This web video promoting Ron Paul is an excellent illustration of the way that so many of Paul’s so-called “anti-war” supporters adopt—sometimes without even realizing it—a premise of moral equivalence that, when examined more closely, turns out to be a craven betrayal of justice, covered by a conveniently malleable concept of “national interest.”
The video starts out by inviting us to sympathize with the Islamofascists, who, we are told, are led to military “resistance” against a foreign occupier—that is, the United States. Imagine that, say, the Chinese or the Russians maintained a military base in Texas, and that thousands of armed troops from such a nation were patrolling American streets. Wouldn’t that be awful? So surely we can understand why al Quaeda in Mesopotamia plants roadside bombs to kill American soldiers, no?
One notices right away that this opening sentence demands that we ignore the differences between the American forces in Iraq or Afghanistan, and the forces of al Qaeda and its allies—or the relative characters of the nations or institutions on whose behalf they act. American troops, representing a democratic nation that liberated Iraq from the barbarism of Saddam Hussein and helped to institute the first-ever democratic governments there and in Afghanistan, are to be regarded as the moral equivalent of, say, the People’s Liberation Army patrolling the streets of Dallas.
Of course, once one accepts this moral equivalence, one is prepared to accept anything. One is even prepared to accept the weasly quotation marks around the words “keeping us safe” and “promoting democracy,” and the snide tone in which such words are narrated in the video. What, exactly, are these scare quotes for? They strongly suggest that we ought to be much more serious than to believe for a moment that the U.S.-led coalition of nations is really serving democratic goals in Iraq and Afghanistan. Naïf that I am, I am left to ask what the video’s producers believe we actually are doing in these countries? Robbing them of their oil, I suppose. How’s that working out for us? The men and women—and women, don’t forget that—who participated in elections in Iraq and Afghanistan may have good reason to complain of the international community’s failure to prevent voting fraud, and certainly we should be ashamed that the new constitutions pledge these nations to Islam. But none of these or other embarrassments can obscure the basic fact that the overthrow of Saddam Hussein did, in fact, lead to a basically democratic government in Iraq, and the like for Afghanistan—democratic institutions which, of course, were attacked from the start by the Islamofascist cult leaders and gangsters, and which threaten to evaporate again into the dust upon American abandonment. None of the legitimate criticisms of American intervention in these countries can justify the sneering quote marks around the words “keeping us safe” and “promoting democracy.” That is precisely what American troops were sent to do in these countries, and were, in fact, doing.
The video goes on in this vein, urging us to imagine what we’d feel like about an invading army making “mistakes” that killed innocent women or children—again drawing, without saying it, a moral equivalence between accidental civilian casualties in the Middle East, and our enemies, who purposely target civilians and intentionally locate their operations where they will be surrounded by women and children—because, as they gleefully repeat, democracy’s “weakness” is its love of life, while their own death-fixation makes them thirst for murderous martyrdom in whatever form will take the most innocents along. Soldiers of the coalition, in fact, are exposed to far higher risks of casualties than they might be, precisely because the coalition governments have sought tactics that will minimize civilian casualties—something al Quaeda, Hamas, and so forth, don’t bother with much. Once again, to attempt any equivalence between the two sides in this regard can only be done at such a level of remove that ethical judgments would be rendered meaningless, and the video’s attempts to invoke moral sympathy can only be regarded as farcical, or worse.
The climax of this moral equivalency comes in the middle of the video, when we are explicitly invited to imagine ourselves joining with some Holy Army of Martyrdom to “defend our soil and our sovereignty” by fighting against this invading army—and to feel sorry for these freedom fighters who are (so sad) labeled by an unfeeling world as terrorists or insurgents. This absurdity mutates into a thinly veiled accusation that Americans are simply committing genocide. At this point, one loses any interest in watching further.
“Soil and sovereignty” is a particularly interesting choice of phrase: note that even this video does not have the chutzpah to suggest that those who strap bombs to their chests or set IEDs by roadsides in the Middle East are doing so in defense of, say, justice, or individual rights. It is just a question of “soil and sovereignty.” Of course, “soil and sovereignty,” or “Blut und Boden,” has long been the favorite slogan of all fascists. What it really means is, “room to oppress with impunity.” It is the demand for the freedom to enslave. Failure to recognize this is what has so often led otherwise sensible and sensitive people to mistake despotic thuggery for wars of national liberation—often until it is too late, and the bell tolls for thee.
