Guest post: They can kill; we can live
Originally a comment by AJ Milne on In an area specially set aside for wheelchair users.
Disgusting, sure. Maybe the apex of it, in all of this, and that, that’s saying something. But then, if you’re already standing there, with a rifle, shooting into a crowd of unarmed, terrified, screaming people, who can only run away and are as likely to hurt each other in their panic as escape, I don’t imagine it’s much more of a leap to shoot at someone who can’t even run.
And I feel a little sick even having had to imagine that. This is no exaggeration.
I guess you have to think about the dehumanization that has preceded this. Read that rhetoric about how this is a city of the monstrous and the damned. A satanic other. And so they can imagine themselves shooting alien horrors, things that turned evil and rebellious against their divine and righteous authority and which must therefore be stopped. We see people in wheelchairs, young people at a concert who will die and be mourned in aching agony for months and years and decades. They see alien warthogs.
The lesson in this? I say: don’t become that. Don’t, for all that it’s the natural and perfectly understandable rage of the moment, start seeingthem that way. Those fucking idiots with guns and suicide vests are just pawns in this, too, drawn in and poisoned by alienation and idiot delusions of heavenly victories and ever more fantastic, phantasmagoric rhetoric, moonbeams and rainbows and flying horses. They don’t get virgins after the spree killings they attempt to dignify as political statements. They die and rot. And to the extent they ever even get their earthly kingdom, so far as they have, so far as they ever will, for most of them, it will be hell on earth. Those ugly old closed hierarchies generally were, for almost everyone, mostly even when youare damned lucky at where you land in the pyramid.
The world is screaming for blood, now, naturally enough, but I think if you want to really answer this thing right, you mourn, you square your shoulders, and you go on–you go right on trying to make a world people want to live in. Sympathy for all who have been injured, all who will miss the dead, all who were terrified, all who will wake up in the middle of the night, shaking, for years. But no again to all this panicked clampdown on security and let’s become ever more police states, because some ugly old should-be dead letter philosophies have found this dangerous traction in war and chaos and yawning inequities. You want to frustrate the fucking assholes cheering this on, that’s how you do so. You say: right. So they can kill. We can live.
https://www.facebook.com/144310995587370/photos/a.271728576178944.71555.144310995587370/1075357379149389/?l=5c8b07fc38
Nice sentiments, but we can kill them too, and enjoy it.
justinr, of course we can kill them. But enjoy it? No. Any time a civilised society goes to war it has already lost the argument as to what it means to be a civilised society. Sadly, the ‘west’ has been loosing this fight for some time by initiating and prosecuting meaningless and unjust wars, usually against the wrong targets and in an ‘ends justifies the means’ way with scant regard for both the effect on innocents immediately affected and the power vacuum and concomitant radicalisation and disenchantment that results. ‘We’ have indeed brought this on ourselves.
Of course this suits the oligarchs and their servants perfectly well. they get on with making vast sums of money even faster under war conditions, and with less scrutiny and restraint than ever. In the meantime ‘we’ willingly throw away liberties that will probably never be regained in exchange for the absolute illusion of safety.
I read an article a decade or so ago written by a former security analyst. He maintained that the west won the cold war, not because we had better spies or a better security apparatus, but because we had a more resilient society that could cope with the losses and destabilisations that the soviets inflicted on us. In the face of terrorism we have become a less resilient society. It is exactly that corrosion that those opposed to our society seek.
To add to that the taking of joy in killing, is to loose the strongest anchors of any civilisation. That individual life matters, that law and due process matters, that peace and prosperity matter.
Don’t get me wrong. I am not a pacifist. There comes a time when you must fight to survive. That time should also come with the recognition that fighting carries a huge cost that will be paid by generations to come. It should be a last resort, focused and prosecuted in a way that defines the society that engages in it. ‘We’ have not learned that lesson.
A.J. Milne, that it is a beautiful statement