Today is the anniversary of the liberation of Auschwitz:
KRAKOW, Poland – World leaders gathered in Poland, EU lawmakers observed a minute of silence in Brussels and a Holocaust survivor warned German leaders to be vigilant against anti-Semitism in ceremonies Thursday to mark the 60th anniversary of the liberation of the Auschwitz death camp.
In Poland, where leaders from 30 countries gathered to remember the victims of the Holocaust, Vice President Dick Cheney (news – web sites) noted that it did not happen in some far-off place but “in the heart of the civilized world.”
“The story of the camps shows that evil is real and must be called by its name and must be confronted,” he said.
Cheney’s statement encapsulates the very essence of what I’ve been saying over and over on this website.
At a recent dinner party, the conversation turned to Israel. My host enjoined me to define terrorism, and I told him that I defined it as “The deliberate murder of non-combatants, non-military personnel for political ends.” He countered with a hypothetical example of an Israeli cruise missile killing not only a terrorist leader, but also the people around him. The point, I tried to explain, was intent. While I don’t think that “caring” about anything is at all meaningful, I think intent, as a concept, is vital. A man who walks into a crowded bus with rat poison-laced ball bearings taped to a bomb strapped around his chest and self-detonates absolutely, unquestioningly, deliberately, intends to kill as many civilians as he can. That’s inarguable.
It was then explained to me that intent, apparently, has degrees. That is, there are different levels of intent. So if a terrorist leader surrounds himself with non-combatants as a constantly-changing human shield is killed along with some of those non-combatants in an Israeli military strike intended to keep him from sending out more bus-bombers, a moral equivalency can be drawn: non-combatants were killed, right? The Israelis’ form of intent lacked the moral authority that would separate them from the terrorists, because some non-combatants were accidentally killed. Certainly, before understaking such an action the odds were deemed high that yes, indeed, some of the terrorist’s human shields would be slain.
But is that a strong enough reason to keep from acting in self-defense? At what point do the unintended consequences of an action outweigh the importance of performing that action? In many respects, it’s an obvious question: we don’t send in helicopter gunships to destroy city blocks when a drug shootout occurs in Compton. However, the line is drawn: action versus inaction. Taken to its other extreme, don’t you dare get into your car to drive to work: not only will you be producing greenhouse gases that might destroy the ozone layer, but you also run the risk of getting into an accident that might kill a child standing at a bus stop. What’s more important: your job, or that child’s life?
What it boils down to is risk, which is very strongly connected to the term “unintended consequences.” Planning, resources, ability: all mitigate risk, and consequently limit unintended consequences. Risk assessment becomes easy when deciding if that three-week old package of turkey that’s been sitting in the fridge is worth eating or not, especially if you have the means to buy more turkey. Risk assessment is less easy when you decide whether or not to cruise missile a Hamas leader in the middle of a crowd of worshippers.
Which is where we end up now: to defeat terrorists, to confront evil, often calls for killing. Because we live in a world where almost anyone can “reach out and touch someone” anywhere else, the nature of self-defense has come back to the forefront. It took September 11 to teach us that, but it’s hopefully a lesson that won’t require reinforcement: the nature of effective self-defense requires a commitment to being proactive, not reactive. We call this a cliche’: “The best defense is a good offense.” But it is an absolute truism. With this in mind, intent, risk assessment, and unintended consequences become questions of survival instead of abstract concepts.
Militant Islamists don’t fear death, injury, or imprisonment. All they fear is failure. With deliberate intent, they use the murders of women and children to further their aims. When faced with an enemy that committed, that evil, don’t risk assessment and unintended consequences become less and less a set of factors in determining self-defense? The other cliche’ is: “When fighting monsters, it is vital that you yourself do not become a monster.” This, I think, is less a moral caution and more a plea for non-action in the face of evil. War means killing the enemy and destroying things. That is what militaries the world over are trained to do, first and foremost.
