The colourful
condemnation by Western leaders of acts of terror is obviously fully deserved. As far as it goes…
On
July 7, 2005 Prime Minister Tony Blair called the London bombings “barbaric attacks.” On September 1, 1939,
President Roosevelt wrote to the major powers that aerial bombing of civilians
had “profoundly shocked the conscience of
humanity” and called it “inhuman
barbarism.” He later referred to the December 7, 1941 attack on Pearl
Harbour as a “date, which will live in
infamy.” President Bush designated the September 11, 2001 attackers “evildoers.”
James Berardinelli in a review of Errol Morris’
documentary The Fog of War wrote:
“[Former Defense Secretary Robert S. McNamara] served in World War II under the
unrelenting command of General Curtis LeMay, the commander of the 20th Air
Force. In 1945, LeMay was in charge of a massive firebombing offensive in Japan
that resulted in the deaths of nearly 1
million Japanese citizens, including 100,000 in Tokyo during a single
night. LeMay’s B-29 bombers raked 67 Japanese cities, sometimes killing more than 50% of the population. McNamara points
out that, had the United States lost the
war, he and LeMay would have been tried as war criminals.” General Curtis
LeMay, au contraire the most
decorated military officer of the (democratic!)
United States of America, boasted of the Tokyo raid: “[W]escorched
and boiled and baked to death more people in Tokyo on that night of March 9-10
[1945] than went up in vapour at Hiroshima and Nagasaki combined.” (For the
record, he was mistaken.)
The
Chief of Staff for Presidents Roosevelt and Truman, William Leahy, memoired of
the atomic bombs that killed at least 120,000 civilians instantly in Hiroshima
and Nagasaki: “It is my opinion that the use of this barbarous weapon at
Hiroshima and Nagasaki was of no material assistance in our war against
Japan… My own feeling was that in being the first to use it, we had adopted
an ethical standard common to the barbarians of the Dark Ages.”
Prime
Minister Churchill nonetheless described the thousands of carpet and fire
bombing campaigns against over 100 German and Japanese cities, including the
two atomic detonations, as “moral
bombing”…
Columnist
Bob Herbert (New York Times, November
1, 2004) draws on reliable sources to inform us there were by last year already 100,000 civilian deaths due to the American
invasion of Iraq. President Bush recently said however, “It is worth it,” echoing former
Secretary of State Madeleine Albright’s judgment, some of whose family lived
through the Nazi Holocaust, that one million civilian deaths from sanctions
against Iraq were “worth it.”
Historian
Tami Biddle wrote that when aerial warfare was still only imagined in the 19th
century, it meant “English-speaking peoples raining incendiary bombs over the
enemy to impose the customs of civilization.” Rudyard Kipling applauded the ruthless conquering of the
Philippines after the Spanish-American War: “Take
up the White Man’s burden–/The savage wars of peace –.”
Shakespeare expressed in Hamlet: “The lady doth protest too much, methinks.” He might have been
describing a gaggle of 20th- and 21st-century Western
leaders, most recently Prime Minister
Blair and President Bush. In that same play, Shakespeare wrote: “Something is rotten in the state of Denmark.”
In place of Denmark might have been written: “Western civilization.”
Pete
Seeger sang, “When will they ever learn?” Catholic anthropologist Gil Bailie
suggested of war, including by “the good guys,” the West: “If we
humans become too morally troubled by the brutality to revel in the glories of
the civilization made possible by it, we will simply have to reinvent culture. This is what Nietzsche saw through a glass
darkly. This is what Paul sensed when he declared the old order to be a dying
one (I Cor. 7:31). This is the central
anthropological issue of our age.”
Michael Scheuer, the “Anonymous” CIA
author of Imperial Hubris, in an
interview said:“That’s the
way war is. I’ve never really understood
the idea that any American government, any American elected official is
responsible for protecting civilians who are not Americans.”
In the West, no
less than anywhere else in the world, the “clash of civilizations” (Samuel
Huntington) seems still in truth to
be the “clash of barbarisms” (Gilbert
Achcar). The ancient Babylonian creation myth established the ubiquitous maxim:
Might is right. Jared Diamond in The Third Chimpanzee, wrote – and
substantiated his conclusion with long lists of evidence – that the only consistent signature of our species is genocide.
Mahatma
Gandhi once was asked, “What do you think of Western civilization?.”He responded, “I think it would be a good idea.”