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Recent
Stories
July
2, 2003
Reuven
Kaviner
Prosecuting Ben-Artzi, the Refusenik
July
1, 2003
Sasan
Fayamanesh
Weapon of Choice: Nukes, Israel and
Iran
Elaine
Cassel
Sex and the Supreme Moralizer: Scalia
and the Sodomy Cops
Susan
Block
A Love Supreme: Our Assholes Belong
to Ourselves
Bill
Glahn
RIAA Watch: No, No Bono
David Lindorff
Weapons in Search of a Name
Gary
Leupp
Occupation, Resistance and the Plight of the GIs
Steve
Perry
Bush's Wars Web Log 7/1
June
30, 2003
Karyn
Strickler
The Do-Nothings: an Exposé
of Progressive Politics in America
Col. Dan
Smith
The Occupation of Iraq: Descending into the Quagmire
Tim
Wise
Race and Destruction in Black and White
Neve Gordon
The Roadmap and the Wall
Chris
Floyd
The Revelation of St. George: "God Told Me to Strike Saddam"
Elaine
Cassel
Kentucky Woman
Uri
Avnery
Hope in Dark Times
Steve
Perry
Bush's Wars Web Log 6/30
Website
of the Day
Bush El Hombre
June
28 / 29, 2003
M.
Shahid Alam
Bernard Lewis: Scholarship or Sophistry?
Jeffrey
St. Clair
Meet Steven Griles: Big Oil's Inside
Man
Laura
Carlsen
Democracy's Future: From the Polls or the Populace?
Alan Maass
You Call These Democrats an Alternative?
C.Y.
Gopinath
Bush and Kindergarten
Noah Leavitt
Bush, the Death Penalty and International Law
Joanne
Mariner
Rehnquist Family Values
Ignacio
Chapela
Tenure, Censorship and Biotech at Berkeley
Bob
Scowcroft
Bush's Squeeze on Organic Farmers
Jon Brown
Tom Delay: "I am the Government"
Kam
Zarrabi
Keep Your Hands Off Iran, Please!
Ron Jacobs
Big Bill Broonzy's Conversation with the Blues
Julie
Hilden
Fear Factor: Art, Terror and the First Amendment
Adrien
Rain Burke
The Anarchists' Wedding Guide
Adam
Engel
US Troops Outta Times Square
Poets'
Basement
Witherup, Guthrie, Albert, Hamod
June
27, 2003
Jason
Leopold
CIA: Seven Months Prior to 9/11 Iraq
Posed No Threat to US
David
Vest
Supreme Silence: Bush's Bunker-Hunker
David
Lindorff
The Catch and Release of "Comical
Ali"
Ray McGovern
Cheney, Forgery and the CIA
Steve
Perry
Bush's Wars Web Log 6/26
Website
of the Day
John Kerry, Teresa Heinz & Ken Lay: The Politics of Hypocrisy
June
26, 2003
Sen.
Robert Byrd
The Road of Cover-Up is a Road to Ruin
Jason
Leopold
Wolfowitz Instructed the CIA to Investigate
Hans Blix
Paul
de Rooij
Ambient Death in Palestine
Chris Floyd
Mass Graves and Burned Meat in Bush's New Iraq
Elaine
Cassel
Wolfowitz as Lord High Executioner
CounterPunch
Wire
Musicians Unite Against Sweatshops
Sheldon
Hull
Squatting in Mansions
Ben Tripp
A Guide to Hating Almost Anyone
Uri
Avnery
The Best Show in Town
Steve
Perry
Bush's Wars Web Log 6/25
Website
of the Day
Ordinary Vistas:
The Photographs of Kurt Nimmo
June
25, 2003
Bruce
Jackson
Buffalo Cops Wage War on Pedal Pushers
Mickey
Z.