Which brings us full-circle: there is no moral equivalency between the deliberate murder of non-combatants and the accidental killing of non-combatants during a legitimate military action. I give the benefit of the doubt that the Israelis do assess risk, weigh unintended consequences, and do what they think is necessary for self-defense. Otherwise, every time the Palestinians gather in the street to celebrate the murder of civilians, they’d get cruise-missiled. Do you really think the Israelis are militarily incapable of inflicting destruction on a level that would horrify even the most jaded cynic? Instead, they make what surgical strikes they can, they obviously do their best to minimize civilian casualties, and they build a wall. Such restraint in the face of baby-killing is, in my opinion, worthy of sainthood. To use the factor of unintended consequences when innocent lives are at stake complicates decisions made to defend oneself, but it must not be used as an excuse for inaction in the face of evil. To quote Dick Cheney, “Evil is real and must be called by its name and must be confronted.” The time for moral relativism is over. When the Jews say, “Never again,” we mean it, and we will act to save ourselves despite every effort of the moral relativists on the left, the anti-semites on the right, and everyone else in-between.
Your argument is even stronger than you present. When you speak of the intent of the Israelis in killing the terrorist leader, you overlook that it is the intent of the terrorist leader that in the event of his death, the human shield die as well. He intends to kill them as a condition of his death.
That actually didn’t occur to me; you’re right. Every human shield accidentally killed in a military strike equals more bad press for Israel, which in turn is always good for militant Islam. Yet another opportunity to point and go, “See? Those dirty Jews are murderers! THEY’RE the terrorists! Long live the intifada!”
David, you expressed my sentiments exactly. How often I have had similar discussions on moral equivalency. “Gee, aren’t we just like them because we kill innocent people too” and “isn’t Israel as guilty as the Palestinians of shedding innocent blood in the Middle East?” Are these people moral idiots? Well. to be fair the mainstream media does a very good job of confusing the moral issues with the narrow focus of its cameras. A dead child is a dead child whether on a city bus in Haifa or as part of a human shield in a Hams
My profound apologies. My computer just crashed and the comment I was making got cut short and repeated for some crazy reason. Please forgive any confusion this may have caused. I desperately need a new computer.
If I may complete my comment, however, there are a vast number of people who have a difficult time understanding that there is really such a thing as evil. Auschwitz is a permanent memorial to the fact that there is indeed pure defined evil in the world. The fact that so many world leaders and dignitaries gathered there this year is significant in that maybe there is some international consensus finally that terrorism is not a legitimate tactic of unconventional war, but a manifestation of cold blooded human evil, and any cause, movement or nation that adopts it should be regarded as illegitimate and an international pariah.
The liberation of Auschwitz could only have happened through the inadvertant death of millions of innocents. The Allied bombers of the Eighth Air Force and RAF Bomber Command killed 500,000 German civilians and in the process forced the German high command to strip the Russian front of thousands of 88mm anti-aircraft guns for home defense that might have been better spent knocking out Russian tanks. Those same Soviet liberators who liberated Majdenak and Auschwitz-Birkenau raped and murdered their way into the heart of Hitler’s Reich. The innocent and guilty suffered equally for the crimes of the Nazi regime.
My question always comes around to how guilt, or evil if you will, is defined. As a life-long student of Holocaust studies, I can tell you that the guilt, not just in Germany, but across all of Europe, is a whole lot broader than Europeans are generally willing to admit. It was not just a question of doing nothing and turning their backs on the victims, but of aiding and abetting evil on a scale that is actually quite shocking. In France, it was for the most part the French police who rounded up the Jews and deported them to the death camps. The Gestapo actually had to do very little of the work. Even in the British Channel islands, the local bobbies cooperated with the SS to round up the handful of British Jews on the islands and deport them to occupied France. Aside from a miniscule number of people in the German resistance, the overwhelming majority of Germans coorperated and accepted the Nazi anti-semitic policies of the time. As many as three hundred thousand people were involved in some aspect of the Jewish genocide from bureaucrats making train schedules to diplomats smoothing deporation problems to the railroad workers in a dozen countries to Chemical company employees making Zyklon B to slave labor adminstrators in a hundred factories to bankers and business leaders who profited from the confiscation of Jewish possessions in what was among other things the largest, organized robbery in history. Did anyone ever stick his neck and out and disapprove of any of this? Barely a handful did. Even the Vatican decided it was in its best interests to keep silent and preserve its terrestrial wealth from Nazi confiscation. That is why the Vatican’s moral voice holds little authority for me now. They sold their soul a long time ago and not even John Paul II can buy it back.
