{"id":19912,"date":"2010-08-29T19:11:45","date_gmt":"2010-08-29T09:11:45","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/slackbastard.anarchobase.com\/?p=19912"},"modified":"2010-08-29T19:11:45","modified_gmt":"2010-08-29T09:11:45","slug":"a-debate-on-afghanistan","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/slackbastard.anarchobase.com\/?p=19912","title":{"rendered":"…a debate on Afghanistan"},"content":{"rendered":"

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Let’s debate Afghanistan, but give us the facts first<\/a>
\nTom Hyland
\nThe Age<\/em>
\nAugust 29, 2010<\/p>\n

Where there is no information, there is no hope of a meaningful discussion.<\/em><\/p>\n

IT HAS taken nine years, the deaths of 21 Australian soldiers and a hung parliament, but now our politicians agree: they will have a debate on Afghanistan. The Greens have long called for one; so have former and serving soldiers. Now Julia Gillard and Tony Abbott reluctantly concur…<\/p>\n

What about degrees of responsibility and shared burdens of guilt on an individual level? What can we learn about how one views oneself often in positions of power or authority?<\/a><\/em><\/p>\n

You almost never find anyone, whether it\u2019s in a weapons plant, or planning agency, or in corporate management, or almost anywhere, who says, \u2018I\u2019m really a bad guy, and I just want to do things that benefit myself and my friends.\u2019 Almost invariably you get noble rhetoric like: \u2018We\u2019re working for the benefit of the people.\u2019 The corporate executive who is slaving for the benefit of the workers and community; the friendly banker who just wants to help everybody start their business; the political leader who\u2019s trying to bring freedom and justice to the world\u2014and they probably all believe it. I\u2019m not suggesting that they\u2019re lying. There\u2019s an array of routine justifications for whatever you\u2019re doing. And it\u2019s easy to believe them. It\u2019s very hard to look into the mirror and say, \u2018Yeah, that guy looking at me is a vicious criminal.\u2019 It\u2019s much easier to say, \u2018That guy looking at me is really very benign, self-sacrificing, and he has to do these things because it\u2019s for the benefit of everyone.\u2019<\/p>\n

Or you get respected moralists like Reinhold Niebuhr, who was once called \u2018the theologian of the establishment\u2019. And the reason is because he presented a framework which, essentially, justified just about anything they wanted to do. His thesis is dressed up in long words and so on (it\u2019s what you do if you\u2019re an intellectual). But what it came down to is that, \u2018Even if you try to do good, evil\u2019s going to come out of it; that\u2019s the paradox of grace\u2019. And that\u2019s wonderful for war criminals. \u2018We try to do good but evil necessarily comes out of it.\u2019 And it\u2019s influential. So, I don\u2019t think that people in decision-making positions are lying when they describe themselves as benevolent. Or people working on more advanced nuclear weapons. Ask them what they\u2019re doing, they\u2019ll say: \u2018We\u2019re trying to preserve the peace of the world.\u2019 People who are devising military strategies that are massacring people, they\u2019ll say, \u2018Well, that\u2019s the cost you have to pay for freedom and justice\u2019, and so on.<\/p>\n

But, we don\u2019t take those sentiments seriously when we hear them from enemies, say, from Stalinist commissars. They\u2019ll give you the same answers. But, we don\u2019t take that seriously because they can know what they\u2019re doing if they choose to. If they choose not to, that\u2019s their choice. If they choose to believe self-satisfying propaganda, that\u2019s their choice. But it doesn\u2019t change the moral responsibility. We understand that perfectly well with regard to others. It\u2019s very hard to apply the same reasoning to ourselves.<\/p>\n

In fact, one of the\u2014maybe the most\u2014elementary of moral principles is that of universality, that is, if something\u2019s right for me, it\u2019s right for you; if it\u2019s wrong for you, it\u2019s wrong for me. Any moral code that is even worth looking at has that at its core somehow. But that principle is overwhelmingly disregarded all the time. If you want to run through examples we can easily do it. Take, say, George W. Bush, since he happens to be president. If you apply the standards that we applied to Nazi war criminals at Nuremberg, he\u2019d be hanged. Is it an even conceivable possibility? It\u2019s not even discussable. Because we don\u2019t apply to ourselves the principles we apply to others.<\/p>\n

There\u2019s a lot of talk about \u2018terror\u2019 and how awful it is. Whose terror? Our terror against them? I mean, is that considered reprehensible? No, it\u2019s considered highly moral; it\u2019s considered self-defense, and so on. Now, their terror against us, that\u2019s awful, and terrible, and so on.<\/p>\n

But, to try to rise to the level of becoming a minimal moral agent, and just enter in the domain of moral discourse is very difficult. Because that means accepting the principle of universality. And you can experiment for yourself and see how often that\u2019s accepted, either in personal or political life. Very rarely. <\/p>\n

…Let\u2019s take the Iraq war. There\u2019s libraries of material arguing about the war, debating it, asking \u2018What should we do?\u2019, this and that, and the other thing. Now, try to find a sentence somewhere that says that \u2018carrying out a war of aggression is the supreme international crime, which differs from other war crimes in that it encompasses all the evil that follows\u2019 (paraphrasing from Nuremberg). Try to find that somewhere\u2014I mean, you can find it. I\u2019ve written about it, and you can find a couple other dozen people who have written about it in the world. But is it part of the intellectual culture? Can you find it in a newspaper, or in a journal; in Congress; any public discourse; anything that\u2019s part of the general exchange of knowledge and ideas? I mean, do students study it in school? Do they have courses where they teach students that \u2018to carry out a war of aggression is the supreme international crime which encompasses all the evil that follows\u2019?<\/p>\n

So, for example, if sectarian warfare is a horrible atrocity, as it is, who\u2019s responsible? By the principles of Nuremberg, Bush, Rumsfeld, Cheney, Wolfowitz, Rice\u2014they\u2019re responsible for sectarian warfare because they carried out the supreme international crime which encompasses all the evil that follows. Try and find somebody who points that out. You can\u2019t. Because our dominant intellectual culture accepts as legitimate our crushing anybody we like.<\/p>\n

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Brother Ali – Uncle Sam Goddamn<\/a><\/b>
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Let’s debate Afghanistan, but give us the facts first Tom Hyland The Age August 29, 2010 Where there is no information, there is no hope of a meaningful discussion. IT HAS taken nine years, the deaths of 21 Australian soldiers … Continue reading →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":false,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[29,28,6,9,893,15],"tags":[498],"class_list":["post-19912","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-broken-windows","category-death","category-history","category-state","category-thats-capitalism","category-war-on-terror","tag-afghanistan"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p6AyE-5ba","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_likes_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/slackbastard.anarchobase.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/19912","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/slackbastard.anarchobase.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/slackbastard.anarchobase.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/slackbastard.anarchobase.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/slackbastard.anarchobase.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=19912"}],"version-history":[{"count":5,"href":"https:\/\/slackbastard.anarchobase.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/19912\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":19917,"href":"https:\/\/slackbastard.anarchobase.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/19912\/revisions\/19917"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/slackbastard.anarchobase.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=19912"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/slackbastard.anarchobase.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=19912"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/slackbastard.anarchobase.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=19912"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}