The New Dark Ages
David Lindorff
Indonesia's War on Journalists
Dan
Bacher
Butterflies and Farmworkers Confront USDA and Riot Cops
Adam Federman
"Success is Not the Issue Here"
Elaine
Cassel
"Ain't No Justice": Fed Judge Quits, Assails Sentencing
Guidelines
Bill Kauffman
My America vs. the Empire
Steve
Perry
Bush's Wars Web Log 6/25
Website
of the Day
You Are Being Watched:
Elevator Moods
June
24, 2003
Elaine
Cassel
Supreme Indemnity
Holocaust Denial at the High Court
Roya
Monajem
A Message from Tehran: Is It Worth
It to Risk One's Life?
John
Chuckman
The Real Clash of Civilizations
David Lindorff
WMD Damage Control at the Times
Steve
Perry
Bush's Wars Web Log 6/24
June
23, 2003
Marc
Pritzke
Washington Lied: an Interview with
Ray McGovern
Conn
Hallinan
The Consistency of Sharon
Wayne Madsen
Commercials, Disney & Amistad
Edward
Said
The Meaning of Rachel Corrie
Steve Perry
Bush's Wars Web Log 6/23
June
21 / 22, 2003
Alexander
Cockburn
My Life as a Rabbi
William
A. Cook
The Scourge of Hopelessness
Standard
Schaefer
The Wages of Terror: an Interview with R.T. Naylor
Ron Jacobs
US Prisons as Strategic Hamlets
Harry
Browne
The Pitstop Ploughshares
Lawrence
Magnuson
WMD: The Most Dangerous Game
Harold
Gould
Saddam and the WMD Mystery
David Krieger
10 Reasons to Abolish Nuclear Weapons
Avia
Pasternak
The Unholy Alliance in the Occupied Territories
CounterPunch
Summer Reading:
Our Favorite Novels
Todd Chretien
Return to Sender: Todd Gitlin, the Duke of Condescension
Maria
Tomchick
Danny Goldberg's Imaginary Kids
Adam Engel
The Fat Man in Little Boy
Poets'
Basement
Guthrie, Albert & Hamod
June 20, 2003
Walter
Brasch
Down on Our Knees
Robert
Meeropol
The Son of the Rosenbergs on His Parents Death and Bush's America
Russell
Mokhiber and Robert Weissman
Grannies and Baby Bells
Norman
Madarasz
Pierre Bourgault: the Life of a
Quebec Radical
Gary
Leupp
Bush on "Revisionist Historians"
Steve
Perry
Bush's Lies
Marathon: the Finale
Hot Stories
Wendell
Berry
Small Destructions Add Up
CounterPunch
Wire
WMD: Who Said What When
Cindy
Corrie
A Mother's Day Talk: the Daughter
I Can't Hear From
Elaine
Cassel
Civil Liberties
Watch
Michel
Guerrin
Embedded Photographer Says: "I
Saw Marines Kill Civilians"
Uzma
Aslam Khan
The Unbearably Grim Aftermath of War:
What America Says Does Not Go
Paul de Rooij
Arrogant
Propaganda
Gore Vidal
The
Erosion of the American Dream
Francis Boyle
Impeach
Bush: A Draft Resolution
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July
2, 2003
"A Bad Peace
is Better Than a Good War"
Good Killing
and Bad Killing
By DIANE CHRISTIAN
"I strongly condemn the killings
and I urge and call upon all of the free world, nations which
love peace, to not only condemn the killings, but to use every
ounce of their power to prevent them from happening in the future."
President Bush, denouncing a suicide
bomber attack in Jerusalem
President Bush criticized Israel on June 10 2003
for attempting to assassinate a militant Palestinian Hamas leader,
Abdel-Aziz al-Rantissi. The next day Bush criticized the answering
Palestinian suicide bombing attack on a bus in Jerusalem. He
urged "free nations which love peace to not only condemn
the killings but to use every ounce of their power to prevent
them from happening in the future".
What kind of power stops the killings?
There is killing power of course-the
idea that good killing can eliminate bad killing.