Is the Palestinian who offers himself and his family as a human shield to a Hamas leader really an innocent bystander? It is my belief that the Palestinians will never have a nation as long as they celebrate the murder of Jewish civilians like a bunch of savages. The so-called road to peace is the road to the cemetary with such people, and I seriously doubt whether Hillary Clinton, an admirer of the late Mr. Arafat (currently residing in the infernal regions), would want such a nation to exist only ten miles from her New York home, as would be the case with most Israelis. The truth is that the fundamental goal of the Palestinian cause has never been a state of their own. They could have had that in 1947 or many times since. The principal goal of the Palestinian leadership, and unfortunately most Palestinians, is the removal of Israel from the map and the expulsion or murder of the Jews in Israel. Until that changes, there is simply no hope for any kind of peace process. The government of Israel can no more negotiate a real peace agreement with such people as the Jewish underground of the Warsaw Ghetto could have negotiated a peace with the SS.
(Repeat comments deleted for the sake of readability.)
Ray, you have once again provided the historical perspective that ties both past and present together; unfortunately, as we are both students of human evil in many of its forms, it fails to bring much comfort. Auschwitz didn’t happen in the 15th, 16th, or even 19th Centuries: it happened within the lifetimes of people who are still walking around today, and as you have earlier asked, what happens when the last concentration camp survivor dies? Who will be left to remind us of the presence and potential of evil?
Militant Islam and its supporters on the one side, and those of us who remember the victims on the other. And, as has been in the past, it falls to us now, it falls to America and its strongest allies, to begin and end the fight against evil. I thank God every day that we still have the means and will to do so, and the European malaise and moral decay has not completely rotted us from the inside out.
For the sake of insulting my dinner host, I won’t go on a rant about how he thinks that the Israelis should dismantle the West Bank wall, but for the life of me, I cannot believe it.
“…what happens when the last concentration camp survivor dies?”
Interesting thought. It really depends on the ability of the politicians, media, and educators to remind people that such actions should never happen again. I’m thinking of this situation; what happened when the last Civil War veteran died? Did the South rise up? Well, in a way they did, by turning Republican. More importantly, the government put enough safe-guards in place to limit the ability of the South to try it again. Educators spun the Civil War as the War on Slavery, instead of a war for America to become a major political and economic force.
What happens when the last Holocaust survivor dies? Well, there’s a museum in D.C. and when the Maybe future King of England wears a nazi costume to a party, he gets berated in the press. This is good. Seems like, for now, our moral compass still points north. However, anti-semitism is still rampant in Europe and the Middle East (and the U.S. and everywhere else, but to varying degrees). There are no political safe guards to stem the tide of anti-semitism. There is only, alas, that moral compass, and the hope that the world doesn’t develop moral bipolar disorder.
(Seeing that this creature’s as much as admitted that it won’t be back, I’ve deleted its comment. No drive-by insult comments allowed. –David)
Josh, you first said, “It really depends on the ability of the politicians, media, and educators to remind people that such actions should never happen again.” Then you added, “Educators spun the Civil War as the War on Slavery, instead of a war for America to become a major political and economic force.”
Isn’t that an admission that educators are therefore unreliable? If they spin things one way, don’t they spin them the other, too? Unfortunately, we’ve seen time and again that historical bias is at least as prevalent as journalistic bias, and as such, can’t be trusted. I don’t recall what I was taught regarding the Holocaust in grammar school, if anything; I do recall some discussion of it in Hebrew school. I’d like to think that both discussions were pretty darn similar.
Right. Educators can be unreliable. No doubt. Educators can be biased and can express that bias to children. Bias influences what we think. Educators may present a line of evidence or a theory and define it as “the” established fact. It’s sad, in a way, especially if educators don’t promote critical thinking.
The trick is to get educators on your side. If you can do that, you got a lot of power.