Light Yourself a Candle
"Dig it! First they killed those pigs and then they put a fork in pig Tate’s belly. Wild!"
Bernardine Dohrn, 1969
"But to wipe out a man’s entire family, it’s hard to imagine that doesn’t give his colleagues at least a moment’s pause."
Michael Goldfard, 2009
But that’s moral equivalence, Jim!
Yes. Yes it is.
Goldfarb link via Greenwald.
Comment by Robert Hutchinson —
January 4, 2009 @ 1:29 pm
Even better is the way he can only muster a “perhaps it might work” for even that action. Why, such a flimsy justification for murdering babies might give one at least a moment’s pause.
Comment by Thoreau —
January 4, 2009 @ 2:15 pm
I said in another forum once that nobody would ever ask a member of the Manson family to go on the news to comment about some issue, yet they’ll invite a cheerleader for the Iraq War to go on TV and offer comments. I was told that I’m not to be taken seriously if I insist on talking like that.
Needless to say, I find it awesome that you equated apologists for bombing with apologists for the Manson family. Because you are exactly right.
Comment by Thoreau —
January 4, 2009 @ 2:24 pm
Shit. I just realized that Dohrn is now a professor at Northwestern, an elite institution that confers the “serious” badge on a person. Meanwhile, Doug Feith did a few years as a visiting professor at Georgetown.
I guess that murder apologists of both stripes are taken seriously. WTF?
Comment by matthew hogan —
January 4, 2009 @ 2:54 pm
I guess that murder apologists of both stripes are taken seriously. WTF?
“Political language … is designed to make lies sound truthful and murder respectable, and to give an appearance of solidity to pure wind.” — George Orwell in a similar essay to the one Greenwald cited.
Comment by kid bitzer —
January 4, 2009 @ 3:45 pm
“I guess that murder apologists of both stripes are taken seriously.”
no, not really. what it shows is simply that being a university professor does not mean you are taken seriously, no matter what the university is.
merely holding a faculty position somewhere–even somewhere ivy or quasi-ivy like n.u.–gives you far less visibility, prestige, and influence than comes from getting on t.v. regularly as goldfarb does.
i mean–the very fact that you didn’t know about dohrn’s job shows that. you think of her as a young punk, because that’s when she was famous. you didn’t know she teaches law now, because now she is invisible.
being a university prof. means you are insignificant, that’s all.
Comment by kid bitzer —
January 4, 2009 @ 3:48 pm
oh–and strong agreement on the main point. sorry that i placed the emphasis on disagreeing with a minor point, or a follow-up to your follow-up.
we don’t see dohrn on meet the press, and we don’t see david broder nodding his head sagely when she speaks. she really does not get treated with respect in the mainstream, and this supports your claim in your #2.
Comment by Thoreau —
January 4, 2009 @ 4:05 pm
Fair point on academia and prestige. OTOH, while I have no illusions about the significance of professors, there is a certain difference between people like me (science professors at state technical universities) and people like her (law professors at big name universities, members of all sorts of boards and professional committees). She may not be on the cable news shows, but she at least occupies the sort of career position that gives one a shot at being a talking head.
Then again, I only see the ones who become talking heads. For every talking head from academia, between the top schools there are thousands of professors of law, public policy, economics, foreign affairs, etc. who are never on TV.
Comment by kid bitzer —
January 4, 2009 @ 4:47 pm
who are never on TV.
no, but i’m in ur base, wasting my time.
Comment by y81 —
January 4, 2009 @ 5:11 pm
Umm, except that none of the Tate murder victims was guilty of anything or was in any way a legitimate target, whereas Hamas leaders are legitimate military targets. And, if they hide behind their wives and children, then the deaths of those wives and children are the fault of the man who hid behind them. Real men, when they embark on a war, send their families out of harm’s way. So the moral equivalence of Israel and the Manson family escapes me.
Comment by Robert Hutchinson —
January 4, 2009 @ 5:39 pm
And, if they hide behind their wives and children, then the deaths of those wives and children are the fault of the man who hid behind them.
Yes, better to let a dozen children die than let one innocent man go free. That’s how that saying goes, right?
Comment by Robert Hutchinson —
January 4, 2009 @ 5:40 pm
Oops, no, I misquoted. It’s “one guilty man”, obviously. And it’s not so much letting children die as it is ripping their bodies apart with explosives and crushing them under tons of debris.
Comment by Avram —
January 4, 2009 @ 6:04 pm
Remember that Dohrn’s “Dig it!” comment, in its original context, was her characterization of the news media’s sensationalistic portrayal of the murders, and not an endorsement. Here’s the context:
The “This” she was referring to, by the way, was the government-arranged assassination of Fred Hampton.