The President himself subscribes to this
and he personally ordered the assassination killing solution
for Saddam Hussein and his regime. Bush sent stunning military
force against Iraq because he felt war was the good killing necessary
to deal with "evil". Bad killing in his logic justifies
good killing. Bush's administration presently defends the US
preemptive attack on Iraq on the grounds of Saddam Hussein's
brutality. Even if he didn't have weapons of mass destruction,
the reasoning now goes, he killed and tortured viciously and
therefore required killing. The agent's intention governs the
morality in this reasoning. The "free nations which love
peace" kill righteously. The enslavers who love war kill
wickedly. It's good guys and bad guys rather than actions that
determine morality. This subverts classical ethics which say
primary morality derives from the act itself, not from the intention
or situation.
When Bush rebuked Israel for its attempted
Hamas assassination, Israel claimed its own self-defense right
to fight terrorist organizations and pointed out that the US
had just taken this posture and action. The Palestinians argue
the same claim-they say that Israeli occupation and military
oppression are terrorism and that they too are only defending
themselves and resisting evil. Good killing and bad killing become
issues of point of view. Each position moralizes its hurt, revenge
and righteousness.
The young Palestinian suicide bomber
on the Jerusalem bus dressed as an Orthodox Jewish student. He
disguised himself as one dedicated to the enemy religion. He
is named a terrorist by those he fought against and a martyr
by those he fought for.
WARRIORS AND MARTYRS
Was the suicide bomber a warrior or a
martyr, or both, or neither? By conventional codes he's a guerilla
warrior-disguising himself, sneaking in, sabotaging, not distinguishing
the civilian and the military. That distinction between killable
and non-killable is usually argued as an important element of
proper warfare. Don't kill women and children and aged innocents,
just combatants, soldiers garbed and properly identified as fighters.
But these distinctions often dissolve even for us, the US, as
the fire bombings of Dresden, the nuclear bombings of Hiroshima
and Nagasaki, and the Vietnam and Iraqi wars demonstrate. War
itself is clearly terrorism against civilian population as well
as against combat against deputed fighters.
The US press, like the Pentagon, tries
very hard in covering the Iraq war and occupation to emphasize
the boundary between civilian and combatant-repeating the political
refrain that we're only after Saddam and the hardliners, not
against the Iraqi people. June 14th's New York Times'
front page features a soldier comforting another crying soldier
who is upset after seeing Iraqi children wounded when playing
with ammunition. The sense is that soldiers are not cruel killing
machines, rather that they care about Iraqi children. In fact
they burned and maimed and orphaned and killed many Iraqi children.
They just didn't mean to.
The suicide bomber meant to kill Israeli
innocents. His terror is more malicious and unsentimental in
intent. But the killing actions and the innocent dead don't differ.
Does morality depend on the intention of the warriors?
When people vilified the 9/11 terrorists
many said they were cowardly, by which they meant to strip them
of warrior status. Just as we demonized the kamikaze pilots in
World War II, we sought to deny the terrorists any sacrificial
warrior role. The Al Qaeda discipline and courage and dedication
were ignoble to us because destruction of us was their cause.
We felt ourselves innocent, not the Great Satan of anti-Islamic
oppression. So we resisted the idea not only that the terrorists
were martyrs, but even that they were warriors.
We thought of our dead as martyrs because
they got killed. One warrior/martyr distinction is about agency-active
and passive. Warriors kill and martyrs get killed. Warriors seek
the death of the enemy; martyrs suffer their own death as the
enemy. Martyrs do not kill others. Those who choose martyrdom
allow themselves to die for the sake of ideals and witness. The
Palestinian bomber immolates himself like the Buddhist monks
set on fire during the Vietnam War, personally for a cause, but
his action is to kill others. The bomber is a warrior not a martyr.
He kills. It's a useful distinction.
Being willing to die for your cause is
necessary to martyrdom, but it's different from being willing
to kill for your cause which is warrior posture. Warriors are
theoretically willing to die for their cause, but they try not
to die. Martyrs endure others' violence and thereby reveal it
and refuse it. They make peace by absorbing the violence and
not returning it. Christ was not a warrior.
US WARRIORS &
MARTYRS
One reason the US won world sympathy
for the 9/11 attack was because those killed were seen as martyrs;
they were killed for being in American buildings, sacrificed
to an idea of war. President Bush's response to 9/11 was to turn
the savage brutality into full warrior response: kill the enemy.
