A journalist who seems to understand the problem:
NEWS STORY
U.S. did not deserve attacks
Blaming the victim is morally unjust
BRIAN KAPPLER
Montreal Gazette
Saturday, September 29, 2001
There's an awful lot of victim-blaming going on this month.
A poll published in La Presse yesterday showed 33 per cent of
Canadians - including 40 per cent of Quebecers - believe the main
cause of the Sept. 11 horror was "American policy in the Mideast." You
hear a lot of the same sort of talk on the CBC, that great house organ
for "enlightened opinion," where the phone-in shows are full of the
same views.
So the citizens of the U.S., collectively if not individually, brought this
act upon themselves. The 6,000-plus deaths were somehow a natural
or automatic reaction to awful things the U.S. has been doing. The
United States - the whole country, if not the specific children, women,
busboys, bond traders, and firefighters who were incinerated or
crushed to death - they deserved this, the argument runs.
How can so many people believe that? How can anyone believe it?
Goo of Decayed Ethics
For a few decades now our society has wallowed in moral relativism,
situational ethics and a "non-judgmental" outlook. And now here we
are, 33 per cent of us anyway, utterly unable to identify a wholly evil
act.
It's everywhere, this goo of decayed ethics: the Reuters news service
won't use the word "terrorist" about the Sept. 11 attacks, because
"one man's terrorist is another man's freedom fighter," in the words of
a Reuters official, and the news agency wants to be strictly neutral.
And in yesterday's Le Devoir, a group of social scientists deplored the
attack but also denounced the "Manichean" American response.
By this they meant to say that President George W. Bush and other
Americans are presenting the fight against terrorism as a battle of
good against evil, just as Osama bin Laden justifies his actions.
But is there real equivalency here? Sure, Bush has called the Sept. 11
actions "evil." But with a precision virtually unknown in the annals of
conflict, every U.S. leader from Bush to Rudolph Giuliani has spelled out
repeatedly this is not a war against Islam, or Muslims, or even against
Afghanistan, but rather against certain people who committed certain
crimes.
The bin Laden gang, on the other hand, is waging war against a whole
society and a whole way of life. Their twisted version of a great religion
will not let them rest, apparently, until all the world is like Afghanistan,
a charnel house of fundamentalist tyranny, where dissent is deemed
accursed.
Nobody, not even Bush, would characterize everything about the U.S.,
or its government, as purely good. During the Cold War, in particular,
the U.S. became cozy with numerous thug dictators. Some now argue
that had the U.S. not done so, we'd all be studying Russian as a
second language today.
Perhaps. In any case, the "blowback" of those Cold War compromises
still cause misery around the world.
Americans are Pre-Eminent
But for 60 years or more the U.S., for all its flaws, has been the world's
great beacon of individual freedom and responsibility, individual human
dignity, individual human worth.
Many other countries share those values. But the Americans are
pre-eminent in displaying those values to the world, and so they're the
targets for hatred, resentment, fear and envy.
What the Sept. 11 bombers really want to destroy are those values. So
how can this assault on the cornerstone of one society, by a
lunatic-fringe element of another society, possibly be the fault of the
victim? How can anyone see it that way?
The tendency to blame the victim has been creeping into our public
discourse, and our courts, for some time. A wife on trial for shooting her
abusive husband may well be found innocent by reason of having been
bullied, or some such. Violent crime rates may be a problem, but we are
told we have to understand a social system that permits poverty
means that poor people have to steal ... and so on.
It's a slippery slope. When moral guideposts vanish into a fog of
relativity, when actions are neither right nor wrong, then all that
remains to constrain anyone is naked force.
We must all be able to identify a crime as a crime, to call an evil action
evil. We can love the sinner, all right, but we must hate the sin.
- Brian Kappler's E-mail address is bkappler@thegazette.southam.ca.
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