Back to Lindy Bill again.
I think that I have to give myself a pat on the back for managing to penetrate Lindy’s secure space, and eliciting from him not one but two comments about me. His second:
“It's political, not personal. He has a view of the world that is opposite ours. We can be happy that people who think like him are not running things.”
Good for you, Lindy. Quite right. Our differences are political, not personal, but you need to take one more step. The great Ortega y Gasset said that we owe our enemies one thing – understanding. By this measure you have a long way to go.
Earlier Lindy said:
“Thanks, Mike. That is actually not too bad. It's a good example of how Liberals view the world.” [Lindy is commenting about my original post, in which I said that I thought he was a good example of how human beings can go seriously wrong and become evil].
What is interesting about Lindy’s comments, as well as those made by others, is the assumption that I am left-wing. In their minds, if I am not a “conservative” Republican then I must be a left-wing Democrat. In fact, for whatever it is worth, I am neither. If I fit into any pigeon hole, it is the one labeled “paleo-conservative,” close to Pat Buchanan, who opposed Clinton’s bombing war in Serbia, as well as Bush’s vastly more destructive invasion of Iraq.
Lindy Bill cannot send bombs down on civilians in Baghdad or Beirut, or put bullets into the heads of Zeks, but the difference between what he does, and what Stalin Bush Clinton did is not one of quality. He and they occupy the same low and sordid moral universe. They create an idea about a man – arguing that a man is this or that, anti-soviet, islamo-fascist, medieval fanatic --- then shoot at the idea and kill the man. The reason they create the idea about the man is because they want something the man has, his country or property, or they want him not to count, so that they do not have to be bothered with him. This is evil, and this is what Lindy does, day after day, in post after post.
Ortega’s moral injunction is that we understand the man we are fighting, so that when we kill him, we know what we are killing.
While on the subject of killing, please understand that I am not Rodney King, and do not believe that we can all get along. We can’t. War is part of the human condition. But war does not have to be evil. In order for it not to be, it has to be tragic, by which I mean: it has to be necessary, made so by its being waged between parties both of whom are right.
The War Between the States was tragic. Both sides fought for a legitimate principle. (Yes, the South did too, for the principle of human inequality, and the right to embed inequality in human institutions.)
The Israeli/ Palestinian conflict could and should be tragic. But the intervention of the USA has made it evil. We support one side in a quarrel of no concern to us. Our intervention, and our lopsided support for one party, has made it easy for that party to act in ways that shade over into the realm of criminality.
I don’t know what is the solution to the problem in the Middle East. But I don’t have to know, and we as country do not have to know either. It is not our problem. But the current leadership in Washington has made it our problem, not because they know anything about the Middle East, or care about the people over there, or the people here for that matter. Rather, they plunge into wars, or gin them up, or come flying into ones somebody else started, because doing so gives them power.
Lindy Bill lets look into the mental universe of people who do such things. Not a pretty sight. Evil, in fact. |