So it’s not a true moral equivalence. Goldfard actually endorses the murder of civilians by western governments, while Dohrn was outraged by it.
Comment by Joe Strummer —
January 4, 2009 @ 7:39 pm
Does Goldfarb really believe what he writes? That it is ok to kill 20 or 30 or 100 family members of a terrorist in order to send a message. I wonder.
I was at a dinner on Friday night where the host said that the answer to Israel’s problem is to nuke Tehran. So the question for me was, what does that mean? Is that person actually saying that 5 million people should be wiped from the face of the earth? I had trouble processing the conversation.
I similarly have trouble processing a lot of what what passes for arguments on various blogs. It’s really like, AHHHHHHHHHHHHH. Stop.
Comment by Kolohe —
January 4, 2009 @ 9:27 pm
y81-
A good chunk of US military bases worldwide have spouses and kids living right in the middle of them. Is the US DoD hiding behind them? It seems obvious that dropping a bomb on Ft Meyer is as a legitimate as dropping it on the Pentagon. And act of war, no doubt, but not a war crime.
Now, in the past, the US has generally evacuated dependents from likely hot spots. But, sometimes not in time (P.I. 1941 comes to mind). Regardless, say Hamas should have known and evacuated their (multiple) wives and kids. Where the heck are they going to go? All the land borders are closed, and there has been a declared blockade IIRC for some time (since that mini-civil war between Fatah and Hamas I think).
Comment by kid bitzer —
January 4, 2009 @ 9:36 pm
avram–thanks for the context of that dohrn quote, which does, i think, alter my understanding of it somewhat.
she was parodying the press’s reaction, but that parody has been taken to be her own, sincere reaction.
reminds me of what happened when lennon, appalled at the adulation the beatles were receiving in the press, snorted ‘we’re bigger than jesus’ or words to that effect.
meaning, not, ‘i, john lennon, believe the beatles are more important than jesus,’ but rather, ‘i, john lennon, am appalled and disgusted by the fact that the press and public treat us as though we are more important than jesus.’
i’ve always felt he got a bum rap on that one. looks like dohrn did too.
Comment by Nell —
January 4, 2009 @ 9:46 pm
The context changes the meaning of Dohrn’s quotation enough that IMO it calls for an update to the post — even though that would ruin the neat equivalence.
Comment by Jim Henley —
January 4, 2009 @ 10:03 pm
My understanding is that the truth of the “context” is controversial, being an after-the-fact justification from Dorn and Ayers in a cultural moment where it’s to their advantage that Dorn have been speaking parodically. I’m willing to be convinced; I just ain’t so far.
y81: As I am sure you know, since the Kosovo War, American pilots have been taking off from bases in the mainland US, flying bombing runs over foreign countries and coming home to their own beds and families. These days, many of our drone pilots do the like. Are they “real men?”
Comment by kid bitzer —
January 4, 2009 @ 10:43 pm
well, that puts the new context in a new context.
in that case, i think lennon was an arrogant bastard.
(actually, i’m pretty sure of that, no matter what else.)
Comment by Avram —
January 5, 2009 @ 12:36 am
Jim, I haven’t been able to find any counter-claim that provides an alternative context.
I wasn’t there. Ayers was, and has provided more context. If someone else who was there wants to counter Ayers’s claim by providing a different context, I’ll take that seriously.
If David Horowitz wants to try and refute Ayers by quoting some isolated words and phrases out of context, I won’t take that seriously.
Comment by Donald Johnson —
January 5, 2009 @ 1:04 am
Well, Dohrn might or might not have been a creep, but Goldfarb certainly is. In these uncertain times it’s good to have something one can cling to.
Comment by matthew hogan —
January 5, 2009 @ 7:43 am
Let’s see: Terrorists will be deterred by killing their relatives, even though terrorists are supposedly hiding behind their relatives in hopes the relatives will be killed, and thereby arouse sympathy.
And if it weighs more than a duck….
Comment by joe from Lowell —
January 5, 2009 @ 11:28 am
My understanding is that the truth of the “context†is controversial, being an after-the-fact justification from Dorn and Ayers in a cultural moment where it’s to their advantage that Dorn have been speaking parodically. I’m willing to be convinced; I just ain’t so far.
Jim,
Are you saying that you don’t think the quote provided by Avram was accurate? Because I don’t see a whole lot of wiggle room in those words – they’re pretty obviously a statement about the press.
Comment by joe from Lowell —
January 5, 2009 @ 11:31 am
I like the way Goldfarb ends his bloody outburst with a sneer about how well negotiations have worked.
