons entire village for knocking out a tooth.
FEELING justified is not nearly the same as BEING justified.
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