Chuck, one great problem of moralism is that it has its head screwed on backwards: it faces the past (and the present, of course, is past by the time anything we think now can make a difference). What in the fuck difference does it make whether the souls of 200 million working-class americans are deep-dyed in sin or radiant with intellect and beauty.
How can we change the world. What can we do in the next few weeks that potentially will make a difference in what we can do 6 months from now.
Carrol ------------
I don't disagree of course.
However, there is a usefulness to a moral discourse but the use isn't to assign guilt or blame either in advance or in retrospect.
The proper point to a moral discourse is to focus public consciousness on overly simplified, but therefore clearly drawn and dramatic alternatives. And this obvious propagandistic purpose is getting a lot easier at the immediate moment.
Initiating a US war on Iraq is not just a sick joke, it is a formal state crime against humanity. Not that anybody cares much. But let's be clear about it. It doesn't matter if the civilian casualties are a few thousand or a few hundred thousand. All their deaths are going to be on our formal, collective, national head.
How's that? Because this time around, the US will be the aggressor state as a matter of our own policy, record and law. One of the founding provisions in the UN charter prohibits unprovoked military attacks, and that is exactly what the US government is preparing to do.
There is no flimsy pretext like rushing in to aid the poor Emir of Kuwait. There is no obfuscating an embargo by claiming to hurt only the military and not civilians. Regardless of the US government propaganda to the contrary, Iraq is not a threat to the US and furthermore, it has no conceivable means of carrying out any such real or imagined threat on the US or any other state. It is moreover, a severely weakened regional power with an impoverished population, a demoralized and poorly equiped military, under international trade embargo, and has been under continuous US aerial bombardment and harassment for ten years. And needless to say, Iraq is not a state sponsor of international terrorist organizations, certainly not al Qaeda, whom it in fact opposes.
This time around the US is preparing to commit an open, premeditated and planned atrocity. This is wrong and it has to be denounced openly, bluntly, and without reservation.
Sure, I sound like a complete idiot, a joke. But just to assume a pose of knowing silence for the sake of some intellectual decorum is almost a form of complicity. I am probably going to be embarrassed by this seemingly absurd position, but frankly I don't care. If this Iraq crap turns out to be nothing, then so what?
Meanwhile if US armed forces duplicate on a larger scale something like the current Israeli government assault on Arafat and the Palestinian Authority this very night---then it will become important to have denounced these planned events in advance. Why? Because in the case of an openly perpetrated offensive assault, waiting to see how it turns out before denouncing it makes political resistance to it a mockery.
Well, that's my argument for a moralizing discourse.
Chuck Grimes