Fear is the foundation of most governments.
-John Adams
Sunday, August 20, 2006
GRIM'S FAIRY TALE
PSYCHOPATH'S CORNER: FUN WITH HYPOTHETICALS
Via Parrotline, a rundown of a right-winger post which offers yet another shallow paean to the necessity of hardening our hearts, gritting our teeth and facing the terrorist threat with unabashed brutality. For some reason this always necessitates abandoning a basic principle of human decency.
The title of the post? On the Virtues of Killing Children.
It isn't necessary to read the post. Right from the get-go the author, Grim, gets it completely, utterly wrong.
If you are writing an essay attesting to the virtues of a certain behavior or principle, it is implicit, by labeling it virtuous, that such an action is good and proper regardless of its context.
Charity, for example, can be considered virtuous because, even if a person derives personal satisfaction from the act of giving, the action itself has merit.
At no point in his phony Socratic dialogue against a strawwoman does Grim actually address how killing children might contain virtue, let alone virtues.
It is generally acceptable amongst human beings that killing children is always, in every case, a monstrous action. In other words, it is completely contrary to what might be called virtue. There can be no virtue, ever, in killing children.
Grim's title, and thesis, could only be the work of the most backward morality.
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A quote:
"Here: That we pursue war without thought of the children. That we do not turn aside from the death of the innocent, but push on to the conclusion, through all fearful fire. If we do that, the children will lose their value as hostages, and as targets: if we love them, we must harden our hearts against their loss. Ours and theirs."
What does this mean in a military sense? What conclusion? In which instances? If we love them, it doesn't matter if we kill them - isn't that a bit like destroying the village to save it? What about the likely result: that killing someone's child will radicalize them and the people around them, no doubt creating even more terrorists where there were none?
No matter how heavyhanded and serious the tone, Grim's essay is a totally amoral formulation, and it is done for selfish reasons - he doesn't want to feel bad when innocent children die.
Grim loops his logic around and makes the usefulness of terrorism contingent upon giving a fuck about children.
But that's not the only reason terrorism works - adults can die, too, and property can be destroyed and all manner of unforeseen consequences can result. The state of terror is an overriding goal, and children are only one part of that equation.
Likewise, if hardening our hearts were solely about an act of will, then we could do the same as regards our own children, thus removing the ability to terrorize us by threatening them.
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Now, Grim might have been able to make a case had he argued on the utility of killing children in specific military instances, provided there were any positive examples of such a strategy being successful.
By that we mean historical studies from military units in which a policy of completely ignoring the stigma against child-killing when attempting to suppress a radical group of individuals actually resulted in an acceptable resolution.
Because Grim's purported aim - to advocate child-killing as a strategy toward defeating an intractable enemy - isn't supported by any cases in history of which we are aware. It is, in fact, so obviously counterproductive that the idea should be immediately absurd to anyone familiar with human conflict of any kind.
He might have even been able to say that, in very specific cases, it becomes necessary to kill children in wartime. Children may be recruited to be combatants, and in those cases it is terrible what must be done - but such a response should never, ever be thought of as anything even approaching virtue.
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It comes down to one unsurprising conclusion.
The only reason one would ever attempt to argue for child-killing is if the desired end state is genocide.
History seems to bear this out: The Old Testament, the Mongols, the American colonists, the Spanish explorers in South America. Where child-killing has been advocated, its goal has ever been extermination.
It's hard not to get that same underlying directive from Grim's bold statements that echo every mass murderer masquerading as a conqueror in history.
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And notice that victory becomes possible only if we kill children.
The worst crimes are always masked by those words: what needs to be done.
