Stop Me Before I Kill Again
I won’t waste any time “refuting”The war for moral superiority” by Diana West. It does that job quite nicely on its own. Somehow in West’s panicky and bitter brain condemning “Abu Ghraib, Haditha, CIA interrogations or Guantanamo Bay” becomes evidence of “perpetually adolescent non-judgmentalism” since what could be more “non-judgmental” than judging things? For West, barbarity is whatever we haven’t gotten around to doing yet, like beheading people. One recognizes immediately that if credible reports surfaced that the American government was beheading insurgents or, as West scare-quotes it, “civilians” or, maybe best of all, journalists, her objections to beheading-qua-beheading would drop tumbrelward.
Instead, I’ll point out a couple of things: All that quondam sanctimony from the hawks about how we peaceniks just didn’t care about the poor foreigners yearning to be free had all the staying power of an April snow. Even now you needn’t read too deeply into a popular blog’s comment section, or too far into an Administration speech to find someone tut-tutting that we wish Saddam were still in power visiting horror upon the poor suffering Iraqis. West tells us that visiting horror on the poor suffering Iraqis is our job, dammit. All you humanitarian interventionists and Libertarians Without Borders, it is with Diana West that you marched off to war.
Second, this kind of thing is exactly why I retain a soft spot in my heart for the antiwar, “isolationist” Right. Some of them have their dodgy atavisms, yes. But they recognize that about themselves ahead of time. Of course the staff of The American Conservative value “our own men more than the enemy’s,” they consider American blood more precious than foreign blood. (The quote is not from TAC – it’s from West.) They know that war is about hatred and slaughter. (West’s complaint is that we don’t have enough of either.) Knowing themselves, they try to avoid situations that will bring out the worst in them. That beats hell out of prating about your compassion for your fellow man until the instant things start to go wrong.
Comment by Pithlord —
June 27, 2006 @ 6:44 pm
The other good thing about the scariest of scary paleocons is that they think it perfectly natural that non-Americans will be just as atavistically patriotic about their own god-forsaken countries. The average right-wing American seems to have some narcissistic belief that everyone else ought to share their own self-love. Some dodgy neo-Confederate who has passed beyond Instapundit’s particular stage of infantilism is that much closer to bodhisattva status.
Comment by Realish —
June 27, 2006 @ 6:48 pm
Ugh. That makes my stomach hurt.
It seems to me there’s a fundamental difference between thinking that America is morally superior because of the way we act, and thinking American intrinsically morally superior, and thus that however we act is justified. Laws, not people, I think it was once phrased. The right is way, way off on the wrong side of that distinction.
Comment by washerdreyer —
June 27, 2006 @ 6:55 pm
Somehow in West’s panicky and bitter brain condemning “Abu Ghraib, Haditha, CIA interrogations or Guantanamo Bay†becomes evidence of “perpetually adolescent non-judgmentalismâ€
Based on that article, she clearly thinks that there only two things one should be judgmental about. The first is whether one’s society is morally better than a given other society. The second is the character of people who don’t agree that these are the only two things to be judgmental about.
Comment by moonbiter —
June 28, 2006 @ 7:16 am
It might be pointed out that given the dynamics of modern high-explosive weaponry that US troops decapitate and dismember and burn to death insurgents and civilians on a routine basis. So in a sense she already has no problem with beheading and that sort of thing.
Comment by Lee —
June 28, 2006 @ 8:55 am
Another thing to be said for the paleocons is that many of them are traditionalist Catholics who hold to a strict interpretation of just war theory (a la the current and recent popes) which is far less permissive about warmaking than the version favored by neoconservative Catholic thinkers like Michael Novak and George Weigel, who tried, unsuccessfully, to make the case for the Iraq war to the Holy See.
Comment by Avram —
June 28, 2006 @ 2:59 pm
West reminds me of Pope Rat’s claim that anybody who disagrees with him is engaging in ”moral relativism”.