2001-09-16 - 11:05 p.m.

On the Side of the Monsters (1)

I seem to have gotten into a little debate about International Ethics with a fellow Diarylander.

Madame Entropia was one of my early supporters here at Diaryland, and I counted myself as a great admirer of her writing. By turns deep, poetic and disturbing, I envied her ability to tap into the dark corners of her soul.

She is somewhat unusual among diarylanders: she is not from North America. She is a lifelong native of Greece, but her English is impeccable, in spite of the fact that she has never even visited an English speaking country. Even chatting with her in real time on ICQ, I had to keep reminding myself I was talking with someone from halfway around the world, her English was that good.

Her life has gotten busy of late, so she has been updating infrequently. Well, at best I'm an inconsistent reader of other people's journals. Nevertheless I was shocked to read her entry dated Sept. 11. I'm going to reproduce the whole entry below because I've been finding the navigation of her site very slow and difficult recently.

Tuesday, September 11th 9:44 pm

I have no tears for you. I am sorry.

This is for Hiroshima, Nagashaki and the people that still carry the sign of cancer after 60 years.

This is for Vietnam.

This is for Serbia. The destroyed country, the children and women you burnt, the civilization you stepped all over. The Valkans will never be the same again, and all you cared about at the time was the stain on the dress.

This is for the alleged fight for human rights, this is for the alleged fight for world peace. Where was Superman when all this happened?

For years and years U.S. pilots have been bombing countries, killing, destroying, and you never cared. You never knew. Maybe you'll care now, that death has struck your door for a change.

What goes around, comes around. I have no tears for you. May God forgive you. Because humanity can't.

Here is my rebuttal, that I posted in her analyzer:

Entropia, I am very disappointed in you.

I am dismayed that someone as sensitive as you should say something so ignorant and cold-hearted. This isn't about "America" getting hit, it's about 5,000 innocent people being killed at the whim of some insane fanatics. That's right, PEOPLE. Mothers, fathers, children. Maybe some people you know died - the firm you work for has several offices in Manhattan.

The ironic thing about this is that Bin Laden and his band of maniacs are probably more upset about American Culture "polluting" the Islamic world than they are about anything that the U.S. Government has done. It may be more about McDonalds and Disneyland and Levi Jeans than it is about Iraq and Vietnam.

But if we are going to play the game of "your country is bad" I'm sure I wouldn't have to dig too far into Greek history to find some bloody fingerprints. How would you feel if some terrorists blew up the Parthenon and some fool said: "I can't cry for those Greeks - think of all the people Alexander the Great killed!"

And her answer to me, also from her analyzer:

Ups, I think I will have to answer this one.

I am sorry if I have disappointed you, Uber, indeed, I am. Yes, I am sensitive, but memories are memories, and what I have seen the past decade was a lot worse than what I saw last Tuesday. A lot worse, believe me. As far as your Greek history example, yes, you would not have to dig very deep to find evil being done by us, but that was always done TO us and not to other countries. Call it internal affairs, dictatorship, civil war, whatever. If you want to find evil done by Greece to other people, you would indeed have to dig very, very deep.

And I think that if we have to get it down to comparing things, Alexander the Great and the imperialistic politics of the U.S in the last decade are two totally uncomparable things. At least I can't find things in common. Maybe you can.

Okay, that is everything that has transpired so far.

I feel constrained to reply in longer format, simply because the analyzers are so damned clumsy. The fact that they are password protected now makes them rather hard to use and their popularity has sharply declined. Of course the fact that people were using them to post all sorts of anonymous nastiness was the reason they were password protected in the first place.

But I digress...

What really bothered me was the subtext of Entropia's message: that the terrorist attacks on Washington and New York were deserved payback for America's "imperialist policies." She specifically mentioned the atomic bomb attacks on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, the war in Vietnam, and the military action in Serbia.

You know, this is not the first time I've heard arguments like this in the last couple days. I've read a snotty screed from some British journalist, and some wingnuts at Lily's university have expressed similar opinions.

As you might guess, it has bugged the hell out of me. Not just because it's hideously cruel and insensitive, but because I wondered: do they have a point? Did we deserve this?

So I sat down and thought hard about it, and came to the conclusion that NOBODY deserves something like what happened on Tuesday. There is absolutely no logical or moral excuse for saying that we did. Anyone who says that this was some sort of "justice" either has some very foggy ideas about morality, history and how the world really works, or they are just plain consumed with bitterness and hatred.

It is clear that Entropia doesn't like the United States. Okay, that's fine. There are a number of countries I don't like myself. However, what was done to the U.S. goes beyond liking or disliking a particular country. The terrorist attacks on the WTC were crimes against civilization, and crimes against humanity. There is no glossing over this fact. To try to excuse or explain away what the terrorists did is to put yourself on the side of the monsters and the madmen.

Now let's be clear on what we are talking about here. On Tuesday morning, a group of men hijacked four commercial airliners, and purposely crashed one of them into the Pentagon and two of them into the World Trade towers in Manhattan. The loss of life from all these acts looks like it's going to be around 6,000 people, maybe more.

By saying that the U.S. "deserved" this, you are essentially saying that it's okay to commandeer civilian aircraft and crash them into civilian targets. Do you really want to live in a world where that's a regular occurrence? Because if that is permissible, you can bet that it will start happening outside the United States very soon.

But that's right, the United States is a special case, isn't it? We deserve to have our civilians slaughtered because of our "imperialist policies." Well, as long as we are thinking about guilty parties we might want to add some other countries to the list.

For instance, Germany was responsible for untold millions of deaths in World War II. Surely they belong on the list. Japan also was not very kind to the civilians they conquered in the 1930s and 1940s - ask the Chinese and the Koreans. Russia, too, has killed a lot of people, mainly its own civilians. I think that the Chinese government has killed over a million Tibetans, and they certainly aren't very nice to their own dissidents.

If you want to go back farther into the previous century we can add some other names. The colonial powers of Europe: France, England and the rest had holdings in Africa and Asia until the 1950s. In fact, many of the problems in Africa and the Middle East now can be attributed to how the European powers handled their colonies. Israel, Lebanon and Syria used to be something called "TransJordan."

concluded, Tomorrow