Your browser may have trouble rendering this page. See supported browsers for more information.

|<<>>|287 of 714 Show listMobile Mode

When is it OK to kill someone?

Published by marco on

Updated by marco on

Unfortunately, this isn’t the easiest question to answer. There are those out there who would naively declare that it’s never OK to kill someone are just showing the gross inexperience in thinking in an ethically constructive way. These people are also most likely anti-Semites. The article, This Says It All by Justin Raimondo (Antiwar.com), gets us started.

“Vice President Joe “Loose Cannon” Biden, […] when asked about the attack on the flotilla, said: “So what’s the big deal here?” […] At the time he said it, the odds were fair that an American citizen — out of nine with the flotilla — was among the dead. Now that it’s been confirmed, I wonder if it’s dawned on our dim-witted Vice President that it is indeed a very big deal.”

Despite Raimondo’s admirable hope, the odds are not good that Biden has learned anything. As far as Israel is concerned, good old Joe learned everything he needed to know a long time ago, namely, that “there is no space between Israel and the U.S.”

There are those among us who are completely unsurprised at the American reaction because we’ve simply extrapolated from history. There are others who are surprised that the U.S. doesn’t care about dead humanitarians because the U.S. has either gone to war—or nearly done so—over far lesser incidents. Those were Americans, though, not foreigners, which makes all the difference. Now that it turns out that an American was killed, there may be a few furrowed brows by those confused as to why this current incident still isn’t a big deal.

In that case, let’s dredge up the memory of Rachel Corrie, an American activist run over by an Israeli tank—and to be sure that it wasn’t an accident, run over again. She is a prime example, however, of the fine nuance in the carefully structured hierarchy of American ethics (CSHAE). Though technically an American, she was a traitor and enemy combatant in all but name because of her activism against Israel’s occupation of the West Bank and the Gaza Strip. So nobody in the U.S. government or the U.S. media gave a shit about her. Ditto for Ita Ford (Wikipedia) and her sisters when they were raped and killed by America’s allies in El Salvador. In the latter case, the U.S. government and media worked hand-in-hand to promote the nuns from humanitarians to anti-government terrorists in order to facilitate the absolution of their murderers.

We can only assume that the activists on board the Mavi Marmara fell into the category of Americans unworthy of their citizenship. Some of them, however, were formerly members of the U.S. military. Well, former members of the military don’t count for very much in the CSHAE, as evidenced by the spectacular treatment of veterans once they return home. The first-hand experience they bring with them of the abhorrent nature of the wars in which they are forced to fight is roundly ignored by the government, the media and all the people who would rather have their agendas advanced (in the case of the former) or their fears assuaged (in the case of the latter).

So, to recap: American citizens are worth starting wars over, as long as they espouse the ideology of U.S. hegemony. Members of the military, though seemingly a special case, must also hew to the company line or face ostracization.

What about active members of the military, those on duty? They seem to be quite well-protected from criticism no matter what they do (see: Abu Ghraib, Fallujah, etc.) Well, there’s still a distinction to be made there. In 1967, the U.S.S. Liberty was deliberately attacked and nearly sunk by a foreign vessel. 34 sailors died in the attack and 170 others were wounded. The ship was in international waters near the Sinai peninsula. U.S. reaction was so subdued that, according to Wikipedia, “it remains the only major maritime incident in U.S. history not to be investigated by the U.S. Congress.”

For those who are confused as to why we didn’t just nuke Iran in response, the answer is that the attacking vessel belonged to the Israeli Navy. The article, Obama’s Timidity and Deaths at Sea by Ray McGovern (Antiwar), also mentions the incident, adding much more detail, including that “the surviving crew was threatened with imprisonment if they so much as told their wives. When some of the crew later called for an independent investigation, they were hit with charges of anti-Semitism.”

So that’s the final rule in deciding whether a dead person can be considered an international incident worthy of starting a war. In the list below, an answer of no exits the diagram with a no problem.

  1. Is the person an American?
  2. Is the person on board with American hegemony?
  3. Is the person in the U.S. military?
  4. Is the person still in the U.S. military?
  5. Was the U.S. provably involved in the killing?
  6. Was Israel provably involved in the killing?

If you come out at the bottom of this list, then it’s time to go on the warpath and warm up the nukes. Otherwise, it’s time to stand down and start dissembling.

Let’s apply this little guide to another recent incident, this time involving a ship in the South Korean navy. As detailed in the article, The Black Art of ‘Master Illusions’ by John Pilger (Antiwar.com):

“On 20 May, South Korea announced that it had “overwhelming evidence” that one of its warships, the Cheonan, had been sunk by a torpedo fired by a North Korean submarine in March with the loss of 46 sailors.”

Though the ship sunk on the 26th of March, it only because news in the U.S. when the sinking could be pinned on an official enemy, North Korea. However, once we will in more details, we discover that we must expand the rules in the list above. It turns out that even the South Koreans don’t believe the story about a North Korean torpedo. Citing from the article:

“In April, the director of South Korea’s national intelligence, Won See-hoon, told a parliamentary committee that there was no evidence linking the sinking of the Cheonan to North Korea. The defense minister agreed. The head of South Korea’s military marine operations said, “No North Korean warships have been detected [in] the waters where the accident took place.” The reference to “accident” suggests the warship struck a reef and broke in two.”

Right-thinking people—otherwise known as people “unsuited for the world of public policy”—would think that, given that the people involved don’t believe the story, that there is no way to build a case for war. This is a remarkably unimaginative approach to world-domination. It turns out that, just as an actual incident committed by an ally may be ignored, a fictitious incident commited by an enemy can be brought into existence through the liberal application of propaganda.

Therefore, most Americans, subject as they are to their own mass media, likely believe that North Korea has initiated[1] a war with South Korea. Just as the parents of these Americans likely believe that the North Vietnamese initiated a war with South Vietnam in the Gulf of Tonkin (Wikipedia).

We’ve been here before, people; try not to be one of the idiots who lets it happen again.


[1] Or, more precisely, re-opened hostilities in a conflict that never officially ended (the Korean War).