File under: What a Difference an Administration Makes:
Sontag Award Nominee
Here's an interesting article that makes a strong case against "antiwar" sentiment in Europe. It's worth reading in full, but here are some highlights:
In the first paragraph, the author mocks "the widely held vision of Helpless Europe being dragged into a bellicose folly by Big Bad America."
She observes that contemporary Europe is "precisely designed to be incapable of responding to the threat posed by a dictator" and that Europe's self-conception "renders obsolete most of the questions of justice--indeed, all the moral questions."
She deplores Europe's inaction "in the face of all this irrational slaughter and suffering," and observes: "Of course, it is easy to turn your eyes from what is happening if it is not happening to you."
In answer to the placards at antiwar demonstrations, she says: "For Peace. Against War. Who is not? But how can you stop those bent on genocide without making war?"
She argues that a dictator need not pose an immediate threat to those outside his borders to justify taking action against him: "Imagine that Nazi Germany had had no expansionist ambitions but had simply made it a policy in the late 1930's and early 1940's to slaughter all the German Jews. Do we think a government has the right to do whatever it wants on its own territory? Maybe the governments of Europe would have said that 60 years ago. But would we approve now of their decision?"
She rejects as "grotesque" any attempt to equate the casualties inflicted by the . . . bombing with the mayhem inflicted on hundreds of thousands of people" by a genocidal dictator.
Here's her conclusion:
Not all violence is equally reprehensible; not all wars are equally unjust.
No forceful response to the violence of a state against peoples who are nominally its own citizens? (Which is what most "wars" are today. Not wars between states.) The principal instances of mass violence in the world today are those committed by governments within their own legally recognized borders. Can we really say there is no response to this? Is it acceptable that such slaughters be dismissed as civil wars? . . . Is it true that war never solved anything? (Ask a black American if he or she thinks our Civil War didn't solve anything.)
War is not simply a mistake, a failure to communicate. There is radical evil in the world, which is why there are just wars. And this is a just war. Even if it has been bungled.
Stirring words indeed. A powerful case for liberating Iraq. Only the author wasn't writing about Iraq, she was writing about Kosovo. The article appeared in the New York Times magazine, on May 2, 1999. The author? Susan Sontag.
And now, as Paul Harvey would say, you know the rest of the story.
opinionjournal.com |
