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Taking it on... with expediency.
09/05/2002

Since I lost this post to a program crash this morning, I'm going to try to be more expedient this time.

Over on his blog, et cetera, Victor recommends this article from Joseph Sobran for "some much-needed moral clarity." Because I found the piece to only offer the "clarity" that comes with the denial of inconvenient facts, I thought I should address it point by point.

Back in the days of the British Empire, the Brits had a rude word for the natives of the countries they ruled: wogs. It was said to be a derisive abbreviation of the phrase worthy Oriental gentlemen. Later an anonymous wag observed, "Wogs start at Calais" — that is, right across the English Channel. Even the French were wogs!

The fundamental problem with this article: it builds its entire argument in the context of this word, "wogs," the users of which are set up as "rude" and "derisive." As you'll see, it doesn't take much to become an anti-wog bigot in Mr. Sobran's lexicon. In brief, his point seems to be that anybody who does not lie awake worrying about suffering in distant lands must be such a bigot. Of course, if we were to lie awake worrying about everybody, we'd never sleep!

We Americans don't call people wogs — we prefer to speak of "denizens of the Third World" — but is our attitude so different? When 3,000 innocent Americans are murdered, it's an inexpressible horror, to be commemorated and avenged. And if a few innocent wogs get killed in the process, who cares?

Again, if we "commemorated" and "avenged" every innocent victim in all the world, we'd be doing a whole lot of both. There's a broad spectrum of conscience between being a person who is more affected by mass deaths of people he knows in places he has been (or even just within his own country) and a person who says "who cares?" about dead foreigners. Could Mr. Sobran maybe point out who has acted so callously?

Even so, as an official policy matter, the central concern of the U.S. government ought to be the U.S. citizens who have commissioned and who finance it. I'd suggest that the biggest problem that the people of Afghanistan and Iraq have is that their governments have not taken them as their priority for decades.

How many innocent Afghan wogs have been killed by U.S. firepower? Nobody seems to be counting.

Actually, if Sobran had done just a little bit of research, he would have discovered that there was quite a bit of "counting" going on through to the spring (i.e., through the main component of U.S. action in that country). Here's a brief summary. The counts range from a few hundred, to just over a thousand, to 4,000 plus.

How many Iraqi wogs were killed in the 1991 Gulf War?

According to Encarta, between 20,000 and 35,000, with no distinction made between civilian and military casualties. (Note also that the Iraqi military deliberately hid themselves and weapons among civilians in such places as mosques and elementary schools... were their own people "wogs" to them?)

How many died of disease and malnutrition because of the destruction of the infrastructure, the pollution of waterways, and the subsequent "sanctions"? By some estimates, hundreds of thousands, most of them children. That's a lot of wogs. But then, wogs are the sort of people we don't keep statistics on. A wog is nothing if not expendable.

Yes, what about those U.N. negotiated sanctions, to which Saddam agreed in order to remain in power? They haven't stopped Saddam from building palaces and rebuilding chemical weapon factories. At any rate, I do care for those Iraqi children and want to remove the man who is the cause of (and, umm, sanctioned) the sanctions. And if we don't "keep statistics" on them, how are there "estimates" of deaths?

How many wogs will be killed in the coming war? Many times 3,000, it's safe to say. Our government will "seek to avoid civilian casualties," but there will inevitably be "collateral damage," even in a "just cause." Do wogs feel anything like the horror we felt last September 11 when our planes and missiles rain death on their cities? We seldom ask.

First, why the emphasis on 3,000? The motivation isn't purely revenge; that would be wrong. The comparison — the tally — should be with the number who will likely die if we fail to make the correct decisions right now, and that could mount into the millions. But, of course, when assaulting anti-wog bigotry, one needn't actually address such issues; it is enough to assert that there is no thought, no calculation, only prejudice.

Second, Sobran skips right past the difference between the experience of being attacked on a day that promised nothing other than a boring day at the office and the experience of being in a city in which the bombers are specifically trying to miss you and, when it's all over, promise liberation from a multi-decade oppressive dictatorship.

Wog covers most non-Westerners, but it's not exactly a racial term because it embraces many races. It really means people we don't quite consider human. And there are areas of ambiguity. Black Africans are human when they suffer at the hands of white rulers. But after the whites are overthrown or driven out, and the blacks slaughter each other in huge numbers, as in Rwanda, they become wogs again.

As for the remaining whites in South Africa and Zimbabwe, who are now being robbed and murdered with the approval and even incitement of the new black tyrants, well, don't ask.

