Hitchens on Kerry

kjkhoo at pop.jaring.my kjkhoo at pop.jaring.my
Wed May 9 18:49:41 PDT 2001


LeoCasey at aol.com wrote:
>In a message dated 05/09/2001 12:01:15 PM Eastern Daylight Time,
>owner-lbo-talk-digest at lists.panix.com writes:
>
>>McVeigh and the Irish Republican who sets off a bomb on a crowded street are
>>in the same moral situation as Clinton, Bush, and their servants, who if
>>the newspapers are to be believed have also set off bombs on crowded
>>streets and blown up day care centers. (Literally, they have other people
>>do these things, speaking of cowardice.) I haven't seen anything by
>>Cockburn or Vidal that justify this sort of thing as good in itself; what
>>they are pointing out is that McVeigh is not
>>different from Clinton and the others except for the scale of his
>>operations.
>>
>
>
>In my view, this collapses the distinctions once again. What Clinton is
>responsible for is something more akin to shoot ing at a policeman or a
>soldier.

Provided one discounts, e.g. the surplus 500k deaths or is it now closer to a million of Iraqi children.

From this distant perch, this exchange has been fascinating, if a little surreal, perhaps because i'm not 'up' on the ins-and-outs of all the little personality skirmishes.

Sure Kerry's 'confession' brought back tears and anger. But hell, to vent so much rage on him is the equivalent of getting all worked up over that German captain that directed the loading of the trains bound for Auschwitz, and side-lining the Hitler's and co. who fashioned and shaped the circumstances in which those trains were to be loaded; the Hitler's & co., unwillingly, did themselves in. The 'equivalents' continue to parade themselves as oh-so-sharp-and-smart-and-good characters, and some have had memorials built in their name. I'm grateful for Hitchens putting Kissinger back in the centre of the picture with his book and abridgements in various places.

Was Kerry shot at? Does it even matter? The conduct of the war made it the most modern of wars -- there were no civilians and no military: everyone was a potential target. All else was just sweet propaganda to salve the conscience that consoled itself about the "rules of war". So, how many millions of US army went through the place? There must be a lot more Kerry's around, some conscience-stricken, others still strutting around. Unless one wants and is able to set up a tribunal to investigate the whole thing, why hit so hard then on someone who, for whatever reasons, decides finally to admit to such acts? I'd rather actually 'congratulate' the person, and hope that perhaps more will come forward. For if enough do, then perhaps, finally, the systematic character of those killings will finally have to be confronted, rather than brushed aside as, "That's war, you know".

Retribution may be sweet. But it all comes a little late for the Vietnamese who have had to live with the consequences. Unfortunately -- and this is the current war -- many of the younger 'economists', 'appropriately' trained or 'educated' by the international financial instituions are all gung-ho for liberalization.

Meanwhile, there're at least two on-going wars -- one which is a virtual free-fire zone masquerading as an sanctions, now and again punctuated by a few bombing runs, the other a real free fire-zone, with, just the other day, a 4-month old as "collateral damage". In both, does it need to be said, the United States is a prime mover, the one directly, the other indirectly, as seems evident from the reaction when Powell issued that statement a couple of weeks ago.

Is McVeigh right? He's a self-serving so-and-so, but of course he's right. Two American embassies get blown up, an American warship gets blown up -- and we will always be reminded of it, although we won't of course be reminded of another American warship that got blown up off the Israeli coast. An Iranian passenger aircraft gets blown up, an Iraqi air-raid shelter gets smart-bombed, a Sudanese factory gets hit -- who remembers and who will remind us?

kj khoo



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