The bombing attack on Afganistan was reprisal for terrorism,
though the leader, Osama bin Laden, like Saddam Hussein, was
not eliminated. Bin Laden had often assumed the martyr mode as
justification for his war. He declared himself a slave of Allah
and said he acted in reprisal for the evil done God's people
and shrines. Saddam Hussein didn't strike a religious posture.
He admired strongman Stalin and sought to be feared. Bush was
betwixt and between: pious and martyred in justification, "smoking
'em out of their holes" strongman in execution. All three
are warriors in action-sending others to their deaths to execute
their cause.
JEWISH WARRIORS &
MARTYRS
Jews, until the founding of modern Israel,
haven't been thought of primarily as warriors. To most Americans
they have suffering biblical stereotypes, like their enslavement
in Egypt in Exodus or the suffering servant of Yahweh and exile
in Isaiah. The prophetic suffering servant figure is one who
is innocent, who has done no violence nor had deceit on his tongue,
and yet he is killed by those who vilify him, projecting their
own violence and feeling righteous as they eliminate him as evil.
The Christ story is modeled on this Isaiah figure. Modern Israel
was achieved partly by guerilla warfare but also politically
by Jewish martyr history. Most people take the cry "never
again" to mean "this time we fight, no more Jewish
holocausts". The great warriors like Joshua and David in
Jewish tradition, are not the inspiration, the suffering victim
history is. The legitimizing of Israeli violence similarly rests
not on warrior history (we are great fighters) but on victim
history (we are great victims). Israeli violence is cast by the
Israeli government as only self-defense, exactly as US violence
was rationalized by Bush-he said we needed to protect ourselves
against another 9/11 massacre.
This is a clear pattern in legitimizing
violence. We were injured, we will defend ourselves, preemptively
or vengefully. Even legally we tend to excuse killing if we can
persuade a jury that the killer thought he was acting in self-defense.
Self-defense is much more primal and easier to understand than
complicated history, land claims and numbers of killed.
Islam, which means the peace of surrender
to God, is in popular American understanding a war religion-sanctifying
holy war or jihad. President Bush thinks of the US and
Israel as democratic "peace-loving" nations and the
Islamic terrorist menace looks like bad guys to him. Bush seems
incapable of understanding US or Israeli violence except from
the good guy point of view that legitimizes it.
Good killing doesn't eliminate bad killing.
It echoes and promotes it. The power to stop killing is not adjectival
and moralizing. As the old Hebrew adage goes "A bad peace
is better than a good war."
Good killing and bad killing are enemy
brothers, old stories like Cain and Abel, Ishmael and Isaac.
You can tell who they are, not by their fathers who are the same,
but by what they do. The murderer is the one who kills.
Diane Christian
is SUNY Distinguished Teaching Professor at University at Buffalo.
She can be reached at: engdc@acsu.buffalo.edu
Weekend Edition
Features
M.
Shahid Alam
Bernard Lewis: Scholarship or Sophistry?
Jeffrey
St. Clair
Meet Steven Griles: Big Oil's Inside
Man
Laura
Carlsen
Democracy's Future: From the Polls or the Populace?
Alan Maass
You Call These Democrats an Alternative?
C.Y.
Gopinath
Bush and Kindergarten
Noah Leavitt
Bush, the Death Penalty and International Law
Joanne
Mariner
Rehnquist Family Values
Ignacio
Chapela
Tenure, Censorship and Biotech at Berkeley
Bob
Scowcroft
Bush's Squeeze on Organic Farmers
Jon Brown
Tom Delay: "I am the Government"
Kam
Zarrabi
Keep Your Hands Off Iran, Please!
Ron Jacobs
Big Bill Broonzy's Conversation with the Blues
Julie
Hilden
Fear Factor: Art, Terror and the First Amendment
Adrien
Rain Burke
The Anarchists' Wedding Guide
Adam
Engel
US Troops Outta Times Square
Poets'
Basement
Witherup, Guthrie, Albert, Hamod
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