Sobran makes a good distinction between some Americans' treatment of different races in foreign lands, but it doesn't seem a terrible leap to suggest that the people who would consider the whites "wogs" are often those who are against an attack on Iraq. The key statement, in these paragraphs, though, is the bit about not "quite" considering "wogs" human. What actions must we take to be said to think them human? We obviously can't be everywhere for everyone. And imagine the resistance to seeking to overthrow the "black people's" government in Zimbabwe! But I agree that we ought to be doing more on this count diplomatically and economically.

Israeli Jews aren't wogs, but Palestinian Arabs are. Our media mourn dead "Israelis" (meaning Jews — no Arab is ever called an Israeli). Dead Arabs are ignored. You could get the impression that only Jews die violently in Israel and the occupied lands; the truth is that far more Arabs do.

I don't know what "media" Sobran patronizes, but this seems entirely divorced from the reality. Search any major news outlet for the word "Israel" or "Palestinian," and you're sure to find plenty of articles about Palestinian deaths. My local Newport Daily News seems only to run those AP articles that paint the Israelis in a bad light. Of course, there will be some variation based on what specifically is happening in the Middle East on a given day, but over time, it is certainly beyond rational thought to declare that "Dead Arabs are ignored."

"Life is cheap to those people," we say; what we really mean is that the lives of "those people" are cheap to us. Of course we are also "those people" to those people. If the situation were reversed, they might treat us with contempt too. We would become the wogs.

Anthropologists long ago noticed that all races have difficulty seeing other races as fully human. The ancient Greeks notoriously considered all non-Greeks barbarians, babbling animal noises. The fancy name for this attitude is ethnocentrism.

Ethnocentrism is only natural. We sympathize most easily with people like ourselves. We regard our own customs as superior to customs we don't understand.

Who, specifically, are the "we" who make that "life is cheap" comment? Certainly, some degree of ethnocentric chauvinism will exist everywhere, among all peoples, and far from being a bad thing, that helps to ensure the perpetuation of societies. However, I would suggest that we, as a nation, extending ourselves for the benefit of other nations as we do and going to great lengths to ensure that our wars are as limited and of as limited impact as possible (to the extent of endangering our own soldiers), are much less culpable on this count than those that cheer to see our people slaughtered and drag the naked corpses of our soldiers through the street.

But we cross a moral line when we treat people as "wogs," without rights and feelings like our own. In fact we treat the designated wogs worse than animals. If President Bush announced that he intended to kill every dog and cat in Baghdad, animal lovers would be outraged. It would cause more indignation than making war on the wogs. Just as a rule of thumb, don't do to a wog what you wouldn't do to a pet.

When did Bush announce that he intended to kill every Iraqi in Baghdad? He didn't... we don't... we work to limit human casualties. And we don't even discuss collateral damage among pets! When was the last time we dropped a bomb and publicly stated "while we hit our target, we regret that there were some feline casualties"? As a "rule of thumb," don't write on paper something that you haven't thought through in your head.

The people we think of as wogs, even if we don't put it that way, are quite intelligent. They know perfectly well we would never bomb London or Paris or, no matter how outrageously the Israelis behaved, Tel Aviv or Jerusalem.

This statement is hypothetical to the point of falsehood. When the governments of Israel, England, and France cease to allow their citizens control of their governments, maintaining power by force, and then threaten the United States, then we'll talk.

We are uneasy at the prospect of wog countries getting "weapons of mass destruction." But we should also be uneasy about our own. Mass destruction is a euphemism for mass murder. Our reasoning seems to be that only we are "civilized" enough to be entrusted with such supremely uncivilized weapons.

True, the United States is also the only country that has ever used those weapons. But after all, we had to use them. We were dealing with wogs.

And thus comes the facile ending to a facile column. If it is the wog factor, why haven't we invaded India? Pakistan? England, for that matter? Maybe because those countries aren't immediate threats to us and to the world. Maybe because between India and Pakistan, say, their WMDs help to dissuade extreme outbreaks of war.

And let me say this one more time for anybody who hasn't gotten it yet: the United States didn't use those weapons out of national prejudice; it used them within an unprecedented World War to stop an aggressor nation. Even beyond this factor, we have, as a matter of the course of our system of government, cycled through our government many times over since that bleak day and have not once used such horrible weapons.

As for the civilized comment... well, yeah, we are more civilized than a barbarian who gasses hundreds of thousands of people, invades neighboring countries, colludes with terrorists, and lets his own people starve so that he can continue the pursuit of his megalomaniacal objectives.

Posted by Justin Katz @ 02:38 PM EST