But let us for a moment take the video-makers up on their offer to imagine Texas occupied by foreign troops, in something analogous to our own presence in Iraq and Afghanistan. There actually is such an instance in history, and it did, in fact, happen in Texas, as well as other states south of the Mason-Dixon line. I refer, of course, to the occupation of the former Confederate states in the years between 1865 and 1876—the Reconstruction era. During this time, the southern states were occupied by what Confederate veterans and their supporters regarded as “foreign” troops, who were there to promote peace and democracy—I cannot bring myself to add sarcastic quotation marks, as they did. Much progress was made during this period to put an end to slavery, not just in name, but in fact. Of course, federal enforcement was far from perfect—aside from violent uprisings by local insurgents (oh, I’m sorry, “freedom-fighters, incited by the presence of foreigners on their land”?), there was still a vast chasm between whites and blacks both in the south and the north. Nevertheless, under federal occupation, blacks for the first time enjoyed a serious opportunity to exercise the rights of free speech, private property and travel, to gain an education, and to organize political and social groups. They were given the right and the opportunity to vote, in elections where federal troops tried to protect these new citizens from the violence of terrorist groups like the KKK, who wanted nothing more than to see these troops leave so that they could regain control over their “soil and sovereignty.” While many whites cynically ridiculed the very notion that blacks could possibly participate in, or operate, a successful democracy, several southern states even elected black representatives to the state houses and to Congress. All of this came to a bitter and pathetic end in 1877, when, under the cry of “let us have peace,” federal troops were withdrawn from the south, new state constitutions were written to disenfranchise blacks, and another century of oppressive night descended on the south—suffocating decades of silence, terror, and the dread tranquility that is the illusion of “peace” without justice.
Now, I ask you to imagine for a moment that you are a black man, somewhere in the middle of Texas in 1876, where there is a large federal military presence—“foreign,” in the eyes of your white former masters—which is there to preserve the peace and protect democracy, ideas that the former master class ridicules with sarcastic quotation marks. Imagine that these troops patrol the streets to protect you and your family against the Klan and the Knights of the White Camellia. Imagine that the whites are burning your churches, murdering your friends who exercise the franchise, raping the wives and the sisters in your community as a form of punishment, and trying in every way to regain the tyrannical “sovereignty” they enjoyed a decade earlier, and that they fought a bloody war to protect against federal interference. These soldiers are your only hope for protection. Now imagine what you would feel about demands for the withdrawal of federal troops from the south. Once you have done this for just a moment, there is really no need for you to imagine yourself as a woman in Iraq, hoping this evening that nobody remembers that photograph of you holding out your ink-stained finger.
One might be moved to reject this analogy by claiming that the United States has no “vital national interest” in Iraq or Afghanistan, while it did in the Reconstruction South. But this is no distinction at all. First, the concept of “vital national interest” is conveniently elastic, and leads to bizarre results—if freeing Iraq from a megalomaniac terrorist kingpin like Saddam Hussein was not a vital national interest, it’s hard to see why, unless it be that it is too “abstract.” So, then, is preserving American access to petroleum markets a vital national interest? It’s certainly hard-nosed enough…and yet is it then not a “war for oil”? The concept of “vital national interest” serves as one end of a vise whereby any foreign policy decision can be attacked as too abstract and philosophical, while on the other end it can be attacked as too crass and materialistic. Secondly, there is no vital national interest in the south in the 1870s that is not equally present in the Middle East of today. The southern states were just as “foreign” to, say, Vermont or Massachusetts, as are Iraq or Afghanistan to us today—which is to say, not so very foreign at all. In both cases, arbitrary geographical distinctions cannot outweigh the vital economic, social, military, cultural, political, and human ties that make any country’s dictatorial aggressiveness into everybody’s business.
My thought experiment, I hope, unmasks the spurious and disgusting moral equivalency that lies—and I do mean lies—at the base of the Ron Paul video. By ridiculing the notion of defending democracy and preserving the peace in the Middle East, by regarding the troops of a democratic coalition in a region pock-marked with totalitarian fascist states as equivalent to a communist military patrolling the towns of Texas, the video ignores the difference between justice and tyranny, between peace and desolation, between freedom and slavery. And one who chooses to blind himself to these differences has chosen to blind himself to everything of importance in the world.