As if the 2006 anti-Hezbollah fiasco never happened. As if Israel’s punitive expeditions have ever bought it even a single day of peace.
In fact, there wasn’t a single terrorist attack in Israel while the Oslo-era negotiations were going on.
In fact, both this adventure and the 2006 expedition brought down MORE rockets on the heads of innocent Israelis.
Comment by bryan —
January 5, 2009 @ 12:20 pm
“Shit. I just realized that Dohrn is now a professor at Northwestern,”
Because Physics teaches us that all time is contemporaneous and thus questionable statements made when one is a callow youth are damning “later on” when one is a middle aged professor? They are in fact just as damning as other statements made with much closer temporal proximity because temporal proximity is itself illusory! I get it.
Comment by y81 —
January 5, 2009 @ 2:58 pm
It’s pretty fatuous to claim that our pilots are hiding behind their wives and children. If we were fighting a war where our homeland were exposed to military attack, as Britain was in World War II, obviously the wives and children would be evacuated to the countryside, and in all events kept as far as possible from airfields and military barracks (which are legitimate military targets). Hamas, in contrast, most assuredly does not move civilians away from legitimate military targets; rather it sets up military targets as close as possible to civilians. So the analogy between Hamas and the United States military escapes me.
Given its current circumstances, Hamas is incapable of fighting a morally acceptable war, because its enterprise fails about 80% of both the jus ad bellum and jus in bello criteria. Therefore, just war theory forbids Hamas from engaging in military action. So questions about what Hamas should do differently are pointless.
Comment by joe from Lowell —
January 5, 2009 @ 3:39 pm
You mean, evacuated to the Gaza Strip countyside?
Comment by Barry —
January 5, 2009 @ 4:30 pm
Well, joe, ‘real men’, moral behemoths, would have sent their wimmin and kidz to a luxury hotel somewhere 1,000 miles away.
I would add that, whenever Israeli civilians are killed or wounded, I rarely see y81-type people pointing out that they wouldn’t have been if only Israel evacuated all civilians from the vicinity of military bases (and soldiers, their equipment, busses which would be used to move soldiers, etc).
Comment by y81 —
January 5, 2009 @ 6:58 pm
Lowell, can you read? I said, Hamas is incapable in its current situation of complying with the requirements of just war theory and is therefore prohibited from engaging in military activity. It doesn’t count as a defense that you had trouble complying with the requirements but you REALLY NEEDED to have some war, so you went ahead anyway. Although I suspect there are deserted patches of ground in Gaza, as there are in Manhattan, from which rockets could be launched.
Barry, Hamas is not aiming rockets at Israeli military bases. What on earth are you talking about?
Comment by Barry —
January 6, 2009 @ 9:24 am
I’m pointing out that Israel is a heavily-militarized society; one could play the same game there (’we were aiming at the reservist in that bus!’).
Comment by joe from Lowell —
January 6, 2009 @ 10:38 am
When you need to insist that other people just can’t read, you’ve argued yourself into a corner.
Palestinians in Gaza have no moral right to fight against their oppressors, because Israel has made it impossible to evacuate their women and children from the fighting.
Sure, that makes sense. Who is it that “put Palestinian civilians in the line of fire” again?
Comment by y81 —
January 6, 2009 @ 12:52 pm
Yeah, Lowell, if you can’t meet the proportionality standard (not to mention the reasonable prospect of success standard), you can’t fight. Not against oppression, not against anything. Sorry, those are the rules.
Comment by Uncle Kvetch —
January 6, 2009 @ 1:16 pm
And yet we’re supposed to take it as a given that Israel’s pounding the shit out of Gaza somehow meets the “reasonable prospect of success standard.”
Boggles the mind.
Comment by Brian —
January 6, 2009 @ 3:31 pm
Who makes and follows these rules, by the way?
Comment by joe from Lowell —
January 8, 2009 @ 4:23 pm
They’re not even the rules. Christian moral teaching, from which these rules are drawn, is based upon individual effort to achieve salvation, not the insistence on perfection regardless of circumstances imposed from the outside. That’s why a religion based upon the teachings of the arch-pacifist Jesus can consider any war acceptable – because you don’t always get to choose your circumstances.
If y81’s doctrine was correct, Jewish partisans wouldn’t have been justified in shooting back at Nazis in the Warsaw ghetto, because they had no chance of success and no ability to guarantee that civilians wouldn’t be hit.
Idiotic, self-serving blather.
Although I do like being refered to as “Lowell,” like Hamlet’s step-father being called “Denmark.”