| Wednesday, December 11, 2002 |
19:34 - Damn playwrights
http://www.denbeste.nu/cd_log_entries/2002/12/Shrillandfrustrated.shtml
|
(top)  |
As long as Morally Concerned Public Figures keep making moronic statements about how war is bad for children and other living things, people like Den Beste will keep pounding at them, holding them out over the assembled throngs like Conan with Thulsa Doom, the better to drive home the point when he hacks off the guy's head and hurls it down the torchlit steps. This is the role the majority of the bloggers have been playing ever since 9/11: through force of facts and persuasion and charisma and common sense, to demolish the arguments of those who insist that this is the time to second-guess the most clear and obvious ideological threat the world has ever had to face, to simultaneously assuage our collective guilt for our success and satisfy our inner need for clever and ironic logical leaps by finding anything to blame for 9/11 and its related events except the painfully obvious cause. It can't simply be that fundamentalist theocracy has no place in the modern world and is doomed to die; that would be way too simple. No-- surely it's our fault somehow. ...And that's the mentality that deserves a sound thrashing if expressed while the bullets are flying.
Fortunately, it can be assured of getting it these days. This is a good and refreshing article, particularly if Mr. Pinter's statements seem to the reader to be in any way... disingenuous or wrong, not to say contemptible. But there's one thought of which I wanted to make quick mention:
This particular rhetorical point, that the US claims to be trying to prevent Iraq from getting what the US already has, ignores the critical difference between capabilities and intentions. It is true that the US has the capabilities he claims, but there's no indication that we intend to do what he fears we will, and unleash WMDs out of spite. Saddam, on the other hand, has actually used chemical weapons in large quantities, and in fact is responsible for virtually every death caused with such weapons that have taken place in the entire world since the armistice was signed in Europe in 1919. So far as we know, in the last 80 years only one nation has ever used chemical weapons on the battlefield, and that's Iraq.
And though the Germans developed nerve gas in World War II, and many nations since then have also developed them (including more advanced forms) there is only one nation which has actually used them, and that is Iraq. It's not just that Iraq is the only nation in recent memory to use chemical weapons, the ones it used are far more deadly than the ones which caused so much death and destruction in Europe during the Great War.
A rifle is a deadly weapon, but it's a lot more deadly in the hands of a lunatic than in the hands of a police officer. You have to consider not just what the weapons can do, but also who is holding it.
This is a nice microcosm of the whole liberal-vs-conservative attitude dichotomy toward individual power and weapons, a very fundamental argument. One school of thought holds that all people are fundamentally untrustworthy, that power corrupts inevitably, and that the best goal for public (and global) safety is to disempower everybody-- by suppressing all weapons, because if nobody has weapons, then nobody can cause trouble, right?
The other school of thought says that some people (or nations) are better equipped, morally or financially, to responsibly handle weapons for their own benefit and for the benefit of the community at large. Some people are not trustworthy with weapons, either because of criminal pasts or demonstrated desire to cause harm with them. This school of thought stands for empowering those who deserve to be empowered, and for judging harshly those who have proven themselves unworthy of such trust.
It's the gun-control debate cast onto a global scale. One side thinks we should be disarmed en masse in the interest of public protection; the other thinks some level of risk of abuse is acceptable in order to secure freedom and privilege for those who have proven themselves worthy of it. One side thinks that it doesn't matter if people want to kill each other, as long as the state somehow denies them the means to do so; the other side thinks it's better to figure out who doesn't want to kill each other, and give them control of the power to kill, and the authority to judge and punish people who do have murderous intent.
The side in favor of equitable disarmament ignores the whole "criminals will exist outside the system and acquire weapons and powers denied to the law-abiding" argument, while at the same time constructing the machinery for a police state full of anonymous and forcibly "equalized" citizens who are discouraged from individual achievement.
Whereas the side in favor of justified empowerment assumes the risk of rogue players seizing power through legal channels, asserting that such a risk is mitigated by the very same individual empowerment that would enable the rogues to rise. A justly armed citizenry will be its own best defense against insurgency-- better than any state police force or government agency. Mega Man had it right after all: these people like peace and harmony, and they'll fight to the death to defend it.
Furthermore, the former camp is founded on the idea that all people are not only equal but the same-- differences in ambition or ethical standards arise only from circumstances, not from anything innate or personal. Thus you can prevent unrest by making everybody's circumstances the same; sure, you'll also prevent innovation and entrepreneurship. But that's an acceptable compromise.
But the latter camp presumes to judge individuals and groups by moral and ethical standards; it rewards good people by giving them power and responsibility, and it punishes bad people by taking away power and responsibility. It runs the risk of the wrong people getting the wrong amount of power; it's a very real risk, one that the disarmament camp finds unacceptable.
But history has shown us that this latter philosophy has paid off well. The current most powerful nation on earth, founded on the principle of justified empowerment, has weapons but no desire to use them. The US could have Taken Over The World, like any evil supervillain, hundreds of times over. Why didn't we? Because we're not like that. Who decided we should have this kind of power? We did. Why do we get to dictate who else gets power? Because we've proven ourselves trustworthy.
It's because the American people are a benign democracy, who decided that weapons are good things for responsible people and nations to have, that people like Pinter are free to express opinions like his, and that people like Den Beste are free to rhetorically behead them in a public forum of unprecedented technological grandeur.
The world might not be so lucky twice.
|
|
