First of all, a big thank you to all those who provided support and kind comments on my piece on the victims of the Fallujah atrocity. Special thanks to Glenn “InstaPundit” Reynolds, Spoons, and especially Mitch Berg for their linkage.
Most importantly, I hope this has given context for the senslessness of the tragedy in Fallujah. After seeing the faces and coming to know just a little bit about who these people were, it’s had a profound effect on me personally. I just can’t even glance at the pictures of those bodies, burnt and battered, being hung from that bridge. All I can imagine is the son of one of those victims wondering if that body was the body of his father or the wife wondering if that’s his husband being mutilated by the savage mob. Such thoughts are simply too much for anyone to bear without being greatly moved.
Those four individuals were not "mercenaries". They weren’t "Hessians" and what they were doing wasn’t wrong in any way shape or form. A mercenary fights for whatever cause will pay. These men were fighting for a cause they believed in, a cause that they had not once but twice pledged their lives in order to complete. They were in Iraq not to get rich, but to make a difference, to protect the lives of the Iraqi people, and to do a job that needed to be done. To argue that their specific circumstances in any way lessens the tragedy of their death, that the fact that they worked for a private security firm rather than the government makes them somehow morally suspect is to not only slander the dead, but it reflects a horribly totalitarian worldview.
Hannah Arendt, the great political philosopher and scholar of totalitarianism once wrote that :
Totalitarianism is never content to rule by external means, namely, through the state and a machinery of violence; thanks to its peculiar ideology and the role assigned to it in this apparatus of coercion, totalitarianism has discovered a means of dominating and terrorizing human beings from within.
Read the responses on Kos’ site. Read what Democratic Underground said about these four men. The hate, the invective, the way in which these four men’s deaths are so lightly cast aside for the cheap temporality of politics – all of them are innately totalitarian. It’s a way of dehumanizing the opposition. It’s a way of avoiding discussing the true argument. There can be no uncertainty in what it is: the ugliest side of human nature. It is the essence of totalitarianism, the appeals to hatred, the vicious condemnation of dissent, and the way in which morality is twisted or simply cast aside when it becomes politically inconvenient.
Contrast that to Oliver Willis’ reaction. I disagree with nearly everything Mr. Willis stands for. We couldn’t be on farther sides of the political aisle. Yet his response shows a great deal of humanity and class, much to his credit. This isn’t political. This is moral.
Four good men died, and they were treated with the most inhuman savagery imaginable. They deserve to be something more than a shocking image. They were real people, with families, jobs, and commitments. They were also heroes twice over – once for serving this country with bravery and honor, and again going back when they could have stayed home.
They deserve to have that known.
“totalitarianism has discovered a means of dominating and terrorizing human beings from within”
But isn’t that what Kos is now doing? Trying to make people feel guilty by plaing the persecuted victim?
All this campign did is boost his pathetic ego and allow him to pat himself on the back as the persecuted martyr facing the “fascists.”
My guess is that Kos will ultimately win by turning himself into the victim and therefor turning the wrath of the right-bloggers into guilt and shame.
That is how the Left always wins. As noted by a troll on another board, you have turned Kos into a “Rosa Parks.” No only will he get his jollies from this, he will also use to the max to cause you shame and guilt while boosting his popularity.
Jay,
Your original piece – the one I linked – got a good shout-out on the Northern Alliance Radio Network today from King Banaian.
Your coverage continues to be superb.
“I tell people don’t kill all the liberals. Leave enough so we can have two on every campus—living fossils—so we will never forget what these people stood for.”
– Rush Limbaugh, Denver Post, 12-29-95